I came across this article recently:

https://reason.com/2023/09/03/i-knew-they-were-scumbags/

The author makes a straightforward but simplistic argument that a number of federal prison guards at FCC Coleman, a federal prison in Florida, committed multiple rapes, confessed to those rapes, and got away with it on procedural grounds.

Well, we know that prison guards can be corrupt, and often are. We know that prison guards can even be abusive. It's also very likely that at least one of the prison guards mentioned in this story coerced one or more women into sexual acts they didn't want to participate in.

But the root of the problem is how rape has been defined - which is to say, various activists convinced legislators to define ANY sex inside a prison as rape. There is no such thing as consensual sex between a guard and a prisoner - because the law has defined it that way.

But of course anyone with an ounce of sense knows that's nonsense. It might surprise some - but it won't surprise most - to know that most of the women who end up in federal prisons aren't virgins. Nor do they tend to be sticklers for modesty, chastity, and sexual restraint. The simple fact is that at least some subset of prisoners are more than happy to engage in sexual relations with the guards. This has been attested for centuries. In eras when there were numerous crimes that could be punished by execution, and there were long waits in prison before trial, female prisoners commonly attempted to get pregnant by one of the guards so that their life would be spared on the grounds that it would be wrong to punish her unborn child.

So the article here notes the process by which prison guards avoid punishment: as a condition of employment, guards are required to truthfully answer questions from Internal Affairs, and if an investigation occurs and the guards answer truthfully about any crimes they committed, that information cannot be used against them in court because it would be a violation of their right not to testify against themselves. They can lose their employment, but they cannot go to trial.

Of course, doubtless the reason this process was established was because everyone within the system knows that most such sexual relations are in fact consensual - but it also creates an environment in which even actual rape is difficult if not impossible to prosecute.


So, why am I posting this? I mean, it's all well and good to point out corruption and dysfunction within government, but this doesn't exactly address the issues of this board.

But it sort of does. You may have noticed the parallels between the laws that define all sexual relations in prison as rape, and contemporary age of consent laws that define all sexual relations involving a person below the AoC as rape. In both cases anyone with the least bit of sense knows that the laws don't accurately represent the reality, yet self-righteous activists get involved and demand such laws anyway, and the long term result is a lack of transparency and the introduction of arcane rules that frequently lead to innocent people being hurt and abusers being protected.

All because the reality cannot be publicly acknowledged.





• ( https link ) Reason Magazine: "I knew they were scumbags" - federal prison guards confess to rape?
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