The California Supreme Court has ruled that a transgender prisoner can sue her guards and the prison system as a whole for their failure to protect her from sexual assault while held in the general male prison population.
The Prison system and the guards had claimed that they had no duty to protect or care for the inmates under their charge.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/11/...
Comments
I can't count the number...
of times I've heard people comment about inmates getting injured in prison "They probably diserved it" and such like... On the other hand, I know a Corrections Officer who was severly beaten by inmates (hospitalized for about a month) when he attempted to interveine and protect another inmate...
So, while I can, perhaps, understand Corrections Officers being RELUCTANT to protect inmates from each other. I still can't see them saying it's not their job.
As to the title of your blog "common decency"... Not all that common... Just like "Common Sense".
Annette
The original judge & jury
were numbskulls. Of course the prison guards have a duty of care both to the inmates and to the public, by preventing escapes. The care of the inmates would include reasonable protection from bullying/ aggression, especially where there is a known issue like transgenderism, likely to attract aggression or sexual violence.
(I am so glad I live in the UK, see you lot kicked us out too early.)
Angharad
Angharad
The problem is...
that the USA is so fond of locking people up that more than one in every hundred is in durance vile, so the trend is to make that period as vile as possible so as to save money.
The California prison system, for example, is in receivership over continuing lack of decent medical care for inmates, and recently ordered to put criminals out on the street to bring overcrowding down from 200% to 125%, not quite the conditions in the Black Hole of Calcutta but a fairly close second.
There is a California judge, Judge James P. Gray, who forecast that at current rates of growth, in twenty or thirty years half the population will be imprisioned whilst the other half is guarding them, paying sufficient taxes so as to pay their own salaries.
This, of course, is a perpetual motion machine, which (as every schoolchild knows) violates either the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, or both.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
>> you lot kicked us out too early...
And never paid reparations for the properties and monies expropriated from the loyalists shipped off to Canada.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style