Jokes are made about it all the time. You could be at your job and get assigned to something no one wants to do and when you protest someone says “grab your ankles.” Comedians make whole routines about it. In conversations about crime people always say something like “well you don’t want to end up in a cell with some 300 pound hairy guy named Bubba.” But is prison rape really all that funny? We at Malcolm-Che don’t think so. Because you see, prison rape is a tool that the prison state uses to divide and conquer prisoners. Prison rape is a tool that the prison state uses to bring rebellious inmates into line. And while many people in the mainstream just say things like “well they are criminals and jail isn’t supposed to be a vacation,” we just can’t support that type of mentality. Many of the 2.3 million people locked up in this prison state are there for nonviolent offenses and hardly deserve to get raped for their crimes. But even those people who get locked for violent offenses, if we claim to be a so-called “civlized” society, how can we just sit by and co-sign this practice?
In Christian Parenti’s excellent book “Lockdown America” (particularly Chapter 10) he details how corrections officers would transfer any inmate they disliked into the cell of a “booty bandit” that would repeatedly beat, torture and rape the inmate into submission. He also notes that for Black Panther organizers in Louisiana’s infamous Angola Prison the most difficult step to forming unity among the prisoners was forcing these “booty bandits” and prison pimps to give up their privileges and join with the movement.
We need to stop thinking of prison rape as something that happens in prison because the criminals are ‘beasts’ or whatever, and recognize that it is an integral and necessary part of America’s so-called “justice” system; a system based on holding poor and oppressed people down. In the following article we have for you a judge that straight up threatened a young defendant with future prison rape to try to ’scare him straight.’ The judge should be ashamed of himself (so should the entire system), but instead he unabashedly insinuates that this young man will pay a much greater price then just ‘doing time.’
Driver warned of jail’s sexual gorillas
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5054UP20090106
The newspaper’s editorial backed the magistrate’s warning of life behind bars, saying his comments were “a vision in clarity” and gave the teenager “a reality check of his future.”
“We can only hope this strategy helps. Hope it ends the slaughter of young innocents on the roads through stupidity…,” said the Telegraph. “Road safety has become a war zone and any tactics are permissible…”
Police in the southern state of Victoria impounded 42 cars in the past six days after drivers were caught speeding.
One driver, aged 78, was clocked in Melbourne on New Year’s Day at 170 kph (105 mph) — 70 kph (44 mph) over the limit.
The 78-year-old was the “oldest hoon” in Victoria to have his car confiscated for speeding, local media said on Tuesday.
“It is disappointing to see a senior member of our community being so irresponsible,” Acting Police Sergeant Carlo Visser told Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper.
“What example does this set for younger drivers?” said Visser.
