Custodial rape, that is sexual assault by correctional staff on an inmate, is out of control.  It is absolutely a systemic problem as there is not a single state whose penal facilities are immune from the sickness (Gary Hunter, 2009).  Most reasonable folk will easily attest to the fact that if a citizen is poor, a minority, or an inmate, the government is pretty slow moving with assistance, and that movement is slowed exponentially where the aforementioned groups intersect.  However, to show you just how out of control this form of rape had become, the federal government actually got involved.  The perversion was even too much for them and they have unusually strong stomachs: the Tuskegee experiment, small pox in blankets, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, 256 years of chattel slavery….yes, I have digressed.  The government passed legislation known as PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act).  This act is primarily aimed at eliminating staff-on-inmate rape, which happens to be the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults that occur in corrections (I got into some detail in “New Salves, Same Ol’ Economy), although most Americans mistakenly believe that such assaults are mostly inmate-on-inmate (Justin Peters, 2013).

The laws and penalties in our criminal justice system are supposedly designed to dole out enough punishment to discourage future, if not the initial act, as well as discouraging vengeance and vigilante justice.  Again, the only way this theoretical assumption works in practice is if within the parameters of justice the punishment is severe enough.  Such severity is seldom reached regarding cases of custodial rape, PREA notwithstanding.

In fact, in my own research I found many instances where the bar was not met.  I recall one particularly horrible case involving a guard named LeShawn Terrell, who sodomized an inmate to the point that he tore her rectum.  For his efforts, this public trough supping rapist received but sixty days in jail.  But now we have PREA to fix  this, right?  In a recent incident, a former correctional guard received 100 days in jail for his sexual assault charge; they threw the book at him, by increasing the penalty by 40 days!

However my belief is that there is an Entity at work among us that is far greater than the U.S. Government, because before this rapist could finish his 100 day sentence he dropped dead of a heart attack in the Freemont County Jail….I abstain from further comment.