The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.With this quote, Wilbert Rideau closes his treatise on rape in the US prison system. Written in 1979, The Sexual Jungle is a depressing account of man's inhumanity towards man behind bars. In a perverse power struggle hung on the twisted definition of what constitutes "masculinity", the physically powerful dominate over any who they can break. You either fight the system and face the terrible consequences, or you capitulate and become enslaved. This could mean anything from devoting yourself to one man and becoming his "wife", or being treated as a whore and passed around as a sexual slave. "Since the majority of prisoners don't own slaves, their need for sexual outlet creates a large market for potential profit. In an economic sense, a slave is capital stock, property that can be made to produce income, and prison pimps don't hesitate to put their whores to work hustling for profit." Justification for the behaviour is, "He can't protect himself. Hell - I just proved that. He can't make it in here and you know it. As his old man, I'll take care of him. He give me sex, I give him protection. That ain't no bad deal if you look at it right. Hell - it's more to his benefit than mine."
Dostoyevski, The House of the Dead
The inclusion of Dostoyevski's quote breaks down the high wall between prison and the outside world. What goes on behind bars is only a more sordid reflection of what takes place in society: The power struggle, and man's continuous domination of man, "to his injury." Rideau's key paragraph, aiming to explain why prisoners resort to the methods they do, is simply a broad explanation for any of man's actions. "Man's greatest pain, whether in life or in prison, is the sense of personal insignificance, of being helpless and of no real value as a person, an individual - a man." So, in order to validate their sense of manhood and individual worth, they channel "all of their frustrated drives into the pursuit of power, finding gratification in the conquest and defeat, the domination and subjugation of each other." These are the self-same frustrated drives that propel humanity in general. Capitalism is a competitive market. It is a fight for survival: Which company is going to get the business? Who is going to get the job? Employees must compete to win positions, and then have their work assessed and re-assessed in order to keep their jobs. Like a reverse parole board, his is not a bid for freedom, but a bid to remain enslaved.
In the prison system this power struggle manifests itself as violent rape of other men, but even then it is not seen as such.
The act of rape...is not sexual and not really regarded as "rape". Both prisoners and personnel generally refer to the act as "turning out", a nonsexual description that reveal the nonsexual ritualistic nature of what is really an act of conquest and emasculation, stripping the male victim of his status as a "man."So it might be that we think it rather extreme to brand the treatment of humanity is a form of rape - and, yet it is an act of conquest and emasculation. There is no work that feeds the soul, it is all slavery. Factory work, retail, the military, the civil services - all are pressed into serfdom. Even in the fields in which employees believe they are doing some good they are so tied up with bureaucracy and statistical achievements that those who engage in these fields eventually feel the life draining out of them. It is all designed to prop up the system, cogs keeping the vast machine marching along.
Similar to the oppressed life behind bars, those who give themselves over to the system, who work for the system (and are only too willing to offer their credentials unsolicited - "I'm a doctor/teacher/social worker/nurse") find that once they are in that position they can be bought and sold as property. Authorities alter the system and there is nothing these workers can do about it. They must cooperate and enforce the changes whether they agree with them or not. If they do not co-operate they face the threat of losing their job. With people clamouring for work and the atmosphere of competition constructed by the system, there are plenty who are willing to take over. This is achieved by keeping work at a minimum and making it a competitive market.
Those who brush off this analysis as so much paranoia are those who choose to take the blue pill. More than a quarter of a century before the Warchowski brothers penned The Matrix, Ivan Illich had already made the observation that man had been "reinvented as a source of mechanical power."
Prisoners condemned to the galleys were not much use most of the time, since galleys were most of the time in port. Prisoners condemned to the treadmills produced rotary power to which any of the new machines could be hooked. Up to the early nineteenth century men in English prisons actually laboured on the treadmills to make machines work."Why limit the power source to prisoners when the whole of mankind can be pressed in to service?
Ivan D. Illich, Tools For Conviviality
Workers find themselves turned out on to the streets when multi-million dollar corporations move their factories overseas to lands where labour is cheap. Obscenely, these same corporations go to great lengths to push their expensive products on to the population they have just turned out, thereby pressing their faces into the dirt of their own poverty. They work hard to make people feel worthless for not being able to afford the latest luxury item. They tempt them with "buy now, pay later" deals, and confine them to lifelong servitude as they work to pay off their ever-mounting debts. It is ironic that Apple chooses to have the forbidden fruit as their logo, a reminder of the first humans being turned out of paradise.
The poverty stricken turn to crime, or prostitution - further blurring the line between the free and the incarcerated. Eventually they too will find themselves thrown into prison, banged up for trying to survive a system that screwed them over in the first place. However, to end up in prison is merely a further way to maintain the status quo. Society has no intention of changing the prison system. It serves a purpose just the way it is. Just as the prison administration is content for things to remain the way they are within the prison walls, so the state is content for the prison system to remain. Authorities turn a blind eye. They want things to stay the same because the fear engendered by the prison system serves to keep the people obedient. Man is able to invent rules and laws which the rest of mankind must abide by under threat of reprisals (incarceration). The systematic rape of mankind, being held down and forced to engage in something you have not consented too. Taxes and fines can be extracted from a population who do not want to be processed, who do not want their fingerprints to be taken and their data to be fed into the system and stored. The prison system will kill a man, or break him. In this way it serves to achieve its ultimate goal and turn out the Compliant Citizen, a task that should have been accomplished in the first prison system we are ever introduced to in life - school. It's hard to read The Sexual Jungle and not look at your own children and think, "What kind of a world have I brought them in to?" Yet we send them to school and into the system to be processed. We set up college and university as a goal, and encourage them to carve out a career and become another cog in the whole monstrous machine.
A bullying mentality is learned in school. Older ones can take advantage of the younger. The younger have to take it because their turn will come. Once there was a term for it: Fagging. A small boy could give himself over to an older pupil, and in return for services rendered - shoes polished, errands run around the school, tea-making - he could receive certain advantages. Even if this practice has been abandoned, there is still a servile spirit encouraged, a heavy emphasis on paying one's dues, and to do unto others what was done to oneself.
Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped at the age of ten and held against her will for eight years until she made her escape a few days after her eighteenth birthday. Once free, she found herself the victim of a different form of incarceration. She was not allowed to leave the police station. She was not free to come and go as she pleased. She had to be processed. She could not process herself. She was not allowed to diagnose herself after her years of imprisonment, she had to be diagnosed by state appointed psychologists. The state would argue that this is for the best, that they are offering protection. Wolfgang Priklopil would make the same claim. In his twisted psyche he was looking after Natascha Kampusch when no-one else would. Priklopil often told her that her parents didn't want her and didn't care. The state insinuates the same thing. It is always on hand, watching over. It implies a parent's lack of care, their inability to protect. The State "cares". The National Health Service "cares". Parents? "Meh - not so much." The state has the monopoly on care, they have defined love. It has been decided democratically, and everyone else must comply. One must bend to the will of the nation.
So it is with this system: We must conform or face the consequences. Self-schooling is looked down upon. Self-diagnosis is scoffed at. We find ourselves enslaved to the state and beholden to the professional strata. We are not educated unless we have been through the school system. We are not healthy unless diagnosed by the medical profession. We are not safe unless policed.
One of the evil acts perpetrated by society is to use children as a bargaining tool. Behind the unspoken threat that children will be removed into care if you do not bend to the system, hospitals become houses of incarceration. Should families find themselves entangled in the medical system, parents are not free to leave the hospital on their own recognisance. They must wait to be processed.
Man cannot conceive of changing the system. There is no need to keep the system going the way it is - it is detrimental to humanity. An alternative needs to be found. Nobody needs to starve, and everybody could receive adequate housing. Instead, we would rather have warehouses full of obsolete product than hand it out in the street. Man changes our viewpoint in an instant as it suits him. He declares belief in the survival of mankind as a whole, but he cannot abide the thought of an individual getting something for nothing, without having earned it. So, he has warehouses full of obsolete junk he doesn't know what to do with because they contain metals that will bleed poisons into the earth, water, and atmosphere. He has landfills full of garbage, rivers overflowing with toxic waste, and prisons full of dangerous men. The whole sorry state is irreversible. The answer is to the incarceration problem is to empty the prison cells. Not all men are a menace to society. They rob and steal because the system is set up against them. They need money for food to survive. This is the system man has created.
Religion is not the answer. It is merely another method of dominance. "Do as we say, or bad things will happen to you." This method finds its roots in scripture as later generations of Israelites constructed a scenario to force people into subjugation. They had a system of laws, drawn up by man but claimed to be given by God. They suggested that in the past, under Moses, the people had not done what they were told and bad things happened. Today, government has assumed the position of God. They set the laws and exact punishment on the criminals.
We may choose not to believe in the Jesus story, but what can't be denied is that anyone who speaks out against the state and its systems will face humiliation. Today Jesus would not be executed - not directly - he would be thrown into the prison system and raped to death because there is a twisted concept of what is defined as a "man". What is more brutal, forty strokes less one followed by a crucifixion, or being attacked and raped by five men and then having a hand thrust into your rectum and a bloody mass of haemorrhoids ripped out? In reality, they both amount to the same thing: "Man dominating man to his injury."
We may not have time for the Bible's pronouncement of judgement upon mankind, but we may be interested to know that in the final analysis God rarely has to do anything. When Gideon's three-hundred men blow their horns and yell their battle cry, the men of Midian "set the sword of each one against the other in all the camp." Once the men of Ammon and Moab had united against the sons of Seir, "they helped each one to bring his own fellow to ruin." And in the pronouncement against Gog of the Land of Magog, "Against his own brother the sword of each one will come to be." In today's prison system men have taken this pronouncement and fulfilled it in the most humiliating way. And outside the prison walls men have succeeded in being no less ruthless in the conquest and emasculation of their fellow men.