THERE HAVE been many important comments added today, including Alan Roebuck’s response to the argument that the culture war has been lost and ongoing additions to the debate about the men’s rights movement. I recommend all of the discussions posted since yesterday. The continuing discussion of false rape allegations and jury nullification is important. In that entry, Jesse Powell writes:

By no means is the time for debate over, it has only just begun! I see my giving actual statistics on how many women are raped per year and how many men are in prison for rape has gotten under MRA skins. The reason why I brought up those facts is because it seemed to me there was a lot of hyperbole being thrown around about the system viciously going after large numbers of men indiscriminately and I wanted to bring the conversation back into some kind of reality by showing that the number of men in prison compared to the number of rapes that occur is not so large and may even be smaller than it should be. Basically, what 200,000 women being raped a year and 170,000 men in prison for rape means is that the average punishment inflicted upon a man for raping a woman is about 10 months in jail. Is this too high? My inclination is to say it is too low. There may not be any way to improve this potential injustice against women but it does illustrate the point that the hyperbole being thrown around about unjust and extreme victimization of men for no good reason is not supported by the facts.

Sure, you can say the women lie to the surveyors and say they were raped when they weren’t. Also, a fact MRAs conveniently ignore, is that it is just as possible that women fail to report rapes to the surveyors that did occur. The good thing about using the National Crime Victimization Survey as a source is that the women have no incentive to lie to the surveyor one way or another. In the study I cited by Kanin the women who lied about rape always had one motivation or another to do so. The woman gains no benefit by lying to the surveyor and so surveys should be one of the most reliable ways to gain accurate information.

                          — Comments —

Dan writes:

Jesse says:

“Basically, what 200,000 women being raped a year and 170,000 men in prison for rape means is that the average punishment inflicted upon a man for raping a woman is about 10 months in jail. Is this too high”

Unless these numbers wildly fluctuate each and every year, than it’s plausible to assume that of the 200,000 accusations made each year, 85% result in conviction. Unless, of course, it’s the same guys committing the rape, over and over again. You can’t assume one set of data is cyclical, and the other not.

Also, your contention that this ‘proves’ the average length of incarceration is ten months is silly. What if the average length is ten years, would that change the ratio?

Not at all. Unless the idea of one guy getting out after 10 years being replaced by a new guy this year is beyond comprehension.

This, of course, makes the ASSUMPTION that the rate of false accusation is zero. Which we all know, is FAR from the truth.

While we’re at it, let’s point out the tendency of government agencies of all kinds to conflate Sexual Assault (pinching an ass), sexual harassment, date rape, and violent forcible rape, all in the same ‘category’. This is done SOLELY for the purpose of inflating the numbers.

By the way, the numbers? In 1950, the U.S. had a total prison population just below 500,000, a number roughly stable since about 1920. In 1970, the incarceration rate increased dramatically. Now, 60 years later, the U.S. prison pop is close to 3 million. That’s a 600% increase in 40 years. Yup, that ‘tough on crime’ stuff sure isn’t Eugenics dressed up as crime fightin’. No sir, not at all. Not an attempt to create an illicit ‘slave class’ either. That cheap Prison labor is only there to ‘defray costs’. (psst. I got a bridge worth of scrap iron to sell…interested?)

And this, which Jesse wrote in the previous entry:

“Because life is not perfect and the knowledge we possess in incomplete punishing men who rape necessarily entails punishing men who have not raped but are believed to have raped. That is simply the price that must be paid for the social good of protecting women from rape to the best extent that we as men are capable of.

Personally, I have serious problems with sacrificing men on the altar of political correctness.

By the way, isn’t there supposed to be a difference between what you guys say about men, and what Feminists do? So far I haven’t seen much evidence, so I thought I’d ask…

Jesse writes:

I will address the math problem posed. What the ten months figure refers to is this: 200,000 women are raped a year and 170,000 men are in prison for rape at any given time, that is what the original statistics tell us. We then do this: 170/200 = 0.85. That means if each man who committed rape got a prison sentence of 0.85 years then 170,000 men would be in prison at any given time, matching the original numbers; 0.85 years is about the same as 10 months. This doesn’t mean the average sentence is 10 months long. If only 1 in 4 men who committed rape were prosecuted and put in jail and their average sentence was 40 months that would lead to the same result. In that case 3/4ths of men would receive a 0 month sentence and 1/4th of men would receive a 40 month sentence. The mathematical average of all such sentences would still be 10 months in that case. This is all pretty obvious I imagine, but that is what is meant when saying the average punishment the rapist receives for each rape is 10 months. 

Lastly, on the issue of the number of people in prison, the Wikipedia entry titled “Incarceration in the United States” has a lot of good graphs showing total number of prisoners and the imprisonment rate per 100,000 population. If you want real information on the subject that is the place to go.

Jesse continues:

By the way, the two sources are the National Crime Victimization Survey and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The great majority of men in jail for sex crimes are in State Prisons, only a few are in Federal Prisons. It is probably a jurisdiction issue, sex crimes considered to be a state matter. To be technical there may be some men held in custody in jails for sex offenses which are not counted in the statistics I use. I’m thinking not many, certainly not many with serious sentences, I think all inmates sentenced to a year or more are held in the State or Federal prison system.

The 200,000 figure for number of rape victims does fluctuate significantly; 200,000 was the number for 2008, the most recent year available. In 2007 the number was about 240,000, implying a lot of variation year to year. The 200,000 rape victims is an estimate based on a large sample size, at least 49,000 but I believe in reality 98,000, I think they do the survey two times a year. The number includes all rape victims, or more precisely rape and sexual assault victims. I don’t know quite how rape and sexual assault are defined but I assume the two categories are similar to each other in terms of the seriousness of the offense. The men held in prison also fall under the categories of rape and sexual assault as two separate categories. Again, I don’t know the details of how those categories are defined but assume they are similar in level of seriousness of offense. The numbers I give, 200,000 and 170,000, are for both rape and sexual assault categories combined. 

The 200,000 rape victims counts all rape victims, based on the women surveyed saying yes, I was raped in the past year. It is based simply on the woman’s report. It includes all women saying they were raped; it doesn’t matter whether she pressed charges or not, whether the man was convicted, it is simply an estimate of number of women raped according to self-report. 

The 170,000 men in prison for rape is a more definite statistic since everyone in jail has some offense on their record that they were sentenced under. The category of an inmate is based on the most serious offense they are being held under. 170,000 men are serving sentences for an offense in the rape or sexual assault category. 

This business about estimating conviction rate based on the two numbers doesn’t apply at all to the numbers I cited. The only measure that can be calculated is amount of time an average a man is sentenced to per rape that is committed. That measure is 10 months. 

Also to characterize the 200,000 number as being “accusations” of rape per year isn’t very accurate. If the woman was raped and didn’t tell anyone about it, and then when questioned by the surveyor said that yes she was raped, no accusation affecting anyone was made, only the surveyor knows and knows only for the purpose of compiling crime statistics that will be published in the report on the survey. The surveyor has nothing to do with any legal action that might be taken against a man accused of rape. 

On the issue of one man committing many rapes versus one man committing one rape, that doesn’t affect the question of amount of punishment inflicted per rape committed. That remains the same. 

One issue that might complicate things, though probably not signficantly, is if a woman was raped twice in the same year. Those two rapes are probably counted only once, as one woman who was raped during the past year. The statistic is “number of women raped during the past year”, not “number of rapes committed during the past year”. I am simply assuming that each woman who was raped was raped only once. 

As to whether or not the data is “cyclical”, I think Dan means variable, the number of men in prison for rape is more accurate and definite while the number of women raped is variable due to chance and is biased according to how much women over or under report rape to the surveyor. 

The calculation that the average punishment for rape is 10 months is absolutely solid, assuming the 200,000 number is accepted as legitimate. The average punishment being 10 months does not mean the average sentence for rape given a conviction for rape is 10 months; it means the average amount of time spent in jail for a rape committed is 10 months. The difference is only a portion of rapes committed lead to a jail sentence. All men who rape but are not punished for the crime are counted as having a jail sentence of 0, and that is averaged into whatever the sentences are for those who were punished for the crime of rape. If 1/4th of rapes leads to a prison term that means the average sentence imposed is 40 months. 

One thing that might be worth pointing out, if a man is in jail for rape due to false accusation or misidentification the sentence he serves is still counted as a punishment imposed upon a man for rape. No guarantees are given that the man being punished is the right man.

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