Collins and Kristof

In “United We Rant” Ms. Collins says seldom has a presidential address been delivered when so many Americans are so angry for so many different reasons.  In “Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)” Mr. Kristof says a good starting point to rehabilitate young offenders is to stop the criminal abuse many of them endure in correctional facilities.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

My fellow Americans, the state of the union is angry. Also strong. Presidents usually say the state of the union is strong. But this year you would have to go with strongly angry.

In his speech on Wednesday night, President Obama actually dropped that traditional state-of-the-union-is rhetoric completely in honor of the new irascibility. “We all hated the bank bailout,” he said in one of his first big applause lines.

Yes, the one good thing you can say about our highest elected officials is that they are ticked off at so many people that sooner or later they’ve got to climb up on some common ground. The House hates the Senate. The liberal Democrats hate the moderate Democrats. The normal conservative Republicans hate the hyper Tea Party-types. The Tea Party-ists are having so many internal fights that there’s a definite danger of broken crockery.

And, of course, everybody hates the bankers, except the Republicans who sat on their hands when the president called for taxing them.

Obama does not really do angry. Peeved, yes. He looked pretty peeved when he was being interviewed by Diane Sawyer of ABC News the other night. If he can’t manage mellow with Diane Sawyer, what’s he going to do on Friday when he has scheduled a meeting with the House Republicans? Have you ever seen all the House Republicans in one place? It’s like a herd of rabid otters.

Looking out at the motley crew seated before him for the big speech, the president seemed at times to be pretending that he had never seen these people before in his life. “Washington has been telling us to wait for decades,” he complained at one point, as if he was a visitor from the heartland with a petition that he wanted to deliver if only he could get an appointment with someone on the appropriations committee.

Obama Year One began with euphoria. At the start of Year Two, crankiness rules. The House Democrats jumped up in triumph whenever the president dissed the Senate for holding things up. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid — has Harry Reid had a single sunny moment in the last year? — got caught yawning by the cameras. There were occasionally scattered Republican jeers, although it probably counts as an improvement that nobody shouted a full insult at the president this time around. When Justice Samuel Alito took exception to the president’s assault on the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decision, he shook his head and mouthed “not true.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, who hated that decision more than anyone, was absent for the speech. There are rumors that he’s planning to retire. And can you imagine how Congress is going to behave if Obama has to try to name a successor? There isn’t a single jurist in the United States who doesn’t hold some opinion that 41 members of the Senate would find outrageous. Maybe they can locate a nice 50-year-old lawyer who was plunged into a coma on the day he or she passed the bar, and emerged only last week.

On Wednesday, the things that seemed to elicit the most bipartisan reactions were: hope (standing ovation), cutting the capital gains tax for small businesses (ditto) and Obama’s plan for deficit control, which caused a cold breeze to blow from both the Republican and Democratic camps.

Democrats hate the proposed freeze on discretionary spending because they like discretionary spending. Republicans say it’s too little too late, and, besides, it’s their issue. Hands off.

While the reaction certainly suggested this idea is a goner, it’s likely that Obama’s most conservative proposals are still the ones with the best odds of survival. The last few presidents had their best — and often only — luck getting big domestic bills passed when they were the other party’s programs. Bill Clinton got welfare reform. George W. Bush got No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug plan. Both of those were basically Democratic ideas, although Bush added his own personal twist of not paying for them.

But Obama insisted he was going to hang in there and fight the good fight for health care reform and energy and — good for him — getting rid of the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell rule. Plus, he urged Congress to reform itself and regulate lobbyists and campaign donations. (Silence ruled.)

He also threw in a call for earmark reform. Although those porky earmarks are certainly an undesirable thing, ever since John McCain’s presidential campaign I have regarded calls for their reform as a small sign of desperation. On Wednesday, earmark reform got more time than immigration reform.

Obama has been saying that he’d rather be “a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” Being a good one-term president probably sounds great to him right now. Run the Obama Foundation and never have to deal with Joe Lieberman again.

But he’s definitely going for the double. For one thing, there is no such thing as a really good president who walked away after one term. James Polk? Barack Obama did not leave Hawaii to wind up remembered as the James Polk of the 21st century.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

We all have blind spots, and I think one of mine — shared by many other Americans, perhaps including you — has to do with prisons.

Over the years, I’ve written many columns about Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and torture, not to mention the abuses that go on in Chinese and North Korean prisons. But I’ve never written about the horrors that unfold in American prisons — especially juvenile correctional facilities — on a far larger scale than at Guantánamo.

Consider Rodney Hulin Jr., who was a 16-year-old when he was convicted of arson. A first-time offender and a slight figure at 5 feet 2 inches tall and some 125 pounds, he was sent to a men’s prison. There, he was the smallest person around. Within a week, he was raped, according to an account by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. The prison doctor ordered an H.I.V. test, since up to one-third of the inmates were H.I.V.-positive.

Rodney asked to be placed in protective custody, but he was denied. His father, Rodney Hulin Sr., picks up the story: “For the next several months, my son was repeatedly beaten by the older inmates, forced to perform oral sex, robbed, and beaten again. … He could no longer stand to live in continual terror.”

Rodney Jr. hanged himself.

Maybe Rodney would have been safer in a juvenile correctional facility, but then again maybe not. A stunning new Justice Department special report, released just this month, underscores how widespread rape is in youth correctional facilities. It found that almost one youth in eight reported being sexually assaulted while behind bars in the last year.

That means that a child in custody is about twice as likely to be raped as an adult behind bars, based on similar surveys of adult prisoners. As The New York Review of Books wrote on its blog, we face a “crisis of juvenile prison rape.”

The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a blue-ribbon panel that issued its final report last year, described how a 14-year-old boy weighing 98 pounds was assaulted after he was made to share a cell with two older teenagers. Both were 6 feet 2 inches, and one weighed 160 pounds and the other 195 pounds.

Surprisingly, the new survey suggests that the biggest predators are not other inmates but prison staff — and female staff members offend as much as the males do. More than 10 percent of boys in juvenile correctional facilities said that they had had sex with staff, most of whom were women.

Among girls, almost 5 percent said that they had engaged in sexual activity with staff, most of whom were men.

Reggie Walton, a federal judge in the District of Columbia who led the prison rape commission, said that the figures may even be an undercount because of the stigma of rape. “I was shocked at the level of abuse,” he said.

One lesson from the surveys is that we should rethink the way male guards are sometimes assigned to female inmates, and female guards to male inmates, without sufficient respect for inmates’ privacy or dignity. That won’t stop same-sex violence or inmate-on-inmate abuses, but it would address one important component of the abuse problem.

By some accounts, the majority of guards at women’s prisons are now men. Investigators at one juvenile correctional facility found that a male guard watched as girls showered, while a woman watched over boys showering.

Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, also a member of the prison rape commission, described a Virginia prison where men were stripped naked and asked to spread their buttocks in front of a female officer. When a male inmate asked to be searched in front of a man instead, Ms. Fellner said he was Tasered.

In the last few years, a growing number of states have limited the ability of guards to strip-search members of the opposite sex or watch them showering. And a landmark law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, created Judge Walton’s commission, which has made excellent recommendations to reduce violence and abuse behind bars. The Obama administration should quickly implement those recommendations.

Surveys have found that well-managed prisons and correctional facilities with strong accountability have almost no rape, by guards or inmates. Others have astonishingly high levels. If we want to rehabilitate young offenders and help them get their lives in order, a starting point is to end the criminal abuse of them.

The legacy of Rodney Hulin Jr. should be a concerted drive to end the way inmates are raped with impunity behind bars. The survey results indicating the ubiquity of sexual assault behind bars, often by guards, should be an awakening — and an end to this blind spot that so many of us have shown. We need to be as alert to human rights abuses in our youth correctional facilities as to those at Guantánamo.