The Gulaging of America

Over the next few months, Reform will look at many of the kinds of corruption that plague American  institutions. But there is one institution, in particular, and one form of corruption, that is in a very different category from most of what will be examined. The institution is America's jails and prisons, and the form of corruption is the existence of widespread assault and rape, which is not merely allowed to go on but is apparently used in many places as a form of punishment by guards and prison wardens.

There are perhaps a handful of other issues that raise similar questions about the violation of fundamental human rights in America. The state of many nursing homes is one such issue, and the fact that many low income neighborhoods have been allowed to become enclaves of violence is another.

But the crimes that are going on in America's prisons are something very different. In a column in yesterday's Washington Post, civil libertarian Nat Hentoff describes a 167-page opinion by Federal District Judge Wayne Justice that was issued in March in the case of Ruiz v. Johnson. Many prisoners in Texas, the judge said, are "raped, beaten and sold by more powerful" inmates, and they "pay for protection in money, services or sex."

In a disturbing, August 23, article in Salon Magazine, gruesome accounts are offered in which guards are alleged to have used rape as a form of retaliation. One inmate in California who kicked a female guard and antagonized corrections officers in other ways was deliberately put in a cell with a " psychopathic serial rapist" who was " the guards' resident enforcer", the article says. For several days, the enforcer " beat, raped, tortured and humiliated" the inmate, " tearing open his rectum in the process. Guards and other inmates listened to the echoes of the young man screaming, crying for help and begging for mercy."

According to the Salon article, the Boston Globe       "reported that guards in Massachusetts prisons have used known rapists in the same fashion as their California counterparts." The article in Salon similarly reports that a corrections officer from Louisiana described what goes on in a letter to a newspaper: "There are prison administrators who use inmate gangs to help manage the prison. Sex and human bodies become the coin of the realm. Is inmate 'X' writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and filing lawsuits? Or perhaps he threw urine or feces on an employee? 'Well, Joe, you and Willie and Hank work him over, but be sure you don't break any bones and send him to the hospital. If you do a good job, I'll see that you get the blondest boy in the next shipment."

These accounts can't be immediately verified by this writer, but they are similar to other accounts that have been offered in the last few decades. Based on accounts such as these and on the few studies there are, there can be little doubt that hundreds of  thousands of assaults, sexual and otherwise, including acts of coerced sex that may appear consensual, have taken place in U.S. prisons. The victims are often males who are least able to defend themselves: they may be smaller, weaker and nonviolent. Some are gang-raped. Once marked, they are often targeted again, often repeatedly. Some link up with stronger men who protect them. Some contract AIDS, in which case their incarceration may become a death sentence.

But no one really knows the kind of numbers we are talking about, in part because, according to the organization, Stop Prisoner Rape, the federal government doesn't keep statistics. Stop Prisoner Rape claims there are some 600,000 male victims of sexual assault in U.S. prisons and some 12,000 female victims. Referring to the statistic for male victims, Salon notes that other studies offer much lower estimates.

A 1994 study of the Nebraska prison system found that of 452 males questioned, 101 indicated they were  pressured or forced to have some kind of sex, according to Stop Prison Rape. Half said they were forced to have anal or oral intercourse and a quarter of the incidents were gang rapes. Prison staff were described as perpetrators 18% of the time. 

The implication of these figures should shock anyone who  believes that America has reached a state of civilization in which such things can no longer take place. But they are taking place and we are all implicated by our silence just as citizens of other nations who fail to stop atrocities conducted in their name or inside their borders have to take some of the responsibility for what happens there.

If anything, these issues are becoming more disturbing as the burgeoning institutional complex of law enforcement, prisons and the justice system pulls an ever-increasing number of people into its orbit, whether as prisoners or on probation. While the rate of growth of the prison population is reported to be slowing, the total number of prisoners continues  to rise. According to an article in the Washington Post, there were more than 1.8 million inmates in the United States in 1998, which is 672 inmates for every 100,000 residents of the country. The Post says the rate is surpassed only by Russia among the world's nations. The war on drugs is the cause of a substantial part of that, of course, and every year it channels more offenders, including significant numbers of nonviolent offenders, into this often brutal system where they may be threatened, raped and assaulted. 

In the Salon article, Michael Hennessey, who runs the San Francisco county jail system, describes some of the possible remedies we can use to combat this problem of prison rape. We can build  prisons without blind spots, for example, and we can separate violent from nonviolent offenders "and, within those categories, (separate) the vulnerable from (the) dangerous." 

But what America needs to do most urgently is precisely what it will not do. It needs to follow a path other nations have taken when it comes to violations of human rights and recognize its own responsibility for these crimes, as it begins an nationwide, investigation into civil rights violations in prisons. We need -- and have to demand -- an effort by the federal and state governments, comparable in its effects to the civil rights effort of the 1960s, that will bring an end to this and hold the perpetrators accountable, whatever their status.

Our goal -- and this is a bitter irony -- should be the extension of law into our prisons, not unlike the way Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for all his flaws, has extended the rule of law over formerly lawless and dangerous terrain in New York City. Our policy should be the elimination of all sex in prisons (except where conjugal visits are allowed). Sex should have no place in prison because it is incompatible with the philosophy of justified but humane punishment and because it is often impossible to distinguish consensual from coerced sex. So long as there is sex in American prisons, there will be coerced sex.

The existence of these violations, made possible by American tax dollars and public silence, and committed with the acquiescence or approval of those in charge, raises the most fundamental questions about the moral authority and status of the United States. Clearly, as a nation, we have an obligation to take responsibility for these abuses and bring about change.

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The organization, Stop Prisoner Rape, responds to "The Gulaging of America." 

Rape as a disciplinary tactic, Salon, August 23, 1999, by Christian Parenti; 

Alan Barth's Wisdom - Washington Post, August 28, 1999; A19, by Nat Hentoff; (This link is no longer active.)

Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc Also at this site, Rape of Incarcerated Americans A Preliminary Statistical Look by Stephen Donaldson, July, 1995.
Also: SPR Prior News . This site may be worth exploring for readers who want to examine unofficial sources.

Rate of Growth Of Prisoners Declines in U.S , Washington Post, Associated Press article, August 16, 1999; A02.
(This link is no longer active.)

Dangers Ignored, Aide Says -- Warnings Preceded D.C. Inmate Deaths, Washington Post, August 27, 1999; B01, by Cheryl W. Thompson. (This link is no longer active.)

Related: George Will Examining the National Crime Rate, August 22, 1999.