But just because this has a headline and a lede, don’t confuse it with actual news. The article isn’t based on any investigative journalism, just the word of one corrections-officer-turned-novelist looking to gin up some publicity. But the article’s framed in the most salacious way possible:

The female guards working at Rikers Island are sex-starved and promiscuous with the prisoners they are there to keep in line, says a former guard.

“They would do it on the midnight shift when there were not many people around,” according to Yolanda Dickinson, who worked at Rikers from 1997 to 2004 and recently penned a novel called “Taboo,” based on the jail’s out-of-control sex scene.

…With 3,890 female officers guarding some 12,000 men, outlaw love blossoms. “It’s a soap opera,” Dickinson says.

You can always rely on the New York Post to squeeze some panty-sniffing and slut-shaming out of a story about women and sex, even if that story involves not so much sex as sex crimes—this is, after all, the paper whose initial coverage of Lara Logan’s sexual assault gratuitously mentioned her sexiness and repeated gossip about an affair she had with her now-husband when he was still married. Still, this article manages to slut-shame women for committing sex crimes against men, even as it glorifies those sex crimes as “romance”. That’s really a rare achievement in ass-backwardness, even for the Post.

And let’s be clear—what’s described in this article are sex crimes. Oh, sure, they’re not likely to be reported as such, either in this paper or by law enforcement. After all, we live in a society where men’s reputations rest on their virile sex drives—and there are few places more hyper-masculine than a prison. The thinking goes that men would never object to sex because all men want to fuck everyone all the time, so if those guards want to fuck them, hey, everyone’s happy! The Post plays right into all those chauvinist stereotypes by framing female corrections officers as desperate sluts looking for hot, hot action with male inmates who welcome the attention. What’s more, this report is based on one person’s extremely biased viewpoint, which the Post reporting as news.

The article glides right past the fact that the sex with inmates that Dickinson is describing is illegal. Because that would get in the way of the steamy tales of sexxxy jailhouse romance! Oh, they do say casually in the article that “undue familiarity” is illegal. But the law does not view sex between guards and inmates as mere “undue familiarity”—it views it as criminal. I confirmed this with friend of Harpyness, Anonymous Prosecutor, who for years prosecuted sex crimes in New York, including several involving male corrections officers and female inmates.

What she’s describing is rape, right? I mean, any sexual relationship between a guard and an inmate is by definition non-consensual.

That’s right. New York law prohibits any sexual activity between a corrections officer and an inmate, regardless of gender. A sex crime occurs when the sexual act takes place without one person’s consent. Lack of consent can be because force was used, because the person is too young to consent, because the person is too intoxicated to consent, or because the person is an inmate and thus legally incapable of consent.

If one of these men were to object to being forced or even just pressured into sex with a female guard, how would his story be received? Would it be prosecuted?

Sex with a corrections officer is illegal whether or not there was “force”. A good prosecutor’s office would prosecute the case if it was proveable in court, but these cases are very difficult.

Why is that?

Primarily because the victim is an inmate and therefore always an accused or, in many cases, convicted criminal. Without DNA evidence, accusations of sexual assault end up primarily or solely relying on the word of someone with a very tarnished background. Juries are very reluctant to convict a corrections officer based on the word of a convict.

Why are women guarding men at Rikers anyway? I don’t know if it would eliminate sexual assault entirely to have the inmates and guards be the same gender, but it seems like it would reduce it.

There has been a movement to make corrections officers the same gender as inmates, primarily to prevent males correction officers from overseeing female inmates. This is the subject of much debate and litigation in New York and elsewhere. By the way, corrections officers hate being called guards.

It’s spectacularly irresponsible for the New York Post to get its jollies describing sex between inmates and guards corrections officers as “passion” and “romance” and “one way to meet men.” But I realize the Post has never given a rat’s ass about the quality or tone of their coverage—in that sense, they’re in lockstep with their NewsCorp sibling, Fox News.