...Let's talk about how no prisoners, male or female, should ever be subjected to prison rape. Including the victims no one cares about: Male inmates.
I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that the Regressive Left, for now, has won a round for violent convicted males’ rights with a US judge who temporarily blocked Trump’s Executive Order to return female-identified male convicts to the men’s prisons where they belong. It was ruled ‘unconstitutional.’ I’d like some legal beagle to point to me where in the Constitution it states that men have the right to declare themselves women and be believed by any human being with an IQ above a leopard slug, but we live in strange, evil times and not all the cognitive underachievers are on Team MAGA.
I will remind ‘progressives’ that fake-female bepenised sex offenders were bound to result in real female inmates getting raped, as one lawsuit against the State of New York demonstrates.
If you’re a woke progressive who needs further persuasion that putting convicted sex offenders and sadists in women’s prisons is the most colossally bad idea since a real estate developer said, “Let’s build mega-expensive homes here in Pacific Palisades!”, here’s my running list detailing men committing crimes against women before transition, after transition, and in prison.
Prison rape: It’s still a cinch
Inmates of both sexes live constantly with the potential for rape and sexual abuse. Prison guards, male or female, often just can’t resist; one guard at the Central California Women’s Facility was called a ‘serial rapist’ by his nearly two dozen victims, and he was convicted for 64 counts of sexual abuse in mid-January.
It’s no secret that rape is as common as worm-infested food in prisons, although it’s far worse in male ones, and it’s one of the many reasons the number of ‘transgender’ prisoners has skyrocketed to an estimated 1,500-2,000. New convicts customarily ‘realize’ they’ve ‘always felt like a woman,’ right after conviction, since in women’s prisons a man will rule the roost as no one is going to rape him, and if he so desires, he can even continue raping with the blessing of the state since accusing a ‘transwoman’ of rape is ‘transphobic’.
It’s a huge misogynist miscarriage of justice and further dishonor on the Democratic/woke progressive record for allowing cross-dressing sex offenders into the ladies’ at all. Justice systems around the world haven’t questioned or fought it very much either.
But, this article isn’t about transgender prison rape per se. It’s about how no one took notice of prison rape until a few high-profile ‘transgender’ prisoners were reported allegedly raping, molesting, intimidating, threatening, or otherwise making life even further hell for female inmates.
The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has been less than a resounding success. According to an overview published in November 2024, “PREA 2003 has not been implemented accurately due to practical problems related to it, such as limited staff, financial constraints, overcrowded prison conditions, and failure to build separate spaces for transgender inmates.” (Italics mine)
It’s hard to blame male convicts for not wanting to go to a male prison, but, yeah, they should have thought about that before they committed their ‘special crime’. The first male prison rape victim to publicly recount his experience was 1970s political activist Stephen Donaldson, whose hellish experience was detailed (excruciatingly) in The Punk Who Wouldn’t Shut Up. (You’ve been warned.)
Here’s what we don’t think about, talk about, or mention even in impolite company: Why prison rape is allowed to exist at all.
Sympathy for the devils
I’ve written about how I think the horrendous way we treat prisoners will be future generations’ shame the way the history of slavery in America is today. The moral blot of slavery wasn’t readily apparent in human history, anywhere, until 19th-century Western abolition movements. What the hell were they thinking??? future generations always ask.
When we speak sympathetically of prison rape, it’s almost certainly for female prisoners. When we speak of it for men, it’s a laugh; a joke; a punchline; a jeering threat. “You’re going to jail for this one, bitch! They’re going to LOOOVE that pretty little ass of yours!”
Very few have sympathy for male prisoners, who, granted, didn’t get there because they blew up a mailbox.
Female prisons are brutal, and feminists and women’s rights activists express more sympathy for their prisoners, pointing out that many have suffered abuse and trauma in their past, sometimes from childhood. The not so subtle implication is to excuse whatever her ‘special crime’ was that landed her in Big Girls’ Prison, and to argue prison wardens and other staff members shouldn’t be able to get away with raping female prisoners.
It’s a fair point, but few ever ask about the backstory of the male prisoners.
No one asks how traumatized they are when they come to prison, or speculate on how they may have been abused before incarceration, which many of them certainly were. Some, as recorded by New England prison psychologist James Gilligan, have endured such hellish existences before entering prison that it’s a wonder they’re still alive.
And they have been traumatized. One black male prisoner’s story starts when he was eight years old and sent to live with his father for a year. He came back a broken child, having been sexually abused. The typical story proceeds as customary—drugs, crime, poor grades, and eventually prison.
One study on male prisoner trauma exposure found their subjects had experienced “near universal trauma exposure in adolescence with the most frequent exposures involving witnessing or being proximate to violent deaths of family and friends.” It cites previous research showing that between 62%-87% of incarcerated men experienced it pre-prison. It notes national survey data showing one in six suffered physical and/or sexual abuse as children.
Female prisoners aren’t much different, experiencing pre-prison multiple forms of trauma including intimate partner violence.
It’s bad enough to come to prison and be raped by your fellow inmates or advantageous prison staff, and it’s worse to be incarcerated with convicted rapists who faked their way into girl jail and have a real hate-on for women—who now can’t run away or fight back.
Why can’t we acknowledge that prison rape isn’t supposed to be part of the criminal justice system? When are we going to learn that throwing abused people into highly abusive environments is barbaric, and not exactly conducive to producing less violent ex-cons?
We can cheer Donald Trump for ordering men back to men’s prisons - and he deserves our kudos for trying - but we need to express as much outrage for male prisoners trapped with rapists and vicious sadists as for women. Trauma is trauma, and male safety isn’t any less important.
It’s easier to feel sympathy for female convicts, most of whom haven’t committed acts as violent as their male counterparts. Theirs aren’t as often featured in true crime books; and when they are, their stories are usually less dramatic. Male serial killers or gang assassins pull off wildly violent crimes; murderesses are more subtle by necessity—violent crime is more difficult for them so they quietly poison or over-medicate medical patients or the men in their lives.
There’s also, undoubtedly, gender stereotyping breaking switches in our compassion circuits—men’s need to appear strong and manly, especially when they’re in prison, as well as a hyperfocus on female victimization. But rape is a horrifically violent act that has to be even worse when a penis is stuffed into an orifice that wasn’t built to take one.
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, at 1.8 million in 2023, and our treatment of them is infamous. More than half suffer from mental illness. Sixty-thousand are kept in solitary confinement, which can be the worst form of torture. Mental health services are poor in many prisons although better in others.
It doesn’t bode well for those of us on the outside, either. U.S. recidivism rates are atrocious; one Department of Justice analysis showed that 82% of people were rearrested at least once in the decade that followed. Within one year, 43% were back in the bighouse. After a life of trauma and more of it in prison, ex-cons find it exceedingly difficult to find a job and often commit new crimes just to stay alive. They’re difficult on their families and they can’t maintain stable romantic relationships. They reoffend.
Everyone knows the prison system needs a massive overhaul, but no one ever does anything about it.
I hope that some future judge who can read the Constitution will rule that female inmates will no longer have to deal with the incredible and unnecessary stress of sharing cell blocks and sometimes even cells with violent men, but I also share sympathy with anyone housed in a male facility, trans or not. Because prison rape isn’t part of our criminal justice code and neither is extended solitary, or lousy food, or kicking a man with a protruding hernia in his stomach, simply because he asked for medical attention.
Every year, 650,000 inmates are released from prison. One hundred twenty-nine thousand will be back inside in a year.
There should be no tolerance for rape, anywhere. Men aren’t somehow more deserving because they’re responsible for most violent crime. Not all prisoners are convicted of such. If they weren’t violent when they got there they may be unpleasantly trained. The problem is too often politicized: Conservatives want this oversized punishment for their crimes, and liberals’ compassion ventures too often into the realm of idiocy. Or prisons are simply overcrowded and the system has to make room for the never-ending conveyor belt of new bodies.
Male prisoners’ stories are no less horrific than womens’ stories. If female prisoners are worthy of our reasonable compassion, then so are male inmates.
They’ve all suffered enough, and made others suffer as well. We can keep them locked up with the acknowledgement that they’re still human beings. Even the most vicious animals are treated better than vicious humans.
Is it in any way humane to torture them further? We’re not, after all, like them.
Or maybe…..we are.
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