Prison rape isn't as funny as it used to be

If it's true, as Winston Churchill supposedly said, that you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, then what does the youth prison rape scandal say about Texas?
Austin is in turmoil over the mess, which came to public light thanks to The Dallas Morning News. Readers have been subjected to stomach-turning accounts of brutal sexual assault suffered by teenagers whose welfare was the state's responsibility.

That is, yours and mine.
To be fair, until the News reports, the public didn't know what was going on inside the youth prisons. We do now.

And with knowledge comes responsibility to punish those who allowed the rape and abuse and to reform the system to keep it from happening again.
Truth is, we shouldn't act surprised to learn that something terrible was happening inside those prisons. Prison rape isn't new.

But it is something most people prefer not to think about; male-on-male gang rapes and sex slavery all part of a horrifying reality easier to deny than confront.
Worse, lots of people believe that victimized inmates more or less deserve it. After all, goes the thinking, if they weren't bad people to begin with, they wouldn't have put themselves in a position to be raped.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer once joked about how much pleasure he would get out of putting Enron's Ken Lay in a cell with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'
Real funny, Bill. Here's the ugly reality, according to a 2001 report on inmate rape by Human Rights Watch (www.

hrw.org), which notes a racist element in prison sex slavery:
J.D.

, a white inmate in Texas who admits that he cannot fight real good, told Human Rights Watch that he was violently raped by his cellmate, a heavy, muscular man, in 1993. From that day on, he said, I was classified as a homosexual and was sold from one inmate to the next. Although he informed prison staff that he had been raped and was transferred to another part of the prison, the white inmates in his new housing area immediately sold him to a black inmate known as Blue Top.

Blue Top used J.D. sexually, while also renting his sexual services to other black inmates.

Besides being forced to perform all types of sexual acts, J.D. had to defer to Blue Top in every other way.

Incidentally, Human Rights Watch judges that Texas has the worst record in the country of male sex slavery inside its prisons. While Austin lawmakers have been appropriately outraged over the sex assaults in Texas youth prisons, nobody has said a word about the same thing going on in adult prisons.
Kerry Max Cook, a Plano man who spent 22 years on Texas' death row for a murder he didn't commit, writes in his new book Chasing Justice about being raped at knifepoint shortly after entering the system.

This made him a marked man in prison society. After one subsequent rape, he attempted suicide, including nearly severing his own penis to escape the humiliation. It wasn't the last time he'd try to kill himself after being sexually assaulted.

What has the state documented about male-on-male rape and sex slavery inside its adult prison system? And what is it doing or not doing about it? Do the people of Texas really want to know?

Adults being sodomized, subjugated and prostituted in the Texas prison system are no less worthy of our compassion and defense than teenagers trapped in the same position. If brutish men were turning women into prison sex slaves, there would be no end of public outrage. But when it's male-on-male prison rape, we not only ignore it, we joke about it.

Inmates are criminals, but they are also human beings. We send them to jail to pay their debt to society by depriving them of their liberty. Throwing them into a cell with some animal screaming, I want some ass!

as TYC inmate Joseph Galloway says a guard did to him as a precursor to his beating and rape is not part of the deal.
It's hard to stand up for the human rights of prisoners. Still, if your son were walking in the shoes of Joseph Galloway or Kerry Max Cook, would you be indifferent?

If state and local prison officials faced the prospect of living in the sexual dungeons they permit to exist, we'd see swift and sure reform. Failing that, let's expose the rape subculture not just in youth facilities, but in all Texas prisons. Churchill, no bleeding-heart liberal, was right: The condition of our prisons puts all of us under judgment.

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.