I disagree with their logic, of course. Punishments should be meted out in open court in proportion to crimes committed. This is especially a problem because many victims of prison rape are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. Obviously, I don’t have numbers to back this up, but I would guess that people in jail for nonviolent crimes are more likely to be raped, since they’re likely less violent than their violent offender peers. They’re also probably more likely to be skinny white guys, or at least, not as likely to have built up the strength to fight off a gang determined to rape them as, say, a person incarcerated for assault or forcible rape. That rape could be part of the sentence for coke possession or fraud is just sickening.

However, I’m sure that many people disagree with me. Most of them, I’m sure, think of prisoners primarily as rapists and murderers, when that’s not actually the case. I hope this study keeps track of rapes by the crimes for which the victims were incarcerated. Perhaps if most Americans could see how likely they or their loved ones would be to be violated if they ever went to jail for tax evasion or marijuana possession, they’d rethink the “prison rape is a joke” mentality that has become a national ethos.

There is, however, one additional aspect of the situation that Amy didn’t mention. I believe that there’s a perception among many in the general population that prison rapes are inevitable and therefore not too much should be done about them. I’ve talked to a number of people who seem to think that there’s something in the nature of prisons and, most especially, in the prisoners that compels some of them to “go gay” and start raping their fellow inmates. This same attitude can be seen in regard to prison murder which many view as being so inevitable that it’s almost pointless to try to prevent it.

Interestingly enough, I’ve always found it curious that prison rapes aren’t mentioned more often as justification for the view that homosexual men are, if not necessarily violent rapists as a whole, certainly unable to control their raging hormones. The only conclusion I can reach is that many of the people who believe in this sort of wrong-headed homophobia also tend to be strongly religious. Religions tend to lump sinners (in this case, law-breakers) together as somehow subhuman. If a prisoner/sinner is being raped, then why raise a fuss because he is, afterall, only a prisoner.