Letters to the Editor
-
The Self-Regard Provokes a Lack of Sympathy
I understand Peter Kurth suffered unfairly dangerous treatment for a minor infraction - nothing can justify rape. I also get what's behind the negative reactions, even if those writing harsh responses couldn't explain it themselves.
Prison is a topic in which individual observations are read in a larger context. Kurth seems to ignore the bigger picture - not his intent, but it comes off as unaware, privileged maybe arrogant.
Not to dismiss his suffering, but the lack emphasizes how this is a middle class white guy experiencing a fraction of the horrors faced by those who outside Salon's demographic. I immediately thought of prisoners who don't get adequate HIV medicine, prison teaching jobs, embassy representatives, personal diaries, etc.
The poor and minority prisoners at much greater risk of harsher imprisonment without trial with less guilt. In Louisiana after Katrina, arrests on minor offenses could result in more jail time without trial than a conviction.
Kurth was wise not to compare himself to the less fortunate, but wrong to not mention them at all. He doesn't touch on how there are others in Wormwood Scrubs are like him, giving the impression he thinks he's the only one "imprisoned unjustly or necessarily".
Then there's Kurth's introduction, in which he admits his mess was largely self created, but keeps implying others were to blame in petty ways.
He admits being "a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant" implying she's to blame for objecting to being called a cunt.
He says "I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do." as if the airline is to blame for diminishing tolerance of enraged passengers. He admits to refusing to leave a restricted area, because he used to see people there "without anyone making a fuss about it."
He says he was provoked when "I'd been given a seat that wasn't tailor-made to form blood clots in my legs." Implying it was the airline's fault, but the next paragraph admits he didn't tell them about his condition.
Kurth would be far more persuasive if he'd admitted his fault without caveats, and then argued it didn't justify prison rape. Instead, his tone of self-regard (intentional or not) make it seem like he learned nothing at all.