Justice

Should the state be seen as responsible for crimes committed by prisoners against prisoners in jails? It seems to me that knowingly incarcerating a person in a place where inmates are at risk to be beaten, raped or killed is like throwing him in the lion's den.

Comments

Such crimes in jails cannot be avoided completely -- at least not without utterly draconian and inhumane isolation of inmates. So the state should be held responsible for the statistical excess: for that fraction of the in-jail crime rate that is reasonably avoidable. In the US, this excess is abnormally large.

And in the US the responsibility of the state -- and this is us: taxpayers and citizens eligible to vote -- is further aggravated by the fact that the excess is deliberate. We consider vulnerability to in-jail crime to be part of an offender's punishment, and we also use the prospect of in-jail crime to extract cooperation and confessions from suspects. (The cops in Law & Order routinely tell male suspects that, if they won't cooperate, they'll be sent to a jail where they will be "someone's girlfriend." To be sure, with my sheltered life, I have never heard this from a real cop in a real-life situation. But I think that, based on our reading of the news, we can be fairly sure that such threats are common.) Fear of being exposed to rape leads to false confessions, to the fraction of convictions inflicted on innocent people being higher than reasonably avoidable. And we, the state, are responsible for this statistical excess as well.

I agree with everything Thomas Pogge has said in his reply, but also think that one assumption of your question needs to be questioned. Consider the following example: It is my night to cook dinner, but I have forgotten to buy an ingredient. I ask my wife to run down to the store to purchase it, but as I do so, it occurs to me (what is obviously true) that driving a car puts one at risk for injury or death. Now, I think there is an important moral distinction to be made between asking my wife to drive to the store precisely because of the risks I know she will face in driving, and asking her to drive to the store (despite the risks) to purchase an ingredient necessary for the dinner I (or we) have planned. Since I do not believe that it is the intent of the law, as it were, to put inmates at greatly higher risks of victimization by beating, rape, or murder (note that none of these are legally mandated, and all are legally proscribed and are often legally punished, even when they occur in prison settings), the argument that the state is responsible for the beatings, rapes, and murders cannot be made simply on the basis of the elevated risks of these to inmates. I wholly agree, however, with what I take Pogge's point to be, namely, that it is appropriate to hold the state responsible for the poor protection presently provided to inmates against such cases of victimization. We might similarly say that while the state or the police are responsible to provide better protection than they currently do against the dangers posed to us by some crimes (DUI, for example), it does not follow that the state or the police are responsible for those of us who suffer as a result of such crimes (e.g. those who are injured or killed drunk drivers).

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