The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Christopher Glazek has a monumental article in n+1 about America’s violently cruel prison system. Official statistics show a trend of decreasing rates of violent crime that began decades ago. Glazek argues that violent crime hasn’t decreased, it has merely been swept into the penal system where it’s ignored and tolerated. The scale of the problem is vast:
America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.
Unrelated to the article, the Merriam-Webster definition of “brutality” uses prison in the first example. That’s a bad sign to me.