----- Original Message ----- From: "William T Goodall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, August 01, 2005 6:59 PM Subject: Re: Gulags
> > http://www.spr.org/en/academicarticles/odonnell.html > "Why is it that an aspect of prison life that appears to be so > tightly woven into the prisoner's experience in the United States is > not to be found in any concentrated form in the UK?" I've followed this discussion, and it is interesting that this one report's findings was accepted without any thought to cross referencing. So, I decided to do that. First, almost by coincidence, the Justice department has released the first official survey of rape in US prisons. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050731/us_nm/rights_rape_dc_1 There were less than 4000 reported cases of inmate-on-inmate rapes last year. That translates into about a 0.2% probability for a person in prison. The report itself indicated that this number was low, giving a number of reasons why prisoners would not be forthcoming about being raped. So, I'll not pretend that the US number is low. But, this report indicates that the reported rape rate in US prisions is low....which can be compared to the survey results in GB. Unless one can show that there is not significant underreporting in surveys in GB, like there is in the official US report, then one needs to consider that the differences are the differences when one compares apples and oranges. Second, there is the question of the "more polite" British society. Well, for a more polite society, the violent crime rate is very high....significantly higher than the US. Looking at the Ecconomist report: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=513031 one sees that the British report having experienced violent crime at twice the rate seen in the US. There is a greater than 5x difference in the rates of car theft. One might ask, but what about official reported numbers? They are about the same. It's interesting that the officially reported violent crime rate and the survey crime rate in the US are about the same, while the survey crime rate in the UK is 2x higher than the official police number. Officially reported rape rates have been changing substantially in both the US and the UK...in different directions. In the US, it's fallen from about 0.25% to about 0.05% between the mid-70s and 2003 (the last reporting year. In GB, I only have numbers going back to '95, but during that time the officially reported rape rate increased from .009% to .025%. Clearly the gap is rapidly shrinking. All this is occuring even though the demographics for the UK doesn't show the second peak in the 10-25 age range that the US does. Since young males are responsible for much of the crime, this alone could be responsible for about a 10% difference in the crime rate. In short, the numbers do not lead one to easy conclusions....except the obvious one, prisoners are hesitant to complain about being raped in prison. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
