There is good news, and bad news, and completely predictable news in the fight against prison rape. The good news: the Justice Department last week announced a major new initiative designed to fight against prison rape. The bad news: it’s being opposed by right-wing ideologues. As Think Progress explains:
This week, the Department of Justice published new standards addressing the epidemic of rape and sexual abuse in our nation’s prisons. The guidelines, which apply immediately to federal prisons and give financial incentives for states to comply, are a laudable, widely praised, and long overdue step in combating rape in the United States.
The American Action Forum, a Wall Street-funded group whose C(4) runs millions of dollars in attack ads against Democrats, responded by lambasting the move as too “costly” and “complicated.” …
The Weekly Standard echoed AAF’s response, bemoaning the cost of preventing people from being raped in prison. The total expected cost is less than 1 percent of the overall cost of our prison system and ultimately “end up saving money — for example, by avoiding the medical costs of injuries suffered by rape victims,” according to the New York Times.
The completely predictable news? Men’s Rights Activists are completely oblivious to all this.
If the Men’s Rights movement were truly concerned with helping men, rather than playing “oppression Olympics” and complaining about feminists and women in general, they would be all over this issue. But I have seen nothing about this on any site in the manosphere, aside from one post on the Men’s Rights subreddit that drew all of six (mostly ignorant) comments. (Looking through one large thread on the subject of prison rape that was recently on r/mensrights’ front page, I found zero references to the Justice Department’s new initiative.)
What accounts for this obliviousness? It could be because MRAs tend to regard the Obama administration as a tool of our (imaginary) feminazi overlordsladies. Or because they would have to acknowledge that women are also raped in prison. But I think the real reason is that MRAs are so disconnected from real activists working in the real world to combat prison rape that they are completely unaware of any of this.
If you are interested in getting involved, or just learning more about the issue, I’d suggest checking out the website of the group Just Detention International, which campaigns against prison rape.
For more links, see this post of mine.
http://www.justdetention.org/en/survivor_testimony.aspx
Go on Ruby, read these stories and tell us which ones make you laugh. I dare you.
I always thought that Dufresne being innocent in the end weakened the point of Shawshank Redemption, and you basically prove it. The point (I think) of Shawshank Redemption is that prison is this soul destroying thing that not even criminals deserve to be subjected to. Morgan Freeman’s character, for instance, was not innocent. Neither was the kid who tried to tell the director that Dufresne was innocent and got murdered for it. All these people inside the walls are human beings who deserve dignity. The director would still be a grafting douchebag if Dufresne had been guilty of his wife’s murder. The entire system would still be bad if Dufresne was guilty. Dufresne being innocent does give us a way to see how deep the corruption goes (they’re willing to murder and lie to keep him in running the whole con game) but it weakens the central point of the story.
As for American History X, there’s a reason why racist skinheads love that movie. In order to make Dany, Norton’s character and the skinheads sympathetic, they go a bit too far in the direction of idolizing them. Making them look cool in the eyes of troubled kids who will remember the scene on the basketball court, the cool parties and the black kid shooting Dany in the end, and not the transformation of Norton’s character.
I think of it like people who make ‘ironic’ racist jokes and then are appalled when neanderthals quote them approvingly. If you’re going to make satire or irony, you better be good at it. Yes, being misinterpreted by racists as being on their side is YOUR fault if you fail at your attempt at humor.
Or maybe these one. I’ll crying with laughter. Wait, not laughter.
http://www.justdetention.org/en/survivor_stories.aspx
Ruby, I don’t care if you give to charity, rescue pets, or go to church twice on Sunday. You are an evil, dumb, ass of a person. You’ve proven it over and over again, and I really think you should be invited to take your act elseweb.
Ruby said:
“Ruby Hypatia on June 22, 2012 at 9:00 am said:
BTW, I didn’t think it was funny when the main character in The Shawshank Redemption was raped in prison. Why? Because he never victimized an innocent human being.”
He was a fictional character and was never broken by the system. In real life if you treat people with brutality they become brutal. The exceptions are few and far between. If you want to have people fit to walk the streets again they have to be rehabilitated and you can’t do that if all you teach them is more brutality.
The punishment is the loss of freedom, separation from loved ones and lack of employment that they feel is gainful. We should not be viewing repeated rapes as part of their sentence.
Also there are a lot of petty criminals in gaol, caught up in the “three strikes and you’re in” law, who should not be gaoled in the first place. Also, believe it or not, some people are in gaol who are innocent. Even if your premise was reasonable it would be wickedly unjust to treat an innocent person that way.
The number of lgtb people (especially g and t) in these stories is heartbreaking. Rapist don’t target their victims based on how evil they are.
I appreciate your sympathy.
I so rarely comment anymore -though I still read all the threads- and it’s possible that I should’ve just stayed off of this one. Not just because of my friend, but because of the work that I do, a couple of the organizations with which I currently have contracts… this is all hitting a bit close to home.
I mean, I was literally just in meeting yesterday where the new protection act was being discussed. Would it be successful? Will congress try to de-fund it? What happens if Obama doesn’t win a second term? Does it just go away?
And then I come here to see a fucking twit like Ruby talking out of her ass -because, for her, feminism is only about making sure she can choose to work or stay home and bitching about women who are prettier than her on television shows and–
It’s really upsetting to see someone so stupid say such ignorant shit about something that touches on your life and life’s work like this.
And V. was my friend. And what happened to him was sad. I still get sad about it.
And if he had? What crime, specifically, is rape an appropriate punishment for?
If you can think of one, then we better fucking standardize this punishment. Because where’s the fairness in one prisoner getting raped, and another not? Or maybe someone gets raped twice and they only deserved one rape?
YOU GOTTA THINK THIS SHIT THROUGH.
Do you think courts should prescribe the rape someone deserves? Like they could sentence someone to exactly one rape and designate a person to perform it?
If not, it’s hypocritical bullshit to act like random, predatory violence in prisons is a just punishment. (If so, there’s even more wrong with you than I thought.)
Gosh, and Criminals never do things like love their families or take care of animals. They just run around grunting and tearing at the ground, 24 hours a day. They’re nothing like you or me.
(It’s hard for me to even be sarcastic about this without noticing the implicit racism. “Criminals are a different breed from good people” thinking tends to come very closely coupled with “and you can tell because they look so different.”)
GUYS RUBY MEETS THE MINIMUM BASIC STANDARDS OF DECENT HUMAN
WE SHOULD THROW HER A PARADE
So sorry, Nobinayamu.
Ruby is a fucking twit. I am coming around to the idea that she is actively trying to make feminists look bad by pretending to be one and then spouting fucked up shit.
I think Ruby’s got an interesting mindset where she’s a Good Person and since she’s a Good Person everything she does is Good, and it is tooooootally meaaaaaan that we think it’s bad for her to think prison rape is okay.
And, of course, the corollary is that there are Bad People and they deserve ALL the bad things to happen to them.
Also I’m sorry for your friend Nobinayamu.
I think Ruby’s using the same logic Meller does:
“Bad people think just anyone should be raped. But I only think certain people should be raped. I’m very selective about this! So I’m a good person!”
@Nobinayamu
My sympathies as well
@Ruby
You know, even if your premise was right (which it isn’t), how fucking stupid do you have to be to not realise that rapists generally prey on those weaker than them. So all those people that you’re yukking about, are most likely the people raping some poor soul who got thrown in with them for having a couple of grams of weed, or who got caught stealing from a store to feed their family, or just happened to be the wrong type of person in front of the wrong cop. So once again, FUCK YOU AND YOUR RAPE-ENCOURAGING BULLSHIT
I’m sorry, Nobinayamu.
I think Ruby’s a feminist in that she thinks men and women should be equal. She’s totes okay with oppression, just make sure that that oppression is gender-neutral. Let us all genuflect at this altar of purity 😎
you know tha wasnt real, right? i’m not sure why you think this helps you, or for that matter why you think this doesn’t sound dumb.
there’s a word for people who think the recompense for suffering is more suffering. they’re called children.
i know i know, we’ve long since established that you see the world with a particularly nasty child’s eyes, the scuttling greedy id of an overstuffed infant supplemented by a set of trite little conservative axioms that stop you from ever having to think about how the world works as a second
but that doesnt mean were going to stop telling you to grow the fuck up.
Ruby thinks she and her husband and children will never go jail. How anyone could know this with absolute certainty is beyond me.
What if, god forbid, one of her kids got into something and got sent to jail? It could happen. Would she still think rape was the appropriate punishment?
You are the wind beneath my wings today.
I think this thread is proof that some people will take the side of the abusers over the abused, the perpetrators over the victims, the strong over the weak, every time, no matter what. I think it comes from the fallacious belief that the problem isn’t the abuse, per se, it’s who is on the receiving end that matters; as long as the correct people are being victimized, then all is right with the world. I’m glad that most of the MB regulars are calling bullshit on this cruel and idiotic notion.
Ruby, you are a terrible person and I hope you live every day of your life constantly aware of what a terrible person you are.
Ruby’s crossed that line where even if she’s trolling by saying stuff she doesn’t mean, she’s still a horrible person for even saying it.
You know, I also love my family. I do backbreaking gardening/house work for my parents because they’re a smidge too old for me to be comfortable letting them do it all themselves, I regularly take my dog to visit and love on my great aunt who is in a nursing home, I volunteer at animal shelters and give money, when I can, to Planned Parenthood.
All without being a rape apologist asshole.
By Ruby standards, I’m a fucking saint.
Speaking of prisons and the privatization of them, Paul Krugman had a column yesterday about Privatizing prisons. About how it doesn’t save money, and subjects the prisoners to hell-like conditions.
Including abuse at the hands of other inmates.
Worth the read.