Indiana prison blues

We’ve been making jokes about prison rape for years. About dropping soap in communal showers, about the origin of sagging, about who would be whose bitch.

It’s an easy punch line because we don’t conceptualize prisoners as real human beings.

Instead they are bad men, locked safely away in some impenetrable tower, breaking rocks and being mean.

But these are real people — only 8 percent of whom are violent — forgotten to fester in a system rife with abuse.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that almost 10 percent of former prisoners report having been sexually victimized by other inmates and/or facility staff the most recent time they were imprisoned.

In any given year, about 4 percent of prisoners will be subject to sexual abuse.

And yet, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence refuses to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Passed in 2003, the act was recently green lit for implementation following an investigative period that helped clarify the problem for policy makers.

The Act requires each state to ensure inmate safety by performing background checks on all potential hires, refusing to house juveniles with adults, providing anonymous reporting channels and counseling for any victims and practicing a zero-tolerance policy toward any sexual abuse.

Gov. Pence insists Indiana already has an infrastructure to deal with prison rape.

But how good of an infrastructure can it be if it falls short of these basic guidelines?
Regardless of the population affected, we should never hesitate to protect others from sexual victimization.

If Pence really wanted to save money, he would stop pushing for more draconian drug laws that will only worsen the economic burden of Indiana’s prison system, like he did this past spring.

He would expand the Hoosier Initiative for Re-Entry program (that he signed into law), to hire more former inmates and reduce the recidivism rate among participants, which would cut long-term prison costs.

He would be working to improve prison conditions so inmates could walk out rehabilitated and ready to participate in society rather than be alienated from it.

Pence is abandoning Indiana’s prison population, and we are letting him.

In failing to enact this law, our state won’t just lose $350,000 in federal funding. We’ll lose face.

We’ll be the state that allows harsh prison conditions, such as rape, to become a tool of punishment.

We’ll be the state where government employees can more easily get away with abuse.

We’ll be the state where prisoners’ lives don’t count.

If allowing rape to endure just to save a few dollars is the new Hoosier hospitality, I want nothing of it.

casefarr@indiana.edu