In the reading the author talks about the two different types of prison. The two types of prisons are the Auburn and the Philadelphia style prison. The Philadelphia prison style is based off isolation and thinks that the individual that is isolated and has time to think and reflect on the crime they committed and often drove prisoner insane according to according to kunzel pt. 1 page 19. The auburn style allows prisoners to develop a community within the prison, allowing prisoners to comfort each other pains and often encouraged conflict labor. I was watching an interview on YouTube with one of my favorite rappers Kevin Gates. Kevin Gates has been in and out of prison and the way he described prison sounded like it was an auburn type of prison. Kevin Gates said that Prison was the best thing that ever happened to him, he later goes on to explain he earned his master’s in philosophy in prison and he said he seen more respect in prison than out of prison. He said “That’s the most respect on earth”  for example when he brushed his teeth he would spit in the toilet because he knew  if he spit in the sink that somebody has to come wash their hands or face in the same space in just spit. He said you have to think about it, there is people in here that are never getting out so this (referring to the prison) is there home and you have to respect it.  Sounds like his experience prison the Auburn style allowed him to build relationships with other cell mates and showed him how intelligent individuals are in prison. If he was in a Philadelphia style prison he may not have had the same experience since he would often be in isolation.

Male Rape in US Prisons Widely Ignored by Prison Officials

Two Articles in Discussion: 

Prison Rape Widely Ignored

No Escape (warning graphic descriptions)

             These two articles discuss the situations that males are forced into once they enter the prison system. Sexual abuse and harassment has been evident for centuries in prisons, however, with more information being developed by scholars... we are finding that rape is still prevalent and widely ignored in the prison system by Correctional Officers and Prison Wardens. It is estimated that 200,000 males are subjected to violent/physical rape inside the prison walls. While Prison officials are there to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the prisoners, often they cannot do anything to protect individuals. Prison officers act with regards to their own personal safety. It is a high-risk job and cooperation with prisoners is necessary. However, cooperation is a very loose term. Cooperation sometimes entails turning a blind eye to rape occurring in their vicinity. In this "Sexual Jungle" there is permission of rape in order to control the larger prison population.

            While there is obviously rape occurring in prisons there are some situations that question the notion of "Male Sexuality." It is common for first time offenders entering the system to get picked up by a predator. This is through cat calling, groping, or other. According to some of the Predators, they believe that Men are not straight or homosexual. They can be turned any way given the situation. Predators in the prison find potential weaknesses - threat of personal safety, need of items, etc - and then they play off that. This usually leads to sexual acts being performed, but again most of the Prison Officers turn their head. In these situations, Prison officers can believe that the two males are in a relationship, when in reality he is being victimized and abused. Many sexual acts are mistaken for being consensual. Some believe that the victims are susceptible because we strive for human interaction. 

           In linkage with the weekly readings, Kunzel's article plays off of this notion of the "need for human interaction." Whether it is male to female or male-to-male, human interaction is essential. The deprivation provided by the prison walls leads to a "Sexual Jungle" dominated by predators. Devising a system to prevent victimization is near impossible. Prison rape is abundant and will forever be a part of prison culture. It is unknown how to deter this from occurring without isolating every individual - which would be far too costly. What is known for sure, there is an unclear division between what we see as consent or rape in prison.

             

Isolation in Modern Prisons

John Hopkins Magazine: Thousands of American prisoners spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement


After reading excerpts of Regina Kunzel's "Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality," parallels can be drawn from Kunzel's findings to the disturbing discoveries of an article published in the John Hopkins Magazine in the spring of 2015. Through the eyes of Gabriel Eber, Staff Council at the ACLU National Prison Project, shocking accounts are relived, many detailing the conditions inside and outside East Mississippi Correctional Facility's isolation cells. Stories of medically unsound prisoners being left for hours upon hours without medical attention are commonplace at EMCF. A 43-year-old black male died inside an isolation cell due to a severe heart condition and lack of any medical intervention, but not before first harming himself and setting fire to his room. Within the article, a correlation is made between isolation and self harm, according to a 2014 study by the American Journal of Public Health, which noted that of the prisoners placed in isolation throughout the three year period, 53 percent harmed themselves, and 45 percent committed acts that were deemed as potentially life-threatening.

Upon reading about these horrific stories, I began to think about Kunzel's mentioning of New York's Auburn Penitentiary and its own system of isolation. While prisoners were forced to move about their daily activities in complete silence, they still were granted company of their fellow inmates through side-by-side labor during the day. This strikingly contrasts with EMCF's isolation cells, where prisoners are left with only the company of four plain walls and their own thoughts. Place within the isolation cell a multitude of health problems and an absence of attention from the two correction officers waiting outside the door, and you have a potential fatality on your hands. Despite modern prisons being socially interactive whereas nineteenth century prisons were more focused on the solitude of the inmates, we still witness a shocking amount of attempts within modern prisons to enforce isolation, which only leads to galvanize mental anguish and disorders as well as the infliction of self-harm.

The idea that the practice of isolation within modern prison systems today is a way of keeping prisoners separate from one another is an argument up for debate. In the article I read, Eber asks the question of why isolation has become the mental institution of last resort. Seeing that most modern institutions view social interaction in a positive light, we are left to ask why prison systems today are still isolating those who need positive social reinforcement the most?

Kunzel article

Kunzel's first article outlines both the Auburn and Philadelphia systems of incarceration, the Auburn system allowing prisoners to experience some level of sociability while the Philadelphia system practiced total prisoner isolation. As a reader digests this information and these prison models, one might think that they are outdated, namely the Philadelphia model, and that we have surely evolved in our efforts to incarcerate individuals who the state deems deserving of such punishment.Unfortunately this is not the case.Disturbingly most prisons across the U.S. have evolved very little and in many ways sharply resemble 19th century modes of imprisonment. The idea that contemporary prisons are in fact inhumane and can be categorized as torture is a fiercely debated topic. A Center for Constitutional Rights article, https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/tools-resources/fact-sheets-and-faqs/torture-use-solitary-confinement-us-prisons, discusses one of many lawsuits that have been filed across the country claiming that solitary confinement is essentially torture. 

"In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. led the world in a new practice of imprisoning people in solitary cells, without access to any human contact or stimulation, as a method of rehabilitation. The results were disastrous, as prisoners suffered severe psychological harm. The practice was all but abandoned. Over a century later, it has made an unfortunate comeback. Instead of torturing prisoners with solitary confinement in dark and dirty underground holes, prisoners are now subjected to solitary confinement in well-lit, sterile boxes. The psychological repercussions are similar."
 "Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, fear of impending nervous breakdowns and higher rates of hypertension and early morbidity. Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal ideation. "

The article suggests the solitary confinement in prison today is a blatant violation of the 8th amendment rights of the individuals imprisoned under these conditions. There are obviously certain circumstances that have improved within prisons i.e., food, sanitary living conditions, access to some medication but the fact that we as a society continue to endorse conditions that  are likely to cause individuals to go insane is somewhat perplexing. We have made incredible technological 

strides in prisons to make them as impenetrable and inescapable as possible and we continue to spend funds to build them but we have done only the bare minimum to make them more tolerable.  There are only two real explanations why prisons are modeled and operated the same way almost two centuries later. Either the individuals with the power to implement change in prisons are not interested in the people within the walls or they believe that prisons in their current state are being run the way that they should be run. 

Sex and Masculinity in US Prisons

Huffpost Live: Sex and Masculinity in US Prisons 

A few statistics given during the video:
Allegation of Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails
51% involved nonconsensual sexual acts or abusive sexual contacts
49% involved sexual misconduct to sexual harassment by staff directed towards inmates
44% of substantiated inmate-on-inmate sexual victimizations involved physical force or threat of force

This video guides a discussion about sexuality and masculinity in US prisons between authors, correctional officers, and former inmates. Throughout this video the commentators talk about how masculinity is defined versus how it is perceived in prison. In the discussion the commentators discuss how society makes these assumptions that males have to be masculine, and females have to be feminine. There are so much more than what counts as masculinity or what counts as femininity, these are social constructs, and much fluidity surrounds these ideas, and how it is not unusual to have a desire for human connection. The commentators briefly mention that if we hear that women have sex in prison we are not surprised, but when we mention that men have consensual sex in prison it is hard to talk about. They discuss examples of groups men being away for long periods of time and still developing a relationship with another man outside of prison, justifying that this is not prison culture.  For one, they mention that it is illegal to have sex in prison, and they use the terminology "code of silence" to demonstrate how far we are in terms of discussing consensual sex in prison, to a further extent how it is punished. When we hear stories about sex in prison, we automatically critique the situation because of the "normal" conservative view we have about the fantasy relationships we have between a man and a woman. It discussion ends with resting questions about relationships among men in the prison system. What influences society's fear of of rape in prison among men? What makes it hard to think not all sex in prison is rape? Even further, why cannot society imagine sex between two men being consensual in prison?

There is much similarity between this discussion and the Kunzel readings. In her first chapter "An Architecture Adapted to Morals" she discusses prison reform efforts in terms of separating prisoners to an extent to where they never see another human being throughout their sentencing. In the discussion the commentators mention that s human beings we have the desire for human interaction. But the idea of the early nineteenth century prison system believed that prison was a place of self-transformation ideally in solitude. Early prison reformers were hesitant of inmates building any type of connection, because as these 'relationships' form, that affection for ones company generates more crime. As we see in modern day prison systems this is not the case. As inmates are socially interactive, levels of crime within society are independent of allowing the inmates to interact in prison. Instead, inmate interaction increase the blurred lines appear between a prison relationship as one of choice versus it being sexual assault.