New York Times to White Prisoners: ‘Bend Over and Take It’

By Nicholas Stix
November 22, 2004

If you’re an Arab terrorist, the New York Times is willing to lie about the Geneva Conventions, in order to aid and abet you. But if you’re a white American prisoner, as far as Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. and his lackeys are concerned, no punishment is too grisly to be meted out to you.

The November 14 Times ran a house editorial, “Racial Segregation in Prison”, opposing a California prison policy being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, that for many white prisoners, has been the difference between life and death.

California prison officials have in recent years been guilty of showing mercy to white prisoners, and the Times will not stand for that. The California Department of Corrections racially segregates new prisoners with members of their own race for 60 days after their arrival in an institution.

The reason for the practice is simple enough, but in matters of race, the Times can always be counted on to hide from, or lie about the facts. Targeting white inmates for rape based on the color of their skin has long been a sport among the black (and to a lesser degree, Hispanic) prisoners who dominate so many prisons in this country, and who consider such racial attacks their birthright. And since such rapes are often committed by violent offenders who know they are HIV+, and result in the death of the victim through AIDS, they are thus a package deal of assault, rape, and murder, not to mention the sexual slavery that the rape initiates.

Note that the slavery that is pervasive in the nation’s prisons is just one more thing the Times doesn’t want you to know about. And so, the same newspaper that opposes the death penalty for blacks and Hispanics is not at all concerned, if every prison sentence for a white man, no matter how brief and how petty the offense, may become in practice, a death sentence. I believe the Constitution calls that, “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. couldn’t care less about some white guys getting the shaft. Indeed, the racial socialism Sulzberger’s paper promotes both in its news and editorial sections, amounts to little more than the belief that white, heterosexual men should get the shaft, literally and figuratively, in every possible way. Or at least, white, heterosexual men who aren’t well-to-do leftists. Conversely, if it were known that white prisoners were violently raping, sexually enslaving, and murdering black prisoners through the deliberate transmission of HIV infection, the story would run in its proper place, on the top of page one.

The anonymous Times editorialist opined,

The State of California says its policy, by which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were segregated last year, reduces violence in the cells. After 60 days, the state says it has enough information to decide whether particular inmates are dangerous. Of course, it is possible that the policy makes things worse. At oral argument, Justice John Paul Stevens asked what he called a “stupid question”: whether, if California wants to discourage racial gangs, it wouldn't make more sense to house prisoners with members of a different race.

Justice Stevens was being cute; he didn’t for one moment think his question was stupid. Let’s see. If we break up the white minority of inmates in most maximum security California prisons, and pair them off with racist, ultraviolent, black and Hispanic gangbangers, will that discourage racial gangs or racial violence? In a word, Mr. Justice: No. But such a policy would give us the penal equivalent of busing, another program that rich leftists who are insulated from its consequences have always loved.

Last May, John Paul Stevens made much of his opposition to the death penalty. However, Stevens has no problem with the machinery of death when, in the hands of racist black and Hispanic prisoners, it takes the lives of white prisoners.

In an irony that is likely lost on Justice Stevens, the only white male prisoners who are reasonably safe are the ultraviolent, neo-Nazi sociopaths who are members of white supremacist gangs. The white gang members protect each other.

Back to the Times:

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the policy. It invoked a Supreme Court precedent, Turner v. Safley, giving prisons broad authority in how they handle their inmates. California produced little evidence to support its segregation policy, but the court accepted as ‘common sense’ the notion that there is a connection between segregating prisoners and combating violence.

The far-left “Ninth Circus” showed some humanity! Well, we can’t have that, can we?

The Times editorialist exploited a peculiar institution of contemporary discourse. Socialists and communists like Pinch Sulzberger have for forty years demonized anyone who talks in explicitly racial terms, unless he is seeking to provide racial advantages to blacks. Speaking in explicitly racial terms about black racism or black social pathologies, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan learned almost 40 years ago, gets one shouted down as a “racist,” and booted out of polite society. And so, California officials didn’t dare mention to the justices the 800-pound gorilla of race in the courtroom, a reticence which the Times editorialist then exploited with, “California produced little evidence to support its segregation policy …”

The Times:

The Ninth Circuit should have been far more skeptical. The courts have long applied ‘strict scrutiny,’ an onerous legal standard, to racial classifications. The Ninth Circuit wants to carve out an exception for prisons. But given the history of racial discrimination in American penology, from segregated prisons and work farms to chain gangs, the courts should be highly demanding in reviewing racial policies behind bars.

This case might be harder if California prisons used racial segregation rarely, and only in response to serious threats or instances of racially motivated violence. But a blanket policy that separates all new prisoners on the basis of race is unconstitutional.

This is the usual Times hypocrisy, where race is concerned. When a policy racially advantages blacks and disadvantages whites, the Times supports blanket policies, and opposes all scrutiny and skepticism. And the California policy is of course in response to “serious threats or instances of racially motivated violence.” What the Times writer really means, is that where white victims are concerned, nothing counts as a “serious threat” or as “racially motivated violence.”

And we can safely ignore the Times’ reference to “the history of racial discrimination in American penology,” which is just the sort of blanket statement that the writer already condemned. (But it’s a blanket statement in favor of black racial privilege.) Whenever the Times proposes some sort of outrageous racial notion or practice, it repeats the mantra, “the history of racial discrimination.”

(Times op-ed columnist and racial newsroom enforcer, Bob Herbert, did just that on August 20, in “Voting While Black,” when he argued that for Florida state police detectives to interview elderly black witnesses in the latter’s homes while armed, as part of an election fraud investigation, constituted racial intimidation.

“The officers were armed and in plain clothes. For elderly African-American voters, who remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks who tried to vote in the South in the 1950's and 60's, the sight of armed police officers coming into their homes to interrogate them about voting is chilling indeed.”

Note Herbert’s logical implication that police officers should not be permitted to be armed while working in black neighborhoods, lest they cause residents to “remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks …”)

By the way, can someone explain to me how racially segregated chain gangs would be an instance of “racial discrimination in American penology”? The Times editorialist apparently assumes, a la the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, that all-white chain gangs are inherently superior to their all-black counterparts.

Prison rape is such as serious problem that Human Rights Watch, of all organizations, devoted a study to it in 2001: No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, which cited the racial rape of white prisoners as a serious problem.

Past studies have documented the prevalence of black on white sexual aggression in prison. These findings are further confirmed by Human Rights Watch's own research. Overall, our correspondence and interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates convince us that white inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse. Although many whites reported being raped by white inmates, black on white abuse appears to be more common. To a much lesser extent, non-Hispanic whites also reported being victimized by Hispanic inmates.

The Human Rights Watch report helped bring about the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which the November 14 editorialist appears to have plum forgotten about. Normally, the Times loves federal laws, but as far as Sulzberger & Co. are concerned, in cases of racial violence or racial discrimination, whites must not benefit from federal legislation.

The November 14 editorial was not the first venture into the realm of prison violence by the Times editorial page. On September 7, editorial board member Brent Staples wrote a signed editorial, “Fighting the AIDS Epidemic by Issuing Condoms in the Prisons”, with condoms offering a surefire way to curb AIDS. Yep, that’ll do it. When a prisoner is about to be raped, all he’ll have to do is request that his attacker don a condom.

Staples left out that little matter of so much prison sex being a matter of rape. (He mentioned prison rape in passing, only to go back to his spiel, which implicitly denied its significance, and never mentioned its often racial character.)

The connection between the prison experience and the spread of AIDS outside prison is especially clear in poor communities, where a great many men spend time behind bars at some point in their lives. But with millions of people regularly exposed to H.I.V. in the prison system, the entire country has both a moral and a medical obligation to confront the sexual realities of prison life.

Until then, lives will be lost and prison-borne diseases will continue to spread from the corrections system into the community at large.

Too bad Brent Staples refuses “to confront the sexual realities of prison life.”

The only thing worse than the Times neglecting a serious social problem, is when the paper devotes space to one.