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Thursday 2 September 2010
Prison Rape, America’s Torture

In the same week in which the world was told about mass rapes taking place in the Congo, a report was released which detailed the prevalence of rape in prisons and jails across the United States. In 2008 and 2009, 88,500 adults held in jails and prisons reported being sexually assaulted. The rates of exploitation of juveniles is even higher, one in eight will be victimized during their incarceration. Those are numbers that ought to give rise to mass protest around the nation.

American journalists will go all the way to Africa to report on sexual assault when they are able to inform the world on the same subject without ever leaving home. Rape in the Congo or Haiti are viewed as a kind of strange pornography, allowing Americans to see themselves as superior, and others, usually black people, as inferior and inhuman.

Movies and jokes told by stand up comics elicit bizarre interest or laughs if the subject is rape behind bars. The horror of sexual assault is usually not considered amusing, unless it takes place in America’s prison industrial complex.

Talking about prison rape means acknowledging the full horror of this nation’s reliance on the prison system to keep some groups, black American’s in particular, in a place of ultimate control and subservience. The 2 million person prison population is fully one half black, a statistic which in and of itself ought to create outrage and protest.

57 notes

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  7. crapffiti reblogged this from adailyriot and added:
    Prisoners are seen as less than human, and therefore rape that happens to them is seen as less horrific in a culture...
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  17. mjschindler reblogged this from azspot and added:
    This shouldn’t happen in America.
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