students made hostile remarks to the students wearing armbands, but there were no threats or acts of violence on school premises.” Since there were no grounds to think the armbands would provoke unrest, there were no grounds for the school to ban them.
By the Seminole district’s own admission, Confederate flag shirts, which were only recently forbidden, have never caused any detectable trouble. The rule was drafted just to head off the simple possibility that someday, they would. Idle anxiety, however, is not enough to nullify the free speech rights that, in this country, even juveniles enjoy.
Confederate flags — and Malcolm X shirts — may be loathsome to many people, but then so were antiwar symbols back when hundreds of American soldiers were bleeding to death in the jungles of Vietnam. The Constitution’s free speech clause doesn’t cover only those who have nothing controversial to say. School officials can’t censor certain types of expression just because it’s going to make someone mad.
Since Columbine, though, many school administrators would rather create a totalitarian environment than take any risk. Back in 1969, the Supreme Court announced, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights . . . at the schoolhouse gate.” In fact, school administrators make that argument all the time. This time, they may be wrong.
Since when does rape equal justice?
Thursday, June 7, 2001
The attorney general of California is very unhappy about the state’s energy crisis, and he has come up with the perfect solution. It involves a creative type of punishment for Kenneth Lay, chairman of the Houston-based energy company Enron. Though Lay has not been convicted of any crime, Bill Lockyer says, “I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’”
Let the record show that the chief law enforcement officer for the nation’s biggest state regards prison rape as a valuable feature of his correctional system. Soft-hearted souls may lament the sexual victimization of jail and prison inmates by violent sociopaths, but Lockyer’s chief concern is that there are some people who have yet to experience this form of justice.
It used to be that prison was feared because it meant a prolonged loss of freedom, hard labor, separation from family and, sometimes, violence by guards. But somewhere along the line, Americans got used to the idea that it also involves sadistic sexual abuse with no one doing anything to stop it.
Why are we so nonchalant? We might be outraged that anti-social thugs are getting away with horrific new crimes every day, under the very noses of law enforcement. Instead, many people — Lockyer among them — have embraced the proposition that the victims are getting only what they deserve.
One of the reasons this phenomenon gets little attention is that it’s largely invisible. Even critics can only make educated guesses about the scope of the problem. But it’s clearly large. A survey of seven men’s prisons in four states, published last year in Prison Journal, found that 21 percent of inmates had been coerced or forced into sexual contact, with 7 percent reporting they had been raped.
When Human Rights Watch did a confidential poll of prison guards in an unnamed southern state, they estimated that one in five inmates were victims of such abuse. Inmates said it was more like one in three.
Suppose we take a conservative estimate and say that one of every 10 inmates suffers this misfortune. With more than 1.8 million men behind bars at any given time, that means at least 180,000 inmates are forcibly violated every year. And that’s not counting what goes on in juvenile facilities. For comparison’s sake, in the entire United States, there were 124,730 reported rapes of females in 1999.
How can sexual abuse possibly be regarded as an appropriate part of serving time? Some of the victims are vicious thugs themselves. But many people in prisons and jails were arrested for nonviolent offenses.
Many of us, if a close relative were found guilty of one of these crimes, would think he should pay for his offense by losing his freedom for a long while. But few of us would agree he deserves to be beaten, stabbed, sodomized and infected with AIDS, which is what prison often means. If a judge were to give a convict a sentence like that, it would be ruled cruel and unusual punishment.
Lockyer might not have the stomach to actually watch one of the encounters that he finds so amusing. One inmate interviewed by Human Rights Watch had complained to guards after being raped. His assailant then beat him with a combination lock — breaking his neck, jaw, collarbone and finger, dislocating his shoulder, and giving him two serious concussions — before raping him again. Afterward, the victim could read the word “Master,” the brand of the lock, on his forehead. Many inmates submit rather than risk being stomped to a pulp.
Atrocities like this happen all the time, mainly because hardly anyone minds. Authorities have no great incentive to take the problem seriously because they generally can’t be held liable for attacks. In overcrowded, understaffed facilities, prevention may be impossible. Prosecutors, meanwhile, see no need to seek punishment.
Treating prison rape like the crime it is would deter some attacks. Prisons could also act swiftly to segregate the perpetrators from the rest of the inmate population. The surest remedy is also the most expensive: Put all prisoners in one-man cells, so they don’t have to sleep with one eye open.
Or maybe we should just require all government officials with responsibility for prisons and jails to spend a couple of nights a year in one of their own facilities. Since you’re already acquainted, Mr. Lockyer, you’ll be rooming with Spike.
The naked truth about Los Angeles
Sunday, August 5, 2001
In Southern California, home of the Playboy mansion, Frederick’s of Hollywood and the video pornography industry, locals are currently taken aback by a work of art that offends their standards of modesty. A depiction of male nudes in the granite floor of the American Airlines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport has caused shock and anger among Angelenos accustomed to the puritanical standards of dress that prevail throughout the region. Susan Narduli may become famous as the woman who put the X in LAX. In reality, the photographs she sand-blasted into the black granite floor of the world’s third-busiest airport would barely qualify as PG. They consist of several life-size images of athletic-looking nude men, with shadows and body positioning deftly used to conceal their vital parts. Narduli says she was merely trying to evoke the nobility of early man’s efforts to fly, not “to do something provocative or controversial.”
Her creation was not too provocative for those avant-garde rebels in the executive suite at American Airlines. “We worked with the artist, and we’re fully supportive of it,” said George Hazy, the company’s managing director. Maybe they’re just trying to distract their customers from the wearisome indignities of modern air travel. But the city airport agency concluded that innocents passing through the building might faint dead away at the brazen display of bare flesh.
“We are a public place, and we have an obligation not to offend people,” one official said. “What I really care about is what my father thinks, or my niece thinks, or the Amish couple from Des Moines thinks.” One complainer wrote, “Aren’t there much more beautiful and acceptable things to be admired, especially by children who have to walk over and past this stuff?”
On behalf of children and Amish couples, the airport hastily covered the pictures with brown paper. But last week, the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission ruled that the piece would remain where it is, sans covering. So outsiders should enter the terminal braced for what they
