If you were particularly unfortunate, you might have seen the rabbit hole of lawyering that went on Thursday night on CNN, when President Trump's divorce lawyer, Jay Goldberg, said that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, would flip on him because of his fear of being raped by non-white men in prison. If you still watch Real Time with Bill Maher, you may have seen the smashing followup to Goldberg's statement: "He’s the one who famously said ‘I’d take a bullet for Donald Trump.’ Well, now that he’s looking at prison time, we’ll see if he’s willing to take a d---."
Ha ha.
I wish I was surprised by jokes like this. But I can't be, because they're so common it's hard to pick out stand-out instances. Even SpongeBob did a "don't drop the soap" joke. And they're only one of so many that the genre has its own Urban Dictionary entry. Go search that phrase on YouTube, you'll come up with pages of examples from TV, movies and video games.
I find it a little difficult to laugh. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that more than 70,000 inmates are sexually victimized every year — almost one out of every 20 — but somehow, making the public care is a tall order. Even in the era of #MeToo, there's one genre of victim we just don't care about — prisoners, particularly male prisoners (although female prisoners are far more likely to be victims of rape in prison). Part of that is the fact that our view of rape often wrongly excludes men from the category of "victim," but part of that is the usual problem with prison reform: Sympathy for criminals is difficult to dredge up because of our moral contempt for them.
The fact is, we don't care about making prison better for prisoners. Cutting down on things like prison rape is essentially a security and training issue — reluctance to report and frequency do probably have something to do with prison culture, but they also have something to do with the fact that authorities don't care. Obviously, that's not to say that correctional officers are all hideous people who deliberately look the other way when prisoners are being raped. But they are often not adequately trained for their jobs, and that leaves room for things like inmates being victimized. And some of them are the perpetrators of sexual assault themselves. In fact, while two percent of prisoners reported being assaulted by other inmates, 2.4 percent reported being assaulted by staff.
The fact is, prisoners are vulnerable when they're in prison, and the rates of prison rape show that we're not doing an adequate job of protecting them. In fact, we're laughing at them here on the outside, where most people generally don't live in constant fear of sexual assault.
It's particularly galling because we're a tough-on-crime country. We have created an environment where we funnel people into prisons and then stop caring about their well-being once they're locked away. We do have legislation like the Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003 — but the rates of rape are still high, and the public is still pretty blasé about it. There's also some doubt about the number of states in compliance with the law — audits aren't complete. Some states, like Texas, refused outright.
There is no real justification for a compassionate adult to be joking about the violation of prisoners' bodies. Of course, I'm not surprised that Bill Maher and Jay Goldberg don't fall into the category of "compassionate adults." But I am disappointed that networks continue to allow these jokes on air, and I'm disappointed that people are still laughing at them.
If the Mueller investigation continues the way it's going, there are going to be a lot of conservatives in prison in the next few years. I suggest liberals like Maher find themselves some empathy and stop joking about the violent abuse of their basic human rights.