The Independent on prison rape (and, later in the article, consensual sex) in the US.
The crook of another man’s elbow is on my Adam’s apple, pressing down, choking me. After just a couple of seconds, I panic and gasp.
Shaun Attwood, who spent more than five years in some of America’s toughest prisons, including Arizona’s infamous Maricopa Jail, is showing me how men in prison are raped.
“Generally they put the victim to sleep with a choke hold – locking the windpipe like this,” he says, rendering me unable to reply. “Within about 10 seconds you’re unconscious.”
Attacks don’t always begin like this. Sometimes, “they’ll lure them with drugs and get them really high – 90 per cent of prisoners shoot-up drugs”. Sometimes they’ll trick the victim into a debt and then make them repay it with sex. Other times it can start with a beating or stabbing.
Human Rights Watch estimated in 2010 – three years after Attwood left jail – that 140,000 US inmates have been raped. Other studies have helped fill in the quantitative picture: 21 per cent of prisoners in the Midwest reported being forced into some form of sexual activity, according to Prison Journal. Young inmates are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, says Just Detention International, an organisation devoted to ending prison rape.
The US has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. That’s a scaldingly shameful fact about the country I was born in and live in. We have no excuse of a recent colonial past, or dire poverty, or a dire lack of public education; we have no excuse of any kind.
Wikipedia image
Given the shameful rate of incarceration, we subject a shameful percentage of our population to prison rape.
It’s not only young men who are more likely to be raped, but obviously gay ones, too. What are the chances, then, that a young-ish gay man such as myself would be raped? Attwood looks down.
“It is inevitable,” he says quietly. “And no one on the outside is interested. Until someone’s son is calling them from prison saying, ‘I’ve got a cellmate with a padlock in a sock who is threatening to rape me,’ they couldn’t care less.”
That line of Lear’s comes to mind (as it often does) – “I have ta’en too little care of this.” We all have.
Factor in this bit from Pro Publica:
http://www.propublica.org/article/guards-may-be-responsible-for-half-of-prison-sexual-assaults?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1390514687
A new Justice Department study shows that allegations of sex abuse in the nation’s prisons and jails are increasing — with correctional officers responsible for half of it — but prosecution is still extremely rare.
The report, released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, takes data collected by correctional administrators representing all of the nation’s federal and state prisons as well as many county jails. It shows that administrators logged more than 8,000 reports of abuse to their overseers each year between 2009 and 2011, up 11 percent from the department’s previous report, which covered 2007 and 2008.
A long time ago (late 1980s?) I read a thoughtful article by a long-term prisoner in Angola, Louisiana’s big bad prison, about the destruction of people by prison rape. I thought it was about people. Near the end of the article somebody asked him about non-prison rape, the kind that happens almost exclusively to women.
Oh, that was completely different. That was natural, normal, something. Not totally horrible like the rape of men.
Shades of your earlier post about the Yemeni (Saudi?) imam saying the rape of girls was A-OK.
I wonder if, these days, the male prisoners have advanced a bit, further than the imams at least?
Who guards the guards?
What’s the explanation for America’s remarkably high incarceration rate?
Higher crime rates or a more punitive legal system (which uses capital punishment) or a higher degree of social inequality than most other OECD countries, perhaps.
Excuse me, but I don’t understand: these men are in prison, locked away, kept apart, guarded day and night by caring-if-tough honest and decent citizens. How do they get the drugs? How do they get the knives (or whatever they stab each other with)? Just asking. Surely a little more effort is required than that needed to rub away the unhappy bit of grit in the eye.
Gordon:
The entire prison industry is a sham. If drugs, assault, rape, murder are daily occurrences INSIDE the prison system, if nation-wide criminal organization are directed from INSIDE the prison system, then incarceration is completely irrelevant to reducing or punishing crime.
The obvious corruption of the legal authorities that permits these offences may be enough to compromise the safety of the whole nation. What happens when Al Qaeda decides to start buying guards?
Gordon:
The entire prison industry is a sham. If drugs, assault, rape, murder are daily occurrences INSIDE the prison system, if nation-wide criminal organization are directed from INSIDE the prison system, then incarceration is completely irrelevant to reducing or punishing crime.
The obvious corruption of the legal authorities that permits these offences may be enough to compromise the safety of the whole nation. What happens when Al Qaeda decides to start buying guards?
Now now we can’t credit these accounts of prison rape until proven, because false accusations. Presumption of innocence so shut up.
/sarcasm