Prisons Make Us Safer by Victoria Law

Author:Victoria Law [Law, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Prisons keep us safe from murderers and rapists.

Arrest and incarceration occur only after harm or violence has occurred; incarceration does not prevent these acts from happening.

“What about the rapists? What about the murderers?”

Rape and murder are commonly invoked to justify the need for prisons. But in reality, arrest and incarceration occur only after harm or violence has occurred; incarceration does not prevent these acts from happening. It also doesn’t guarantee justice or accountability for the survivor (or the survivor’s loved ones).

Relying on prisons to prevent or address rape and violence ignores the reality that many acts of violence, particularly sexual violence, remain unreported. According to the Department of Justice, only 230 of every 1,000 sexual assaults are ever reported to the police.1 In other words, three of four sexual assaults go unreported.2

From there, the numbers shrink even more drastically. Of those 230 sexual assaults that are reported to the police, only forty-six (or 20 percent) lead to arrest.3 Of those forty-six arrests, only nine are referred to prosecutors and five ultimately result in a felony conviction.4 Less than five of those convictions results in prison time. 5

It’s not necessarily the seriousness of the assault that is the deciding factor. As with all other aspects of the criminal legal system, men of color, particularly Black and Latinx men accused of raping white women, are treated more harshly than their white counterparts. Prosecutors are more likely to charge and juries more likely to convict men of color, particularly African American men (and boys). Just look at the Central Park Five, five Black and Latino teenagers between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who, in 1989, were accused of raping a white woman jogger. Police interrogated them, illegally, for hours. They coerced false confessions from four of the five teenagers who said they had been in the park during the assault. In court, the prosecutor seized on the coerced confessions to convince the jury to convict. But in 2002, the person who actually committed the rape confessed that he alone had committed the brutal sexual assault and beating. Though their convictions were vacated, all five men had already lost years of their lives behind bars.

At the same time, white men, particularly white men who sexually assault women of color, are more likely to be treated more leniently by the legal system. Just look at Brock Turner, the nineteen-year-old Stanford University swimmer who received a six-month jail sentence (and registration on the sex offender registry) after raping twenty-two-year-old Chanel Miller while she was unconscious. He served three months in county jail before being released to his parents’ suburban home. (This is not to discount how lifelong registration on the sex offender registry will forever affect his life. As will be discussed more in the following chapter, the hammer of the sex offender registry falls hardest on people of color: African Americans are disproportionately represented on the registry. They comprise 22 percent of those convicted of sex offenses but only 13 percent of the total US population.

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