Photo of NZ Police Minister Judith Collins via stuff.co.nz

New Zealand blogger Maia says the recent earthquake seems to be giving the local justice department head an opportunity to further indulge in rape culture and, by extension, homophobia.

From the [New Zealand] Herald: Police Minister Judith Collins said the actions of looters was akin to “people who rob the dead”. She expected to see the judiciary throw the book at looters.

“I hope they go to jail for a long time – with a cellmate.”

Judith Collins introduced widespread double-bunking; she championed it in the media. When people who had actually done research suggested that it would lead to more prison rape and violence, she shrugged those statements off.

And now she’s telling us that, for her, abuse and violence between inmates is a feature of double-bunking, not a bug. She is not explicit, but we live in a culture where threats of rape in prison are common enough that she doesn’t need to finish the thought by telling us that the cellmate is large and called Bubba. By signalling that she thinks looters should be subject to rape and violence from their cell mates, she has acknowledged that her policy of introducing cellmates is responsible for increased rape and violence.

Source: Alas, a blog

This is pretty cool.  I'm glad she brought it up.

Few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that it will be the new, the young, the white, the middle-class, the petty-criminals, or the white-collar criminals who will become the victims of prison rape when inmates are “doubled up” unsupervised in cells.

Similarly, few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that if assertions like Collins’s are true then the prison system rewards, encourages, coddles, or even tacitly recruits those who really are prison rapists by providing them with more victims.

And finally, few things identify rape culture quite like the general failure of progressives to push back on the previous two assumptions.

While rates of rape and sexual assault seem to be in decline in the general population, prison rape remains a huge reservoir not only of future perpetrators but of current ones! And of current victims. Thanks so much for bringing this up and for making the connection so clearly.

Couple other little assumptions in there

• That only prisoners sexually assault or rape prisoners
• That only male prisoners sexually assault or rape fellow prisoners
• That (dreadful as it sounds) rape and sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to one in prison.
• That sex between prisoners is inevitably non-consensual, or that loneliness and isolation can never be so great that otherwise straight prisoners never seek or form intimate or sexual bonds with each other.

But the main thing is that New Zealand's senior police official thinks that "tough on crime" means incorporating prison rape into corrections policy rather than opposing or working to minimize it.  She's not alone.