RAPE BEHIND BARS
Cahill, Tom
BY TOM CAHILL Stephen Donaldson, a Quaker activist then teaching Indian Buddhism at Columbia University, was arrested during a "pray-in" at the White House in 1973. Refusing to post $10 bond on...
...Donaldson has gathered statistics showing that the number of men raped in prisons in the United States each day may exceed 25,000, not including boys sexually abused in reformatories...
...Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that few prison rapes are reported...
...By turning a deaf ear, the unincarcerated population makes itself a party to these crimes...
...O'Brien asks in Orwell's 1984...
...His address is P.O...
...Prisoners took a lot of their anger and frustration out on me instead of the prison system," Donaldson says...
...Some are forced into prostitution, traded for such goods as cigarettes...
...in this jail within a jail, an inmate is deprived of even the few amenities provided to the general prison population...
...So terrifying are many of our "correctional" institutions that some prisoners participate in gang rapes against their will for fear they might themselves be victimized...
...Prison rapists typically victimize young, heterosexual first offenders...
...I have nightmares about it," eighteen-year-old Ronald Fridge told The Washington Post, describing his rape while in jail for breaking a window...
...What's more, the term implies that homosexuality is somehow linked to violence...
...If an inmate reports a sexual assault, even without naming the assailant, other prisoners will label the victim a "snitch" and put out a contract on the inmate's life...
...Box 246, Napa, CA 94559...
...Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation...
...He is president of POSRIP and spends much of his time counseling rape survivors in cells near his...
...Some researchers who have studied the effects of rape say it takes ten years for the average survivor to heal...
...During his first term in prison, after spending a week in a quiet cell, Donaldson was transferred to a noisy wing containing about 200 prisoners of whom only one other was white...
...Gaston said he had "no evidence of unreported rapes in this jail," despite testimony by some of his own guards that most rapes go unreported...
...Two riots had already occurred in this area since Donaldson had been arrested, and there was talk of another...
...Prison officials consistently deny that rape is widespread in their institutions...
...I was thrown to the wolves in order to defuse the riot...
...Imprisoned in the late 1970s shortly after a suicide attempt, bright, gentle, spiritual Donaldson—who called himself "Donny the Punk"—took a punk himself, raping a lonely, frightened teen-ager...
...Or the victim can report the assault and request protective custody...
...Most of those who make, interpret, and enforce the law have long ignored charges of sexual assault in confinement...
...This can fuel homophobia, which in turn compounds the trauma of prison rape...
...Stephen Donaldson believes rape is a management tool used to divide and conquer the prison population, discipline troublemakers, and destroy potential leaders: Better that prisoners attack each other than their keepers...
...Thomas L. Spaulding, who was raped in Jackson Prison in 1984, brought charges against his assailant—while still imprisoned—and filed suit against the state of Michigan for refusing to prosecute his rapist...
...Boredom, frustration, sexism, racism, and outright terror combine to create an atmosphere of barbarism behind bars...
...Speakers at the 1985 National Conference on Correctional Health Care indicated that most prison suicide—as well as most prison violence—results from rape or sexual harassment...
...Last spring, however, the program was terminated because of lack of funds...
...Meanwhile, he remains in protective custody in the prison...
...While prison officials minimize the problem of rape in confinement, prison guards sometimes permit or even encourage it...
...I was a full-time political activist in 1968 when I was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, for destroying company property during a union dispute...
...Last November, a Federal court in eastern Michigan rejected his claims, but Spaulding is continuing to fight...
...Many of us who have survived prison rape become living time bombs, but without clocks to program our explosions...
...Once "turned out"—prison parlance for "raped"—a survivor is caught in a bind...
...Suicide is the final option...
...Survivors of prison rape, like the millions of women raped outside of prison, suffer from rape trauma syndrome, a little-understood and little-researched disorder...
...correctional institutions...
...Remaining silent almost guarantees further assaults or even virtual enslavement...
...POSRIP, of which I am executive director, is a national group of men and women of all races, sexual orientations, and spiritual and political persuasions...
...My cellmates beat, tortured, and gang-raped me for twenty-four hours until an ex-convict I knew passed the word to my cell that I wasn't a child molester—as the inmates had been told...
...Fresh meat," a burly young prisoner announced as the grinning guard brought me to the cage...
...Donaldson, for example, has blown up unexpectedly several times...
...Women, who make up 4 per cent of the prison population, also surfer rape and abuse daily...
...Now Donaldson and I, along with other victims, are working together to channel our rage in a constructive manner—to alleviate the senseless suffering in U.S...
...In response to a similar suit, a bill was introduced in the Delaware legislature last spring that would provide a seven-year sentence for prison guardvand health-care workers who allow individuals in their custody to be sexually assaulted...
...of prison rape...
...I belong to a big boxer and would rather not," Donaldson wrote from Federal prison a few years ago, "but I don't know how to get out of it...
...Uriah "Wolf Steppenwolf, an inmate in Michigan's Jackson Prison, stopped the rape of another inmate in May 1984 and has been in protective custody ever since...
...Many inmates become "punks," sexual slaves who serve and keep house for their "masters...
...A few prison rape victims have fought back through the legal system...
...We are victims of a system in which those who are dominated and humiliated come to dominate and humiliate others...
...Vincent's Hospital in New York City, one of the few such organizations for men...
...Many of us are survivors of prison sexual abuse...
...He ended up torn and bleeding in a hospital after his fellow prisoners raped him some sixty times in two days...
...The convict then murdered the suspect, Jerry James Everett, apparently to prevent him from reporting the assault...
...The percentage of prison rapists or rape victims who are homosexual appears to be no greater than the percentage of gays in the general population...
...Ron Sable, a physician at Cermak Health Services in Chicago, estimates that only one in ten prison rape victims reports a sexual assault...
...Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing...
...Last year, the state of Wisconsin agreed to pay $60,000 in an out-of-court settlement to Leroy Shipp Jr., who claimed he was beaten and raped while imprisoned at Waupun...
...I was aggressive because I was afraid," Francis Harper told Loretta To-fani, the Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her series on rapes at the Prince George's County Detention Center in Maryland...
...Today's budget cuts and longer sentences—which produce overcrowded and understaffed prisons—can only increase the incidence of sexual abuse...
...Avengeful public, determined to end what it views as the coddling of criminals, seems to believe that prisoners deserve their cruel and unusual punishment, perhaps viewing prison brutality and rape as a deterrent to crime...
...In one Missouri case, a convicted child molester tortured and raped a twenty-year-old autotheft suspect who hadn't been able to make bail...
...It was a choice of rape or be raped...
...By making him suffer," Winston replies...
...He was acquitted of the charge a week after the assault...
...But protective custody is like punishment...
...Exactly," says O'Brien...
...Male rape victims frequently become rapists, possibly in an attempt to "regain manhood" by destroying that of another man...
...How does one man assert his power over another, Winston...
...The parents of Jerry James Everett, the Missouri prisoner, filed a wrongful death suit against Sheriff Guy Koester, charging negligence and violation of their son's civil rights...
...Rather than endure continued humiliation, some prison rape victims try to escape...
...But such dehumanization inflicted on young prisoners surely will not deter them from a life of crime...
...Under the unwritten prisoner code of retribution, the life expectancy of a "snitch" is measured in minutes...
...Stephen Donaldson and I are survivors Tom Cahill is Executive Director of People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons...
...Rape is less an act of sex than one of domination by violence and humiliation...
...My most recent eruption was last summer, sixteen years after my brutalization, when I smashed a plate glass door at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle...
...Donaldson became so emotionally disturbed after his rape that he has been in and out of prison since 1973, and each time he has been another prisoner's punk...
...Arnett Gaston, director of Prince George's County Detention Center, accused The Washington Post of exaggerating the number of rapes in that facility...
...Our rage can end up misdirected or self-destructive...
...Inmate rape is not a major problem at San Quentin Prison," then acting public information officer Nickola Frye told the Independent Journal of Marin County, California...
...Donaldson, East Coast regional director of POSRIP, served as a coordinator of a men's rape support group at St...
...Since that time, little if anything has been done to stop prison rape...
...After refusing to pay for the closed-circuit television cameras I had smashed to publicize a union grievance, I was imprisoned in Bexar County Jail's "gorilla cage"—prison lingo for a cell deliberately overcrowded and racially mixed...
...My estimate of the reporting rate, based on personal experience, is one in 100...
...In the early 1970s, a select committee of the United States Senate—including Senators Arlen Specter, Thomas J. Dodd, and Edward M. Kennedy—heard extensive testimony about sexual abuse of prisoners...
...Refusing to post $10 bond on grounds that bail discriminates against the poor, Donaldson was jailed...
...In the four years I've been here, I've heard of three...
...It makes you lose your mind...
...Incidents of sexual assault, forced prostitution, and outright slavery are epidemic in the prisons...
...According to Prison Law Monitor, one in five prisoners is raped...
...The frequently used term "homosexual rape" is a misnomer...
...Charles County, Missouri, conceded only that Everett's cellmates "may have hassled the boy a bit...
...The case was settled out of court...
...For this reason, and because so many now understand that rape in general is political terrorism, People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons (POSRIP) appealed to Amnesty International last April to investigate the problem...
...Victims who try to retaliate, whether they are successful or not, may have years added to their terms...
...I had been on the telephone trying to tell a Chronicle reporter about my two-month fast to publicize prison rape when he hung up on me...
...in fact, it may be the quickest, most effective, and most cost-efficient means of creating a sociopath...
...Faced with the suggestion that an inmate at his jail raped and then murdered Jerry James Everett, Guy Koester, then sheriff of St...
...For others, murder is the only honorable response to an assault...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
