It's all too often a joke. When we were hoping to put Ken Lay behind bars, Bill Lockyer explained his grand desire "to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, Hi, my name is Spike, honey."' Charming. So much as fantasies of prison rape are good for a sitcom foil though, the actual act is one of the most repugnant and widespread human rights abuses in the country. For a society that recoils from corporal punishment, we're pretty damn quick to knowingly condemn criminals to brutal sexual assault:
In 2001 Human Rights Watch attempted to turn off the canned laughter. Drawing on testimonies from 200 prisoners in thirty-four states, HRW released a report titled "No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons." The findings suggested that male rape, often accompanied by almost unimaginable violence, is widespread throughout the US prison system. The report was damning enough to help convince Congress to pass the optimistically named 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act. In writing PREA, Congress estimated that 13 percent of inmates had been sexually assaulted. Even if that is (as many experts believe) a conservative estimate, it translates into a stunning number of victims. "Nearly 200,000 inmates now incarcerated have been or will be the victims of prison rape," the act states. "The total number of inmates who have been sexually assaulted in the past 20 years likely exceeds 1,000,000."[...]
"I think in a lot of ways this issue is where the women's issue was about thirty years ago," says Lara Stemple, former executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape, the only national organization dedicated to advocating on behalf of prison-rape survivors. "People still make jokes about men being raped that people would never make about women." If the male victim is behind bars, the problem is compounded. Louise Kindley, a veteran rape-crisis counselor who recently opened New York's first program for male survivors, says, "There is an idea that they deserve it."
I think that's right. We've decided to tacitly accept rape in our prisons because we believe deeply and firmly in the guilt of all who enter -- this is just further punishment. Better yet, we're not the executors -- that such barbarism occurs behind bars is further confirmation that those we incarcerate are monsters. The assaults make us feel better, they vindicate our sentencing. And we can countenance them because we never face their horrors:
So despite his brother's warning that any sign of weakness would turn him into a victim, when an older inmate came up and started talking to him on his first day at Riverside, Parsell opened a chink in his exhausted defenses. "The guy was just very friendly," he remembers, "and he said, You know, after count [the roll call of inmates] why don't you come down to chow with me?" By late morning the following day, Parsell and his new friend, Ron, were in the card room with two other inmates, dipping into a plastic bag full of homemade hooch. The old Maxwell House coffee jar Parsell was drinking out of never seemed to get empty.
It took about half an hour for the Thorazine they'd spiked his drink with to hit. Suddenly Parsell couldn't think straight. He couldn't understand what was being said to him, and he couldn't understand why he couldn't understand. It was, he says, like watching a film with pieces of blank tape spliced into it: "skips, like mini-blackouts," flashes followed by darkness.
Then he was back in one of the dormitories. Four inmates were waiting for him. It was only then that Parsell began to understand what was happening. But by the time the panic hit, it was too late. Ron shoved Parsell onto one of the bunks and another two inmates tore off his pants. Even if Parsell hadn't been half their size, with the Thorazine he didn't have a chance. Ron pushed himself on top of Parsell and raped him, forcing Parsell's head into the pillow to muffle his screams as his rectum was ripped open. His cries were so desperate that they almost suffocated him trying to keep him quiet. But Ron didn't stop. Parsell felt like he screamed for an eternity.
All this happens in government structures with taxpayer support. We are all complicit.
