(trigger warning: "criminal" justice)
It's very important, if you live in America, to be familiar with what our criminal justice system looks in real life. Roughly 10% of people are in jail for rape, with similar percentages for murder, violent robbery, and assault. (In total, the big 4 of Violence makes up only about 40% of incarceration...) It's somewhat ironic to note also that between the years of 2012 to 2015... 61,316 cases of prison rape were investigated. If we consider that a lot of men are not going to make allegations or admit to rape under any circumstances... it's actually possible that there's as many people getting raped in prison as there are people in prison for rape. Kinda a troubling thought, at best.
Did I also mention that the Innocence Project estimates that up to 5% of prisoners are innocent? Like, literally, did nothing wrong but were convicted. That means we're about twice as effective at locking up rapists as we are people who've committed no crimes whatsoever. And we're not talking about having a really bad, traumatic night... we're talking about potentially years of being locked up, beaten, malnourished (and in some cases being sexually assaulted the entire time). The reason this strikes me as so peculiar is because I'm 31 years old and almost every woman I have ever talked with about her fears has told me that, in this society, rape is one of the biggest. In fact, I've heard more stories about drunk rapists doing harm than I have about drunk drivers...and my best friend was killed by a drunk driver.
It's a major narrative in terms of why we even have as many police as we do, and why the criminal justice system exists as it does. We must protect our women and children right? But what if by brutalizing entire impoverished communities, and having a twisted joke for a rehabilitation plan... we don't actually make things safer for women and children? I know, I'm reaching, but...
To the people who feel less safe after learning this, why? The threat has already been there unaddressed your whole life. Recognizing it only has the potential to help us make changes. I know it hurts to hear, but these are the times we live in. The holocaust happened a measly 4 decades before I was born & the Civil Rights movement didn't peak until two decades later. If we don't push for change, who will? The mistake is to think we're already evolved, when so many foundational problems haven't been solved yet. A healthy society would turn its focus to this first...not last. It's like leaving a festering wound untended, because the people who control the prisons are not healers.
(Therefor they are a farce in violation of our country's laws, but I digress.)
I am not at all trying to downplay the danger of rape, only to point out that the systems which are in place to protect us? Actually do very little to address the real world concerns of average citizens. A lot of people tell me they feel let down by the justice system, especially women, and I thought perhaps this might help some people to understand why... and that the justice system is more of a for-profit-system in its current form. It's not really designed to heal us or rehabilitate or protect people from human darkness... It's a place of incredible darkness, sorrow, and neglect. At best it's an outlet for society's need of punishment and revenge, not unlike the gladiators of old. It also reflects the fact that we, as a capitalist culture, value the protection of our property over the protection of our body, mind, innocence, and spirit. Does that mean we're stuck feeling helpless and unsafe? Not at all, recognizing the problems we face is the first step to developing long-term solutions.
I also believe that all citizens need to be taught self-defense growing up, with few exceptions, in order to have a genuinely safe society...but that's another topic. Police are an outsourcing of community strength. I won't go so far as to condemn their existence, but I do feel that policing should be a last resort. We are very strong when we work together. Imagine 5 people trained in martial arts against one attacker. Even with a gun, it's unlikely a lone attacker could even the odds. Now imagine an entire well-trained community, with a firm foundation of elders and ethics, armed with all the tools of our respective trades? I'm trying not to bee too idealistic, but it's unlikely you would often find a need to defend yourself physically in a strong community. In America, we outsource this power...we even replace our faith in nature or religion with the miracles money can make. But at the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper you use to place an order. & If the paper-printers can't deliver what you need, then what?
I know these statistics can be confusing to interpret, I am double quadruple checking my math as much as possible... For reference, there are about 165 million men in the United States. With 165 thousand in state prison for sexual assault, this equates to about 1 in every 1000 men at a given time (I do not know if any of the 165k are women, according to the women's graph only 2400 women total are incarcerated for sexual assault... but less than 250k women total are incarcerated in America compared with over 2 million men).
More than 1 in every 100 men in America are in jail at a given time, with black men being 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. It is estimated that in our present system, a black man has a 1 in 3 chance of ending up in jail at some point during his life. This is due to economic disparity, in addition to biased policing, and a biased system. Poor &/or disinherited people commit crimes out of desperation, and when you have a legal system which lacks empathy...it's not exactly a fair game, is it?
It is estimated however that, even with our current mass incarceration system, at least 1 in 100 women may be the victim of sexual assault each year in America (in national surveys, 1 in 5 women report rape in their lifetime, and somewhere between 1 in 14 to 1 in 30 men). Obviously there is more than one disparity going on in terms of prevention? My point is, what are we really doing with our justice system here? Analyzing other sectors of the prison, while 13% of those held in state prison were incarcerated for sexual assault, approximately only 3% of those being held in local prisons were for rape, and little to none of the federal sector... which means approximately 187,000 total out of 2.3 million or 8% of all prisoners. If it is indeed accurate to say that 1 in 100 women are victims of rape each year, the perpetrators are locked up at a rate of only 11% per incidence... While that may not seem like a total failure, consider the toxicity that jail culture perpetuates...when compared to the notion that it is protecting us. 8% of prisoners are rapists taken off the streets, but up to 5% are innocent people who did nothing... meaning that the people who actually did those crimes walked free, while another lost years of their life and experienced life long trauma? While only 40% of the people in prison, total, are there for a violent crime? Something's wrong here. It is my belief that aggressive policing is increasingly becoming obsolete.
Because it doesn't work (in a democracy *wink*)
SOURCES
The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons
TIME: 39% of Prisoners Should Not Be In Prison
WIKIPEDIA: Miscarriage of Justice (relating to The Innocence Project)
The Marshall Project: Prison Rape Allegations Are On The Rise
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 (Pie Chart and analysis)
(this source is potentially a little bit insensitive)
Additional reading...
WIKIPEDIA: The Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a really interesting one too, which has been echoed many times since. Basically, they took two groups of students, made half prisoners, and the other half guards (during one week in leo season 1971). It got so scary so fast that the experiment was ended early. These were college students prior to this, not criminals. The science community really underestimates how strong Confirmation Bias effects our society.
We see things play out how we expect them to, because that's how the game's set up: poverty is set up to turn people into bone-breaking laborers, criminals or crazy... prisons and mental institutions are set up to gather them in zoos, for any wild behavior... where the 13th Amendment allows that they do our work for 10 cents an hour, test medications, participate in social engineering, stay out of sight and out of mind... and the owners of the institutions get rich, the community gets jobs. Meanwhile, in there, they get bad healthcare, bad food, and a traumatized depraved peer group, often described as "kill or be killed"...where even guards sell sex and drugs and conspire with the prisoners, so naturally when they're released they become role models for our society, right? Well yes, they do. Just not the type of role models we'd usually consider as such. Perfect to go out into the world, recruit more prisoners, and return to jail with them...
Ironically, this experiment was funded by the Navy, who was trying to understand why guard/prisoner relationships promptly fall to shit.