Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Hunter Moore, the so-called “King of Revenge Porn,” is an utter piece of shit.
What he did to the people whose images wound up on his site and his conduct throughout his brief run of infamy was perfectly reprehensible. In every way, he’s well-deserving of every ounce of consternation and vitriol which has been expressed in his direction.
Having said this, I also think people who are greatly upset Moore will spend “only” two and half years in federal prison might not fully appreciate what life is like inside a federal prison.
This Just In: Being In Prison Actually Sucks Pretty Hard
I think a lot of people hear the term “federal prison” and immediately jump to all those stories they’ve read about white collar criminals serving time in what sound like vacation resorts with bars on the windows – but that’s not the sort of experience to which Hunter Moore can now look forward.
First off, the sort of white collar criminals who get what seems like highly preferential treatment from the court tend to go into their trials as very influential people with friends in high places. Alternatively, they might be powerful organized crime figures, people who already effectively run the prisons in which they serve subsequently their time, courtesy of their organizational authority over quite a number of the facility’s existing residents.
Moore, on the other hand, is a self-important dipshit, a wannabee internet tough guy with no meaningful influence whatsoever and no friends anywhere – except maybe those who hang out in the wrong kind of “high places.”
For the vast, vast majority of those incarcerated, federal prison may not be the violent, homosexual-rape-filled hell depicted on Oz, but it ain’t exactly Goodfellas, either. Believe me, Moore won’t be eating four course meals prepared by his beloved goombahs in Big Paulie fashion; he’s going to be keeping one eye on his fellow inmates as he eats bland pasta off a plastic plate as quickly as humanly possible.
The bottom line is, life federal prison sucks hard, folks – and if you think 30 months isn’t very long to spend there, all this proves is you’ve never spent 30 minutes thinking about it.
Comparing Apples and Orange Jump-Suits
One of the big complaints I hear every time a prison sentence imposed by a judge is thought to be insufficiently harsh by the public is some version of “That’s ridiculous; people get more time for possession of pot!”
While often true, in context this sort of complaint seems to imply that if our society punishes too harshly one manner of offense, it somehow follows that ALL our sentencing decisions must be based on the same overblown notion of what comprises proportional punishment.
In other words, while I concur it’s insane to put a pot dealer in prison for longer than a revenge porn kingpin, I’m not sure the answer should be to extend the sentences imposed on the latter, rather than to reduce the sentences doled out to the former.
For one thing, I have yet to see any compelling evidence suggesting that the length of a prison term for any given crime has a positive correlation to prevention of the same crime being committed in the future, or a positive impact on recidivism rates. At a time when it’s actually becoming somewhat mainstream for people to talk about the need for reform of the U.S. criminal justice system, I’m just not inclined to stump for locking up guys like Moore and then literally losing the key.
Plus, while Moore is certainly a cyber-creep and unbelievable shithead, he’s not exactly FBI’s Most Wanted material, and I think there’s a certain danger in treating his crimes as being more serious than they are, because this sort of escalation has a way of bleeding beyond its original intent, such that it impacts future offenders who might not be comparable to sleaze like Moore.
Say, for example, our understandably intense outrage at scumbags like Moore leads legislatures to enact severe penalties for revenge porn offenders of all stripes, can our correctional facilities actually handle the number of offenders they’d have to house?
Maybe other folks have a lot of faith in the ability of our legislators to come up with new laws which can offer a truly useful tool in deterring revenge porn without stomping all over the First Amendment – but I live in Arizona, so it’s a little hard for me to drum up such confidence in elected officials.
Crime and (the Point of) Punishment
If the point of incarceration is strictly punitive, and what we’re seeking is a balance between the nature of the crime and the length and severity of the jail term, it’s a very different conversation than if part of what we’re trying to achieve is rehabilitation of convicts and a positive change in their future behavior.
To be clear, I’m not optimistic about the prospects of an arrogant, heartless prick like Hunter Moore becoming rehabilitated under any circumstances, but to the extent it might be possible to reform him into something remotely resembling a decent human being, I’m just not sure the odds of such improve in direct proportion to the amount of time he spends in prison.
In considering all of this, we also need to remember it’s not simply about Hunter Moore and what the appropriate sentence is for him. He’s neither the first, nor will he be the last, person prosecuted for such offenses, and each case is likely to be a bit different.
If we decide revenge porn offenders should be hit with extremely lengthy sentences, we then need to consider how we’re going to differentiate between people who operate the sites and those who upload content to them – in other words, the difference between Moore and the likes of Paige Mitchell, who recently received a suspended six-week sentence for (briefly) posting explicit images of her girlfriend to Facebook.
If people think Moore deserved more time – let’s say five years for the sake of argument – do they also think Mitchell should get more than the threat of spending six weeks in jail, should she slip up again?
Clearly there’s a difference between the two, and intuitively, it seems like it shouldn’t be hard to come up with an appropriate way to differentiate potential punishments under the law – but, unfortunately, once you get the legislature involved, the operative word there probably becomes “shouldn’t,” because a lot of our legislators and politicians seem more than a bit confused about what the Constitution actually says – and similarly confused about what many of our Founding Fathers did or didn’t say about a great many things.
None of this diminishes in any way my satisfaction at finally seeing Hunter Moore get a richly deserved spanking at the hands of the court. All I’m saying is while 30 months in federal prison might not be the equivalent of being whipped for hours by a cat o’ nine tails, it ain’t exactly 20 lashes with a wet noodle, either.
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
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