Pink Prison Jumpsuits Defended For S. Carolina Inmates Who Perform Sex Acts

Inmate calls it risky to punish sex acts with unmanly wardrobe.



And Conservatives wonder why they are compared to Nazis.

The Charlotte Observer reports:

South Carolina's prisons director on Tuesday defended a policy of punishing inmates who perform sex acts by dressing them in pink, despite a lawsuit claiming the rule subjects prisoners to ridicule.

State Corrections Department John Ozmint said the two-year-old punishment deters inmates and protects female officers. His agency has asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

"We don't believe the United States Constitution protects an inmate's right to publicly gratify himself," Ozmint said. "We're hopeful federal courts won't look into our Constitution and create such a right."

Inmate Sherone Nealous, 31, filed the lawsuit in June 2006, claiming the Corrections Department "is placing inmates' lives and physical well-being in danger."

"The color `pink' in an all-male environment no doubt causes derision and verbal and physical attacks on a person's manhood," Nealous, who is serving a 10-year sentence for assault and battery with intent to kill, wrote in his lawsuit. "This policy also gives correctional officers an easy avenue to label an inmate."

A judge has not ruled on the request by the prisons agency that the case be thrown out. Jury selection has been scheduled for this fall.

The policy allows prison officials to discipline inmates found performing sex acts in front of corrections officers by making them trade their customary tan jumpsuit in for a pink one, which must then be worn for three months.

The practice of punishing inmates (under lock and key, away from women and without any other outlet for sexual satisfaction) for sexually gratifying themselves with one another is because it offends the sensibilities of the guards.

South Carolina's prison brain trust would prefer a bunch of tense men milling around the prison with nothing but time on their hands.

Conservatives Crawl Out To Host 'Pity Parties' For Scooter Libby

If it works, and conventional wisdom says it will (Libby will get a presidential pardon), what's the secret to Libby's (and Bush's, Cheney's and GOPer's) success?


The secret is that they clean up well.

The greatest con jobs start with a good haircut and a well-tailored suit. If the political con artist can get somebody else who cleans up just as well to vouch for him (even if both are strangers to the victim), they are well over the biggest hurdle to making a sale. And if one or both of the politicians con artists has an ichthus (fish symbol) on the back of his car (or slips a shibboleth into the sales pitch), they've got a supporter for life, no matter what they do.

This is why Bush still has an approval rating in the high 20s-low 30s, and why Republicans still get votes and elected: Their supporters only look at the surface, listen to the carefully crafted rhetoric and presume meanings not intended. Supporters hear an endorsement by someone in the media and believe that if someone famous, popular in their "culture," a Pat Buchanan (or David Gergen or Ed Rogers or Fred Barnes or Mary Matalin or any other face that has been "media-tested") says "he's really a good guy," "a devoted public servant," a brush with the law must be some mistake. Or "political" (by "them damned liberals") because "he would never do anything wrong or illegal," "knowingly." Even if he's caught dead to rights.

Albert Brooks never said truer words:

It's human nature, to some extent, to think that criminals have to look, well, like criminals.

Whenever some heinous crime has been committed and the police make an arrest (like this latest case in Michigan where Stephen Grant has been arrested for strangling his wife and dismembering her body), the media shoves a microphone into the faces of the perpetrators' neighbors, friends and family. Their comments are remarkably similar, with them invariably being shocked by the arrest because the guy was "so nice," "quiet," "friendly and polite," "helpful" - Grant's sister said he was, "the most docile person I saw my whole life."

We heard the jury's spokesman, Denis Collins, practically apologize for convicting Libby. There was a "tremendous amount of sympathy" for Libby, and some believed he was being made a "fall guy" by his White House superiors:

Some jurors wondered why Libby was being singled out, Collins said. Other Bush administration officials had disclosed CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to reporters as part of an effort to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, and his criticism of the case for war in Iraq. Yet those other officials never faced criminal charges.

"It was said a number of times: What are we doing with this guy? Where's [White House political aide Karl] Rove, where are these other guys?" Libby, Collins said, "was the fall guy."

Another one of the jurors was on Hardball today, and she said flat out that she wouldn't want to see Libby go to prison, because "he seems like such a nice man." She was the juror that cried when the verdict was read, because she felt bad for Libby, and his wife. [Kate O'Beirne appeared on the program, too, making a galling case for a presidential pardon.]

I'm reminded of something Paula Poundstone said when Dick Cheney shot his friend, Harry Whittington, in the face while they were quail hunting:

What is it about these people, Republicans, that the victims are moved to apologize to them?

At Townhall.com, Pat Buchanan writes:

The conviction of Scooter Libby on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice is first of all a human tragedy.

A man who served his country at the highest level, who sat in every morning at the senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, has been dishonored and disgraced, and will be disbarred. Unless his conviction is overturned, or he is pardoned, Libby will go to prison. His life will end with an obituary that declares in its headline and lead paragraph that he was a convicted Dick Cheney aide.

"A human tragedy"?

Is he kidding with this hyperbole?

Pat Buchanan and all of the Republicans who fanned out across the media today to spin the Libby convictions as "no big deal," and deserving of a pardon, need to be reminded that the only reason that Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, Ari Fleischer, Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, Bob Novak, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush aren't facing criminal charges of treason and conspiracy to commit treason is because Scooter Libby obstructed Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. THAT'S why Libby was prosecuted, and a jury determined that Libby was guilty of both the perjury and the obstruction of justice.

If Libby is pardoned, if he doesn't get some serious prison time, we'll need to stop pretending that the U.S. is a nation of laws, or that we even bother to attempt equal justice under the law. We have it completely backwards in this country - if anybody shouldn't be eligible for a presidential pardon, it should be those at the highest echelons of government. They're the role models.

If Libby is pardoned, we might as well hang the democracy up and anoint Bush-Cheney, Royal for life, because if there aren't serious penalties leveled against Libby, there will be nothing preventing a President from breaking the law and subverting the Constitution.

Speaking of the Constitution, I'm not a great proponent of amending it, but I could get behind an amendment that would prohibit a President from pardoning anyone in his or her administration for actions performed in the service of the President. Or anyone outside of the administration who committed a crime that benefitted the President or his/her political party.