Why do we lock up so many people? Ctd

J. Bryan Lowder praises Gopnik's essay on the American prison system, but adds that the article failed to represent Lockuptown's female residents. Lowder raises questions about whether or not it's worse to be a female inmate:

While their overall rosters are smaller than those of their male counterparts, jailed women are clearly caught up in same kind of unjust system that Gopnik describes. But the female prison population also has problems of its own. Kurt Erickson of the Illinois-based newspaper the Herald-Review reported over the weekend that his state’s female-only institutions are anxiously looking to recruit more female guards due to complaints from inmates of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior at the hands of male supervisors. Erikson cites a report by a prison watchdog group that notes that “a great number of inmates expressed distress over lack of privacy and the feeling that their bodies were thoroughly exposed and on display to observation and surveillance by male officers in the housing units.”

(Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images, via Slate)