Not so civilized: Preying on prisoners
Eric Metaxas writes on BreakPoint:
When it comes to illegal immigration, there’s one thing all Americans should agree on.
Three years ago, a woman I’ll call “Mary” was stopped by a policeman for what initially appeared to be a run-of-the-mill moving violation. What followed was anything but routine, though.
“Mary” descended into a kind of hell that is all-too-familiar for the most vulnerable among us.
Mary’s descent started when the policeman discovered that she was in the country illegally. This, along with a ten-year-old warrant for bouncing a $230 check, caused her to be remanded into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Now, stick with me here. We Christians can disagree about our immigration laws and how they should be applied, but we should be outraged at what happened next to Mary.
ICE sent Mary, a Canadian citizen and the mother of four underage American citizens, to a facility in Willacy, Florida. There she was raped by a male guard. When Mary complained to a female guard, the guard replied “nobody’s going to believe you” and said that complaining would only make matters worse.
“Mary’s” story was not an isolated incident: in the episode of PBS’ Frontline that told her story, a former guard at Willacy called sexual abuse of inmates and cover-ups of the assaults there “pervasive.”
And that’s not just at Willacy. The Department of Justice estimates that “over 216,000 people are sexually abused in its prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities every year.”
Multiply Justice 