Friday, April 14, 2000
By Elisabeth Carnell
"Fight the rape culture."
Slogan seen at a protest of the Western Herald
Before feminists get all up in arms to fun off and fight the rape culture, they might want to start by fighting rapists first.
The number of women victimized by rape and attempted yearly in our nation is staggering. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2 in 1,000 women over 12 are the victims of rape/attempted rape. Although the incidence of rape has declined in recent years thanks largely to demographic trends, it is still intolerably high.
The reason rape is so common, however, has little to do with the continued persistence of sexist jokes and pornographic magazines. Instead, rape continues unabated because as a society we’ve decided to stop punishing rapists and other violent criminals.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ "Felony sentences in the United States, 1994," in that year there were 20,239 state and federal felony convictions for rape.
For close to a third of felonious rapists, however, such a conviction didn’t mean a whole lot. Twelve percent went immediately to probation without serving a single day in prison or jail beyond any time served while awaiting trial and sentencing. Another 17 percent were sentenced to spend time in local jails where the average sentence was a whopping 7 months.
Of the remaining 71 percent incarcerated in prison, the mean maximum sentence was 13 years and 7 months which sounds impressive until you start digging around to find out how long such convicts actually serve.
A 1995 Department of Justice study, "Prison sentences and time served for violence" reveals those convicted of rape served on average only 56 percent of their maximum sentence. Half of all rapists served actual time of less than four years.
Those incarcerated for violent crimes are fully aware they will almost certainly never serve their maximum sentence. Convicted rapists reported they expected to serve only 55 percent of their sentence.
In summary, this is the sort of deterrent the criminal justice system offers a potential rapist. Even if he is one of the minority of rapists to be caught and convicted, he has close to a 1 in 3 chance of receiving only probation or an extremely short jail sentence. At worst he can expect to spend 4 or 5 years in prison provided he is cooperative with his jailers at which time he will likely be paroled.
Thus, the potential sanctions of rape are exceedingly low and nowhere near high enough to act as an effective deterrent.
It is this sort of system which allowed Christopher Evans Hubbart to be convicted in 1972 of raping 14 women and then set Hubbart loose after only 6 years in a state prison. Hubbart began raping again the day he was released and in 1982 was incarcerated again for raping 10 more women. Released again in 1990, Hubbart kidnapped another woman for which he served 5 years.
Ironically, this outcome is the result of the indelible influence of an ideology promoted by leftist criminologist and sociologist who advocate ideas similar to the notion of the rape culture myth. A classic example of this is Jeffrey Reiman’s Marxist analysis of crime, The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Prison which is currently being used in some sociology classes at Western Michigan University.
Reiman blames crime on what he believes are structural inequalities in capitalist economies. A detailed debunking of this claim is beyond the scope of this column, but it is Reiman’s conclusions which are of interest here. If crime is indeed manufactured by society, whether through the economic system or through cultural attitudes toward the sexes, the inescapable conclusion is that it is society rather than criminals who are to blame for crime, including rape.
According to Reiman, the notion and practice of punishment is itself an idea which serves class functions rather than justice. Feminist legal theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon have wholeheartedly embraced this idea and argued that men who rape women are not to blame for their violence and indeed should not be subject to punishment. In her 1993 book, Only Words, MacKinnon agreed with the defense put on by Thomas Schiro who repeatedly raped, tortured and murdered a woman in Indiana in 1981.
Schiro’s defense was that he was not criminally culpable because he had viewed pornography. The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected this novel defense, but MacKinnon lapped it up, arguing because "pornography makes rapists unaware that their victims are not consenting," Schiro should have been released.
This is where fighting the rape culture leads – to the denial of personal responsibility and accountability for individuals who engage in violence.
Of course no one bothers protesting women like MacKinnon for their views on rape. In fact she is celebrated and mindlessly worshipped for being on the cutting edge of feminist legal theory. When SAGE protested the Herald publication of ads for Deja Vu, her name was uttered not a few times by the erstwhile opponents of the rape culture.
Three strikes laws for violent criminals, truth in sentencing laws, and an end to the war on consensual crimes such as drug trafficking, which absorb far too many resources, will deter and punish rapists. Fighting a war against "sexist" advertising and dumb blond jokes will keep activists busy for awhile, but accomplish little else.
Postscript: since this essay was published, I have received several complaints from sociology students who claim this piece misrepresents Jeffrey Reiman's views on crime. Namely, they claim that Reiman does not try to absolve criminals of responsibility -- one industrious student even wrote a paper on the subject citing this column as an example of how erroneous information on the Internet can be.
Those who make such bizarre claims need to more carefully read Reiman, since he directly contradicts this view in the appendix to The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Prison, in which he outlines the Marxian theory of criminal justice which he states is "different from (though not incompatible)" with his own. And what does Reiman believe this different, though not incompatible Marxian critique of criminal justice implies?
On the alienation charge, the criminal is at best relieved of responsibility because he has been shaped by the social system to have antisocial attitudes and fated by that system to have antisocial attitudes and fated by that system to experience need and insecurity that, together with those attitudes, lead to crime. On the slavery-maldistribution charge, the criminal is at best a victim because he is the object of the unjust coercion or expropriation characteristic of private ownership of means of production ... on both charges, Marxism does imply reduced or no blame for (most) criminals; but it does not imply an celebration of their acts ... crime and criminality must on the whole be placed by Marxism among the costs of capitalism, lined up alongside poverty, unemployment, pollution, and the rest (Reiman 1990, pp.177-8).
This is completely consistent with Reiman's own view that workers in capitalist societies can't freely choose to do certain jobs.
Finally, note that I do not claim that Reiman believes rapists and other criminals should go unpunished -- a view which I ascribe only to Catharine MacKinnon. It is folly, however, for Reiman and his adherents to believe that this is an intolerable extension of their views. Western culture has a long history of exempting individuals from punishment (or providing lesser punishments) for crimes when the criminal had no or diminished responsibility over his actions. The most obvious example is laws treating insane individuals differently than sane individuals who, like lower class criminals in Reiman's view, have a diminished capacity to choose.
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