Prison Rape and Hobbesian Disorder

By Fester

Eli Lehrer at the National Review's Corner has an excellent piece on the practice of prison rape as a means of prison control and the need for systemic changes to make rape a crime in all circumstances:

Anyone who looks at the problem can�t react with anything other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over 60,000 prisoners � the great bulk of them male � fall victim to sexual abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are �punks� who are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on end.

But the nation�s prison-rape problems can�t go away overnight for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly. Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in prison has lead to a widespread attitude that�s frankly inhumane. It is one thing to say that prison shouldn�t be fun and quite another to say that detainees �deserve� rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.

The American prison system is theoretically a means of protecting both the non-imprisoned population and rehabilitating individuals who society has deemed to be dangers to the rest of  society.  The danger that prisoners pose is that they have committed acts of disorder to the social structure that are either severe, repeated or both.  Behavioral changes are the desired result of a rehabilitative incarceration and probation system.  The environment and the social norms of the prison will have a direct bearing on whether or not rehabilitation is possible or if prisoners perceive that the only control and power that they can access are the controls and powers that they can create outside of societal rules. 

Prison rape, and most rapes are acts of domination and exertion of power of one or more individuals over another individual.  Widespread prison rape that does not result in a high probability of rapid and predictable punishment for the offenders and protection for the victims leads to the very reasonable assumption that the greater mores of society do not apply in prison nor are prisoners protected by those societal norms.  Instead, prison is a Hobbesian environment of predation and pack behaviors for short term mutual protection.  Instead of creating a structured environment with positive behavioral modelling and learning for rehabilitive purposes, the American prison system is an exemplar of systemic disorder. 

And we wonder why the American recidivism rate is so high?  The individuals who have spent significant time in prison have been accultured to behavioral norms that may be locally adaptive but are completely inappropriate outside of prison.  This is in addition to systemic re-integration issues, economic dislocation, employment problems, limited transferable job skills and co-variated concentrations of poverty and criminal activity. 

Another part of the solution in addition to the excellent suggestions that Mr. Lehrer may be to reduce the number of prisoners in prison so as to reduce overcrowding and under-supervision of inmates. The reduction in the number of prisoners being held could be achieved by either reducing the number of people who are sent to prison or by reducing sentences. The most likely and socially plausible diverted inmates would be non-violent offenders who would agree to fairly intensive non-prison supervision modelled on programs like HOPE.