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February 12, 2007
Prison Rape
I've written about this before. Here's a first-person account:
When I first came to prison, I had no idea what to expect. Certainly none of this. I'm a tall white male, who unfortunately has a small amount of feminine characteristics. And very shy. These characteristics have got me raped so many times I have no more feelings physically. I have been raped by up to 5 black men and two white men at a time. I've had knifes at my head and throat. I had fought and been beat so hard that I didn't ever think I'd see straight again. One time when I refused to enter a cell, I was brutally attacked by staff and taken to segragation though I had only wanted to prevent the same and worse by not locking up with my cell mate. There is no supervision after lockdown. I was given a conduct report. I explained to the hearing officer what the issue was. He told me that off the record, He suggests I find a man I would/could willingly have sex with to prevent these things from happening. I've requested protective custody only to be denied. It is not available here. He also said there was no where to run to, and it would be best for me to accept things . . . . I probably have AIDS now. I have great difficulty raising food to my mouth from shaking after nightmares or thinking to hard on all this . . . . I've laid down without physical fight to be sodomized. To prevent so much damage in struggles, ripping and tearing. Though in not fighting, it caused my heart and spirit to be raped as well. Something I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself for.
The crime this man committed for us to throw him into a jail where we know he'll be brutally assaulted, raped, and possibly contract a terminal immune system disease? Drinking and driving.
We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.
February 12, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Just awful.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Feb 12, 2007 10:58:38 AM
I understand your point of pointing out the man's offense at the very end, and it is quite effective. However, I also think that through reading that very moving passage, it shouldn't matter what specific crime was committed.
I guess lately I have read things that suggest that the worse the crime, the more a prisoner *deserves* this type of treatment. No one deserves this treatment. Period.
Thanks for such an evocative post.
Posted by: jrav | Feb 12, 2007 11:01:32 AM
Ideally, we would collect evidence, prove that there is no reasonable claim of ignorance of these conditions, use the cruel & unusual punishment clause to make cases of conspiracy to violate civil rights, and send prosecutors, judges, legislators, and governors off for years to the conditions they have so long tolerated.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Feb 12, 2007 11:07:37 AM
These accounts of prison rape are some of the most awful things I've ever read.
Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf | Feb 12, 2007 11:07:47 AM
Does anyone know what organization I could support that's dealing with the issue of prison rape?
Posted by: Ted | Feb 12, 2007 11:18:42 AM
I have been watching the Federal Courts vs the Texas Prison System my entire life.
The Glass House...TV movie, so not as graphic as HBO, but script by Truman Capote, starring Alan Alda before Mash, Vic Morrow as rapist/thug, etc. Alda plays college professor, vehilcular manslaughter under the influence. Good movie.
1972. I watched it when it ran. I don't know what to do with forty years of frustration and outrage.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Feb 12, 2007 11:21:07 AM
I know a guy who, as a young man, was convicted in South Korea of participating in a car theft ring. What got them caught was an unplanned kidnapping in the course of stealing a car. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison. He's ethnically Korean but an American citizen, which can make things difficult outside prison, let alone in it.
His parents, while devastated, took comfort from the fact that rape and other forms of violence don't happen in Korean prisons the way they do in America. Guards are expected to maintain order over there.
Once again we see how the United States is straying from the idea of being a nation governed by laws. What is illegal outside prison is illegal inside prison. It's not about "coddling" prisoners or being soft on crime. It's just about the law being the law - everywhere, all the time.
But we have an entire apparatus - from Bush himself, the the Justice Department coaching government offices how to illegally stonewall Congressional investigations, to Gitmo, Abu Graib and the Eastern European prisons, to the usual right-wing radio/TV suspects - that supports and encourages the idea that while all people are equal under the law, some people are less equal than others.
Posted by: Stephen | Feb 12, 2007 11:33:24 AM
The crime this man committed for us to throw him into a jail where we know he'll be brutally assaulted, raped, and possibly contract a terminal immune system disease?
He was in a prison, not a jail. I mention this only because the introduction at the link specifically notes that it's looking at prisons rather than jails.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Feb 12, 2007 11:38:00 AM
This really is an issue worth focusing on, obviously because of its intrinsic horror, but also because of the growing prison population and the fact that incarceration is a well-established and expanding American subculture. The use of judicial rape--because that's really what this is, rape as judicially-determined punishment--is of a piece with the growing geographical and ideological realm where American values and laws simply do not apply. The movement to take back this country from powerful enemies who openly oppose its most treasured values must include prisons because they are one of the places where brutal men with the instincts that civilization is meant to mitigate hold sway.
Posted by: Marshall | Feb 12, 2007 11:56:52 AM
one of the most pernicious aspects of this phenomenon is how much the idea that this is somehow justified permeates our culture. it is frequently used as a comedic device in movies and tv.
Ted: the only organization i know of that is set up to deal with this issue specifically is Stop Prisoner Rape, Http://www.spr.org
Posted by: rigel | Feb 12, 2007 11:58:15 AM
This can't be happening in all these new, clean and well supervised privatized prisons, can it?
Anyway, even if it does, they're all criminals.
Brilliant post on an issue that gets no play, anywhere.
Posted by: ice weasel | Feb 12, 2007 12:06:52 PM
one of the most pernicious aspects of this phenomenon is how much the idea that this is somehow justified permeates our culture. it is frequently used as a comedic device in movies and tv.
Yeah. This is truly one of great moral outrages in American life today, but it's been turned into a joke instead of something for people to fight against. I don't see any politicians talking about it either, not even Obama, who doesn't talk about prison life and the drug trade in his book at all.
Posted by: Korha | Feb 12, 2007 12:26:06 PM
Prison rape, as Dave Justus pointed out in the thread from last year, isn't a partisan issue. It has thrived under all administrations at all levels of government. Prison brutality in general suffers from not being high enough on the list of priorities to allow such a difficult problem to be effectively dealt with. We can see that here. There have been two threads on this in six months, and in neither was there anything more than venting. What more could there be? There's so little mainstream effort to address this that we barely even have realistic ideas about what to do. This sounds like criticism, but it's just an observation of the problem. When prison brutality is a problem that rates holding candidates' feet to the fire the way health care or war in Iran or abortion rights or whatever we usually talk about does, then we'll see the wheels start to turn in a serious way. It's just too big a problem to be dealt with effectively with such a low level of concern.
Which begs the question, what priority should it have? Is it more or less important than the issues we do pressure politicians on? If we feel it's less important, then I think we have the answer to why things are the way they are.
Posted by: Sanpete | Feb 12, 2007 12:45:01 PM
I think is is one issue all can agree upon. None of them were sentenced to this.
I don't see any politicians talking about it either...
That's the problem. Look, this is really a no-brainer. Anyone who is confronted with the facts will agree that we can't tolerate felonious sexual assault on the inside where we are all up in arms about it when the same thing happens on the outside.
The question is how to stop it. We may need more prisons, but simply throwing money at the problem without some fundamental change in how we handle bad actors is useless.
Some prisoners are just there for a short time and others are there for life and it's difficult to find real punishment for them.
Posted by: Fred Jones | Feb 12, 2007 12:50:29 PM
Oh my, but this--the dark side of our corrections facilities--is a dreadful, horrific subject from every angle. In the past couple of weeks, I've written about a Tampa rape-victim who was arrested while being treated, then denied emergency birth control at the privatized jail because of the prison worker's personal religious beliefs. I also wrote about an immigrant pregnant mother in Kansas who was driving herself to the hospital because she was beginning to hemorrhage; she was pulled over for a falsified/outdated tag and arrested, and the cops refused to take her to the hospital. She bled out in jail all night and lost the baby in the morning.
Now there is this, which is not the first such account of rape I've read.
Ideally, we would collect evidence, prove that there is no reasonable claim of ignorance of these conditions, use the cruel & unusual punishment clause to make cases of conspiracy to violate civil rights, and send prosecutors, judges, legislators, and governors off for years to the conditions they have so long tolerated.
Bob--yes.
As to whom can we prompt to help, I was wondering if Amnesty International is just for political prisoners being abused, or prisoners in general being abused. There might be a branch of the ACLU dedicated to such matters, too. I don't know this; I'm wondering, that's all.
Excellent, thought-provoking post.
Posted by: litbrit | Feb 12, 2007 12:53:56 PM
"Which begs the question, what priority should it have? Is it more or less important than the issues we do pressure politicians on? If we feel it's less important, then I think we have the answer to why things are the way they are."
i would like to remind everyone that the abu ghraib torturers, lynndie england, et al, were prison guards in civilian life. we are now exporting our brutal prison culture, which rests fundamentally on dehumanizing those who fore whatever reason find themselves incarcerated.
Posted by: rigel | Feb 12, 2007 1:04:36 PM
I think part of the problem is that people equate rape with sex simply because genitalia is involved. As soon as people separate those two things once and for all, we MAY see some action on resolving the issues of rape.
Posted by: Hawise | Feb 12, 2007 1:08:53 PM
Funding, funding, funding.
The Cook County Board is actually CUTTING funding to the Sheriff's office, which would lower the number of deputies looking over the county jails (I assume that on DUI this guy was in county).
Why is this not being fixed? Because the public simply does not care. Who is going to run for office on the platform that they should spend more taxpayers' money to tighten jail security to ensure more fair treatment of prisoners- the majority of people believe prisoners are already getting a better deal than they deserve.
The only other real option to to start putting people in protective custody or solitary. There is not enough money for the former and the latter has serious psychological consequences for the majority of inmates.
Posted by: Fnor | Feb 12, 2007 1:11:38 PM
The question is how we expect politicians do act in terms of setting policies for agencies that do not have a voting constituency? Dealing with the agency formerly known as the INS was a nightmare of inefficiency. Why should politicians bother to change it? After all, the people who dealt with the INS didn't vote.
Who's going to incentivize politicians to address the concerns of prisoners when it comes to abuse and rape? The prison guard union can come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations. Prisoners can't.
The issue is partisan in the sense that proper operation of prisons and other agencies is an issue of "good government." Not an issue of whether the government "serves to voters," but simply government that works well for the sake of it. Is there going to be a politician that sticks his neck out and says, "I'm going to make sure this government agency works well, not because it helps Americans or helps a voting constituency, but because it's the right thing to do." ? For those that constantly tell us that "government doesn't work," why should we expect them to get our prisons working correctly?
Posted by: Tyro | Feb 12, 2007 1:38:37 PM
It seems to me that the message being sent here is: rape is only an outrage when it happens to a man.
Posted by: angry chick | Feb 12, 2007 1:39:34 PM
Although many or most people haven't been exposed to the mind-wrenching details of prison rape, I'd guess that vast majority of people do know that prison rape is a daily occurance in prisons and jails in nearly every jurisdiction. So we know it happens, and to the extent we know it, we are collectively responsible. Yet there is no plan to change things, or even more than a smidgen of public discussion of it - and much of that is elbow-nudges and smiles that indicate acceptance and even support for prison rape.
I'm sure a substantial list of actions could be assembled on how to bring this crime within the criminal justice system to an end.
My personal list of things to consider is:
- to require under federal law that each prison/jail warden maintain a record of rapes reported, and actions taken, subject to review of the federal courts and prosecutors.
- each federal circuit court of appeals appoint a team of prosecutors to investigate and bring charges against inmates and prison staff suspecged of committing prison rape or allowing it to continue through action/inaction
- prison guards suspected of involvement in this 'culture' should be immediately suspended, investigated and charged with conspiracy to commit rape or rape itself.
- inmates who commit prison rapes should have their sentences substantially increased, and segregated from the general prison population.
- repeat offenders of prison rape should be chemically sterilized with drugs for the duration of their sentences (as is done with some child sexual predetors).
- Those convicted of non-violent crimes should not be encarcerated with violent offenders. Those convicted of prison rape should not be mixed with the general prison population regardless of their initial crime.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Feb 12, 2007 1:39:42 PM
It seems to me that the message being sent here is: rape is only an outrage when it happens to a man.
I think the dynamic is more complex than that. After all, for a substantial number of people (including, apparently, a substantial number of people responsible for operating our prisons) male on male rape is not so outrageous. Instead, it's assumed that it will be a part of the prison experience.
Posted by: nolo | Feb 12, 2007 1:47:36 PM
It seems to me that the message being sent here is: rape is only an outrage when it happens to a man.
Grow up.
- repeat offenders of prison rape should be chemically sterilized with drugs for the duration of their sentences (as is done with some child sexual predetors).
You have good ideas, as usual, Jim. I've wondered about this before, though: does chemical sterilization mean impotency or just blocking sperm?
Posted by: Stephen | Feb 12, 2007 1:57:12 PM
The original report from which this account stems includes a list of recommendations here. I'm not sure why people assume that prison guard unions would be against this, since many of the recommendations are simply for better guidelines, more training, and more staff, all of which means more money to union members.
Posted by: Antid Oto | Feb 12, 2007 2:05:54 PM
Grow up.
Here, here. I was waiting for some feminist to make this stupid, stupid remark. People care plenty when it's on the outside. Feminists are so wanting someone to listen to their dribble that they must manufacture an issus, as she did there.
Posted by: Fred Jones | Feb 12, 2007 2:08:34 PM
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