Congratulations to the Southern Poverty Law Center!
The state of Mississippi has decided to close the state's notorious Columbia Training School, seven months after the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state to stop the physical and sexual abuse of teenage girls confined there.The SPLC suit exposed brutal conditions at the prison, including the painful shackling of girls for weeks at a time. It also sought to force the state to provide mental health and rehabilitative services to girls, many of whom suffer from emotional problems or mental illness.
Bear Atwood, director of the SPLC's Mississippi Youth Justice Project, says, "Most of the girls at Columbia do not belong in prison at all...Most are there for very minor, nonviolent offenses. Ripping them from their families and locking them up only encourages further delinquency."
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At the risk of getting someone offended, I'm just going to try and articulate this.
I think it's swell that people are addressing the abuse found in girls' prisons. I think it's heinous that people get all dovey about girls' prisons because they're girls while people in boys' prisons and men's prisons have it coming and that's just an accepted part of prison life that people in society have fun peering into and going "gross!" It's the same sensibility that makes people shocked when the crime rate is up for females because equality spans over the good and bad - this is their argument to keep or enhance inequality, but everyone's so concerned about women that no one is even noticing the corruption and corrupting of men.
Unfortunately, I think the entire way we look at prisons has to be reevaluated, but I don't think it'll ever happen.
And I'm not sure how coherent I managed to be about the subject.
Lunalelle,
Prison reform is actually a major subject in feminism. There is quite a bit out there about prisons as not only disgustingly unjust, but a form of modern racial eugenics. Does anyone know of some good references on this subject? It is not my area of study, but I did read some really good stuff on this subject a couple years back. A great deal of stuff about black men and racist drug laws, which there have been some government efforts to fix.
I do suggest looking into Angela Davis because she has been doing quite a bit of work in this area, especially considering she was arrested as a "terrorist" in the 60's and sexually assaulted by prison guards as part of their routine "inspections." She spoke out about this in a public lecture I attended recently.
This is good news. If the Mississippi penal system can eliminate sexual abuse of females, there's hope for the American military ! Or not...