It shouldn’t need to be said in 2012 but god damn does it ever: it is not okay to laugh about prison inmates being raped.

“Dropping the soap” is something we’ve all heard so often I doubt most people even consider what it means. It’s a go-to when discussing the conviction of someone you think deserves to be in jail, and hard-boiled television cops love to throw out hints about it while questioning perps. Male-on-male prisoner rape is ongoing fodder for TV shows, especially ones that like to push boundaries (I’m looking at you, Oz). It also comes up in the comments section of any news piece discussing a violent crime, with people gleefully predicting a lifetime of assault for the suspect.

These jokes obscure the reality, which is that prison inmates face incredibly high chances of being raped (and that rape is entirely a terrible thing, no matter who you are). Just Detention International found in a 2011 report that as many as 20 per cent of male American inmates have been raped, though numbers are difficult to pin down because so few rapes are reported. It’s likely that Canadian numbers are similar, and for gay and transgender inmates everywhere the rates increase threefold and more.

Many people claim that rape is an acceptable consequence for committing a crime. One commenter online had this to say:

No they should make those people get raped and how are they going to stop it? Really what are they going to do when they see someone raping someone else, its like when someone tells you your going to jail, the first thing you get in your mind is that your going to get raped. Its like a threat for people to not go to jail.

If this is the prevailing attitude, perhaps we should add rape to prison sentences. It would certainly make more sense to spell it out if we expect it to act as a deterrent for those thinking of committing crimes.

“No less than two years and no more than five, and no less than 30 rapes, five to seven of which must be performed by a group of no less than four people.”

That has a nice ring to it, right? It doesn’t sound perverse or backwards at all! It sounds exactly like something a modern, enlightened nation would do. I’m glad we’re all at peace with this new development.

But if this doesn’t sound quite right to us as a society, if systematic, state-sanctioned rape is perhaps not what we want our country to stand for, maybe all of the assholes out there who currently find it funny to laugh about endless violent rape should think about what they’re saying before making their — almost always incredibly shitty — jokes.