It’s strange how so many stood by as hundreds of thousands of men were sexually abused in American prisons, and then the moment a predator tries to ‘identify’ as a woman to gain access to a women’s prison, suddenly safeguarding for sexual assault in the prison system is top of the political agenda. I don’t get it. There are literally gangs who want to kill each other sharing prisons in America, but one dangerous inmate might make it into a women’s prison, and its global headline news? Isla Bryson has rightfully been barred from entering women’s prisons, and so marks what I hope is the end of yet another tiresome pantomime of canned outrage, and faux sympathy for prisoner safety. So many pointed and laughed at the radical left during the saga, but for me, the story exposes a similar shortsightedness in the right. And that is, prisoner safety does not start and stop with Isla Bryson. Physical and sexual violence within the prison system is an endemic problem that has been wilfully ignored, but throw in a blonde wig, and suddenly here they come… Preachy, performative high IQ political commentators, each smugly pointing at how a failure of safeguarding could happen, without realising that such failures have been happening to hundreds of thousands of prisoners across America, and the world, right under their own noses for decades. Hundreds of thousands of cases of sexual assault, ignored, or at best joked about. Each met with silence by the very people who now scoff about how ‘hilarious’ and ‘absurd’ the left is. But Isla Bryson is just a drop in the ocean of a much larger problem, ignored by all of us, and the brush of hypocrisy should be painting both political sides with blame. So can this story of Isla Bryson become a vector for a wider conversation, one desperately needed, for the safety of all those in the prison system? Images by: Diego Gonzales, Matthew Ansley, Ravi Avaala, Zhang Kelly, and Amir Seilsepour. Video by @triggerpod Sources Contagion of Violence Prison Policy Initiative The Sexual Victimization of Men in America Raise the Crime Rate

2023-08-03