PSA: It's Still Bad When Bad People Are Assaulted In Prison

Larry Nassar is a horrible person, but celebrating his stabbing has consequences.

Larry Nassar is a terrible person. He used his position as the team doctor for the US women's gymnastics team to sexually assault at least 265 teenage girls and he'll spend the rest of his life in prison as a result.

Nassar is currently in the hospital after having been stabbed multiple times during an altercation with another inmate.

It is entirely understandable that many people feel the impulse to cheer. Larry Nassar was and is a true monster, and it is in no way shocking that anyone would want to stab him or see him get stabbed. But I'm going to ask you to hold off on that while I tell you about another prison-related story that's been in the news lately.

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In Texas, a recent heat wave has turned prison cells into ovens, and it's actually killing people. This is nothing new. It's been happening every year for some time now, as more than two-thirds of the state's prisons do not have air conditioning. It's so bad that prisoners have been known to lie on their cell floors in pools of toilet water just to escape the worst of it. So far this year, at least nine people have died from what the Texas Tribune suspects were heat-related illnesses, though they cannot prove this as the Texas prison system stopped categorizing deaths as being heat-related 11 years ago. Despite this, a study published last November estimated that at least 13 percent of all summer deaths in Texas prisons from 2001 to 2019 were likely caused by the heat.

In 2011, recorded temperatures in these cells actually got up to 149 degrees Fahrenheit — which means that if Texas prisons were swordfish steaks, they would be safe to eat.

The Texas Tribune reports:

Every summer, as temperatures routinely soar well into triple digits, thousands of officers and tens of thousands of prisoners are cramped inside concrete and steel buildings without ventilation, save windows broken out of desperation and fans that blow hot air. The heat has killed prisoners , likely contributed to severe staff shortages , and cost taxpayers millions of dollars in wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits over the last decade.

This year, state lawmakers chose again not to put any money directly toward installing air conditioning in the dangerously hot prisons, despite a $32.7 billion budget surplus.

To be clear, this is not just hurting prisoners like Larry Nassar: One of the prisons most affected by this has been a women's prison in which no one is serving more than two years.

The attitudes we have about what happens to incarcerated people make it a whole lot easier for state lawmakers to avoid spending money on air conditioning for prisons. It allows those who run the prisons to not give a shit about what happens to the people in them. It allows us all to kind of shrug off violence in prison and rape in prison, because who cares what happens to the "bad people."

In many an episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," a perp is told that if he doesn't cooperate, he will still be sent to prison and the detectives will put the word out that he's a child molester, whether it is true or not. We're meant to cheer for this, along with the implication that it will result in the person being murdered in prison. New York doesn't have the death penalty (and no state has the death penalty for any crime that is not a homicide), but that's certainly one way to get around it.

When a particularly terrible person is sentenced to prison for any reason, many people still indulge in the occasional "Don't drop the soap" reverie, as if there is ever such a thing as a "just" rape.

And while yes, child molesters are apparently very unpopular in prison, those who are actually most vulnerable to physical and sexual assault are the 14,500 juvenile offenders housed in adult facilities across the nation. If those in charge at prisons don't care if Larry Nassar gets stabbed, you think they're going to care if some non-famous 16-year-old kid gets stabbed? No, they're not. This is not justice being meted out. This is not "karma." It's incompetence and apathy on the part of those whose job it is to oversee prisoner safety.

It's also worth noting here that studies estimate that between four to six percent of people in US prisons are actually innocent and that the cruelty that some find so satisfying and cathartic when it comes to monsters like Larry Nassar affects them as well.

We need to care about what happens to people in prisons. If "basic human decency" and "no cruel and unusual punishment" doesn't sell it for you, then the fact that, unlike Larry Nassar, most people who go into prisons will eventually come out again probably should.

It would be one thing if this were an incredibly rare occurrence in our system instead of an ongoing issue within it — if it happened specifically because this guy was Larry Nassar. But it's not, and it probably didn't.

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