"You're right about one team being no better than the other when it comes to hypocrisy."
We must hold the Democrats accountable for their actions as well. People have become
apathetic about unpleasant social issues. For instance, the public tolerates rape in the prisons.
This is not a sexual act. It is an act of violence.
According to some of the evidence that I've read the prison authorities allow it to go on because
it is a reward for some of the most violent inmates. If the violent inmate will behave
a small thin man is put into the same cell with him. The bigger prisoner can easily rape the
smaller inmate over and over again.
This is torture. The Amercian government complains about torture or violation of human rights in other
countries, but it goes on in our prisons! - MEPHISTO
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Little Sympathy or Remedy for Inmates Who Are Raped
"But while rape is accepted as a fact of prison life, the subject has received little serious attention and legal remedies are rare. Few prison rapists are ever prosecuted, and most prisons provide little counseling or medical
attention for rape victims, or help in preventing such attacks.
The widespread social reluctance to address the issue is reinforced by many legal constraints. A 1996 law barring the Federal Legal Services Corporation from financing legal aid organizations that represent prisoners
reduced the number of lawyers available to litigate on behalf of inmates.
That same year, the Prison Litigation Reform Act made it far more difficult for inmates to challenge the conditions of their confinement. In the few incidents that do lead to legal claims, the victims, as convicted
criminals, do not garner much sympathy from politicians, prison officials or juries.
And the legal standards for prisons' liability create a perverse incentive for guards to ignore the problem. Generally, prison officials can only be held liable for an assault if they had actual knowledge of a substantial risk
to a prisoner and ignored it.
"Many inmates find that when they try to report a rape, the guards don't want to hear it," said Joanne Mariner, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, who recently completed a study of prison rape, to be released on Thursday.
"They tell them to act like a man, to deal with the problem themselves. There are very few prisons that follow good procedures for counseling, or sending inmates for a medical examination."
Because almost half the states do not collect statistics on prison rape — and many inmates quickly learn that there is nothing to be gained in reporting rape — there are no reliable national figures on its frequency. And
many prison systems play down the problem, suggesting that rape is so rare that there is no need for data.
Prison officials say that much of the sexual activity in prison seems to be consensual — or if it is not that it is impossible to detect coercion. But lawyers who have spent substantial time investigating prison conditions say
guards are too quick to assume consent.
Donna Brorby, lead counsel for the prisoners in a decades-old lawsuit challenging Texas prison conditions, explained it this way:
"In the Texas prison system, where I spent months interviewing prisoners, the policy, of course not written, is to leave it up to each prisoner to defend himself, and to consider people who don't fight off their attackers to be
consenting. But many people feel powerless to fight off predators. Rape is the top of the pinnacle of a whole spectrum of violence and victimization in prisons."
With two million Americans incarcerated nationwide, only Texas, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported more than 50 sexual assaults a year in response to a Human Rights Watch
request for information.
But one study of inmates in seven men's prisons in four states — published in the December 2000 issue of The Prison Journal, an academic quarterly — found that 21 percent of the prisoners reported at least one episode of
forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent reported that they had been raped.
A 1996 survey of prisoners in Nebraska state prisons found that 22 percent of the inmates said they had been forced to have sexual contact while incarcerated, most of them having submitted to forced anal sex at least
once.
Still, the next year, when Human Rights Watch asked for information on prison rape,
Nebraska prison officials said such incidents were "minimal." Other states, like New Mexico, said they had "no recorded incidents over the past few years."
A survey in one Southern state, which provided information to Human Rights Watch on the condition that it not be named, underscored the confusion. While the survey found that prisoners estimated that one in three inmates
had been coerced into sex, prison guards said it was about one in five. Prison officials in supervisory positions estimated about one in eight.
The Dillard case — first in criminal court and now in civil court — is one of the few to come to public attention. Mr. Dillard's court papers charge that prison guards set up the rape, transferring him into the cell of Mr. Robertson, known as the Booty Bandit, to punish him for kicking another guard.
Mr. Robertson backed Mr. Dillard's account. He told a state investigator in 1997 that he had asked Robert Decker, a guard, to place Mr. Dillard with him, and that Mr. Decker agreed to the move so Mr. Robertson
could show Mr. Dillard "how to do his time."
Mr. Decker and three other guards at the prison were charged with aiding and abetting sodomy. At the 1999 trial, they said they had not known that Mr. Robertson, 36, would attack Mr. Dillard, 23. or that the two were
enemies. The guards said that Mr. Dillard had not complained about the cell transfer and that it had been a mistake, not an act of retribution.
But Mr. Robertson and Roscoe Pondexter, a former prison guard who worked the weekend of the rapes, testified that the guards had knowingly exposed Mr. Dillard to sexual assault.
"They knew Dillard was my enemy, and they knew who I was," said Mr. Robertson, whose records include more than a dozen complaints from inmates of being raped, choked or attacked after they refused his advances.
"They put Dillard in for something to happen to him."
The four guards were acquitted in the criminal trial.
Mr. Dillard is now out of prison, living with his wife and two children in California. His civil suit against the guards is scheduled for trial in January. If he wins, prisoners' rights advocates believe it could open the door
for other such cases.
"This is about as strong a case as there is," said Ms. Mariner, of Human Rights Watch. "If Dillard loses this one, it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that there's no point taking these cases to court."
The Human Rights Watch report documents just how common and brutal prison rape can be — and how it can escalate into repeated assaults and even slavery, in which inmates are sold or rented to other inmates for sex.
The report also establishes that many men, rather than being beaten into submission, are coerced into sexual submission by those who seem to offer protection in a gang- ridden and terrifying environment. "
Above is an excerpt from the article, Little Sympathy or Remedy for Inmates Who Are Raped
By TAMAR LEWIN
From The New York Times
April 15, 2001
nytimes.com |
