By Ankush
David Kaiser, the president of Stop Prison Rape, has a letter in the latest issue of The New York Review that's worth a look. Kaiser wrote in response to Jason DeParle's (typically excellent) essay a couple issues ago, which explored many of the problems with the American prison system (and which I wrote about here), and he urges that more attention be paid to the problem of inmate rape.
All of the stories of prison rape, which Ezra has written about in the past, are appalling, but Kaiser recounts the following one, which is likewise a truly terrible episode:
Tom Cahill, a former president of Stop Prisoner Rape, was arrested during the Vietnam War for civil disobedience. An ideologically unsympathetic jailer put him in a cell with known sexual predators, telling them he was a child molester, and that if they "took care of him" they'd get extra rations of jello. For the next twenty-four hours Tom was gang-raped. He has never fully recovered from this.
That one would never recover from such a thing is, of course, no surprise. Sadly, the issue of prison rape is rendered all the more tragic by the straighforwardness of the solutions:
