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Sat 16 Oct, 2004 10:04 am
The New York Times printed this article giving a horrific insight into prison life for the vulnerable.
(Full story here
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/16/national/16rape.html?ex=1255665600&en=d12674f2ec2e8415&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt )
One of the more disturbing aspects is the allegation that Mr Johnson, as a BLACK gay man, was unable to secure any protection....at least in Texas.
"Ex-Inmate's Suit Offers View Into Sexual Slavery in Prisons
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 16, 2004
AUSTIN, Tex., Oct. 12 - The inmates at the Allred Unit, a tough Texas prison, mostly go by names like Monster, Diablo and Animal. They gave Roderick Johnson, a black gay man with a gentle manner, a different sort of name when he arrived there in September 2000. They called him Coco.
Under the protocols of the prison gangs at Allred, gay prisoners must take women's names. Then they are assigned to one of the gangs.
"The Crips already had a homosexual that was with them," Mr. Johnson explained. "The Gangster Disciples, from what I understand, hadn't had a homosexual under them in a while. So that's why I was automatically, like, given to them."
According to court papers and his own detailed account, the Gangster Disciples and then other gangs treated Mr. Johnson as a sex slave. They bought and sold him, and they rented him out. Some sex acts cost $5, others $10.
Last month, a federal appeals court allowed a civil rights lawsuit that Mr. Johnson has filed against prison officials to go to trial. The ruling, the first to acknowledge the equal protection rights of homosexuals abused in prison, said the evidence in the case was "horrific."
"I was forced into oral sex and anal sex on a daily basis," said Mr. Johnson, who has been living in a boarding house here since his release in December. "Not for a month or two. For, like, 18 months."
The phenomenon of sexual slavery in prison has only recently emerged from the shadows. Prison rape, in general, has received sporadic notice over the years and sustained attention more recently, with the passage last year of a federal law that aims to eliminate it. But there has never been a comprehensive study of incarcerated gay men subjected to sexual abuse.
Discussing any form of prison rape is difficult. It makes many people uncomfortable. Some find it amusing.
"It has been the subject of mockery and almost sadistic glee," said Margaret Winter, associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But Roderick is a human being who doesn't deserve this, not in a civilized society."
The civil liberties union represents Mr. Johnson in his lawsuit, which will go to trial next summer.
Sipping a beer in the courtyard of a hotel this week, Mr. Johnson displayed the affable good nature of the restaurant manager and car salesman he used to be. He is a compact, trim man - 5 feet, 9 inches, 170 pounds - who dresses neatly, talks easily and has bright, expressive eyes.
"I'm the first person in my family to get a taste of prison," he said, with more than a little shame. His crimes were relatively minor and all nonviolent - burglary, a bad check, cocaine possession - but they were enough to send him to Allred, a maximum security prison 250 miles north of here, on the Oklahoma border. According to state prison records, Allred ranked second among the more than 70 Texas prisons in the number of sexual assaults in the two years ending in August 2003. It reported 50 out of 635, with the Telford unit in Bowie County first, with 59.
Mr. Johnson's suit says he begged prison officials to move him to a unit called safekeeping, where white and Hispanic homosexuals, former gang members and convicted police officers lived. He asked seven times, in writing.
The officials did nothing, saying Mr. Johnson's claims could not be corroborated. At prison hearings, Mr. Johnson said, officials would take pleasure in his plight. They suggested that he was enjoying the rapes, he said.
Mr. Johnson said they told him he had two choices. One was to fight. The other was to engage in sex. The officials deny they mishandled the complaints and the ugly comments attributed to them.
Carl Reynolds, the general counsel of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the Texas prisons, said Mr. Johnson's complaints were properly handled.
"These allegations were investigated by the internal affairs branch of our agency," he said. "There seems to have been a lot of doubt about his motives and his ability to present evidence."............"
It's no wonder.
sorry about the format...pdf is still a mystery to me
When the abuse of Iraqi prisoners made headlines world-wide in April and
May this year, George W Bush claimed it "doesn't represent theAmerica I know". That's funny,because it sure represents the America prisoners in America know all too well ?- especially prisoners in Texas, where Bush was governor from 1994 to 2000.
Under Dubya, "Texas prison" became one of the most feared phrases in the language. In 1996, prisoners in theBrazoria County Detention Centre in Angleton, Texas, were beaten by riotclad guards, kicked, poked with electric prods, forced to crawl and threatened with snarling dogs. They were also videoed while all this was happening ?-for "training purposes". Sound familiar?
And in October 1999, women prisoners in the Travis County Community Justice Centre, Austin, revealed that they werere gularly kept in portable detention cells for hours at a time in summer heat with no water; and were forced to perform sex acts for their captors in order to avoid more time in the cages.
Prisoners in Texas's supermax prisons reported they were being gassed by
guards and thrown on concrete floors while handcuffed. At the Terrel Unit
facility in Livingston, where prisoners staged a hunger strike in 1999, deathrow prisoner Michael Sharp said before his execution that many guards there"think it is their patriotic duty to torture
and brutalise prisoners".(Texas prisoners and their familiesalso know what an enthusiasticexecutioner Dubya was. He imposed the death penalty 137 times, more than any other governor. Among his victims wa sKarla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in the US since the Civil War.)
Other prisons experienced riots and protests at poor conditions, including
inedible food and lack of proper medical care. In one notorious case, the Bobby Ross Prison in Dickens County, the government inspector sent to investigate complaints turned out to be moonlighting as a "consultant" to the
private company running the jail!!
In 2000, as Dubya prepared his race for the presidency, Texas had the
United States' second highest rate of incarceration after Louisiana. There were 204,000 prisoners in Texas, of whomover 45.3% were Black and 26.2% wereHispanic. He oversaw a prison boom, in which the criminal justice system embraced "assembly line" procedures to
fill prisons with profit-generating inmates. Prison profiteer Wackenhut
operated 13 prisons in the Lone Starstate, including Travis County
Community Justice Centre, where 11 Wackenhut thugs were eventually put on trial after the 1999 scandal.
Where there weren't enough prisoners to generate the desired profit margin,prison profiteers imported prisoners from other states, sometimes without consulting state authorities.
The prisoners abused at Brazoria in 1996 were from Missouri and had been arrested on drug offences. Brazoria was operated by private company Capital Correctional Resources. Another privateer, Corrections Corporation ofAmerica, imported 240 sex offenders from Oregon and housed them in a minimum security facility in Houstonused for immigration detention.
Prisoners were used as slave labour,exerting a downward pressure on
workers' wages and conditions throughout the state.
In light of the above - further quote from the article:
"He added that the problem of prison rape was real and that Texas was committed to solving it. The new federal law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, says that, by a conservative estimate, 13 percent of inmates in the United States are sexually assaulted in prison. The law calls for research into the problem by the Justice Department, which will recommend policy changes based on the studies.
A 2001 Human Rights Watch report on prison rape touched on the subject of sexual slavery.
"Six Texas inmates, separately and independently, gave Human Rights Watch firsthand accounts of being forced into this type of sexual slavery, having been 'sold' or 'rented' out to other inmates," the report said. Those inmates, and other Texas prisoners, told the group that sexual slavery "is commonplace in the system's most dangerous prison units." The group said it also "collected personal testimonies form inmates in Illinois, Michigan, California and Arkansas who have survived situations of sexual slavery."
State prison systems elsewhere in the country told Human Rights Watch that prison rapes were relatively rare. Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin reported fewer than 10 cases annually. Arizona, New York and North Carolina reported 10 to 50."
Rare? Or not reported/investigated?
Prisoners who "grass" others are not popular....
I have never had a prisoner/ex-prisoner who spoke of being raped to me be prepared to report it officially.
However, when I worked at a sexual assault service, one male, and one female, prisoner did attend subsequent to prison rapes...
I wonder if the awful system is at last being challenged????
http://www.justiceaction.org.au/
I have something to confess dearest rabbit.
Your thread made me a little sensitive so I started trolling Aussie sites for signs of hypocrisy. Lo and behold, I find a most superior article showing how Texas prison abuses mirror the scandal of Abu.
It is perhaps disingeneous and political to post it on your thread since it has barely any connection to your theme...but...I was too lazy to start a new thread. Forgive me.
Lord! Oz has NO record in terms of prison humaneness!!!
The Texas thing was just a joke.
I wasn't even panning American prisons - I know (or knew) ours all too well.
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