For a nation that leads the world in putting people behind bars, we're doing an absolutely horrible job of looking after the poor folks we keep tossing in there:

The Justice Department reported Thursday that 12 percent of incarcerated juveniles, or more than 3,200 young people, had been raped or sexually abused in the past year by fellow inmates or prison staff, quantifying for the first time a problem that has long troubled lawmakers and human rights advocates. [Washington Post]

So often, "protecting the children" is the knee-jerk justification for all sorts of draconian criminal justice policies. Yet, the youth who need the most help are routinely being sexually assaulted by the people who're supposed to be rehabilitating them.

The shameful – though not at all surprising – explanation for this seems to be that we just can't afford to do a better job than this:

Four former commissioners on a blue-ribbon prison rape panel that spent years studying the issue say they fear that authorities are deferring to concerns by corrections officials that reforms would cost too much, while not focusing enough on prison safety and the effects of abuse on inmates.  

We can afford to put them in prison, but we just can't afford to take very good care of them. That is literally what's happening here, and it illustrates perfectly what an unfathomable travesty our criminal justice system has become. Yet, lawmakers continue to cower before the mighty prison lobbies that fight tirelessly to build more and more prisons that are less and less safe.

It's amazing that drug policy and criminal justice reform could be considered even remotely controversial while our correctional institutions remain plagued by endemic patterns of violence and sexual abuse. This would be intolerable even if everyone ever sentenced to prison in America actually deserved to be there (imagine that).

It's not enough to just wish it wasn't like this. The bottom line is that anyone who lobbies for aggressive police tactics and harsh laws bears responsibility for the abuse and indignation that innocent (and guilty, though undeserving) people will inevitably suffer within our brutal prison system. If you understand what happens in there, then you have a moral obligation to consider that reality when forming and expressing opinions about who truly belongs behind those bars.