WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- The most horrific aspect of the U.S. prison crisis is rape -- the forcible sexual exploitation of the weak by the strong -- that occurs regularly in almost every jail or prison in the country, spreading disease, destroying lives and the will to survive.
Though there are no hard figures on male rape, former Virginia Attorney General Mark Early (believe spelling is EARLEY), now an official of Prison Fellowship, a major prison ministries group, testified last summer that authoritative studies of the 2 million people behind bars in the United States state that "anywhere from 250,000 to 600,000 of them" are victimized every year.
Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., co-sponsor of the only national law to ban the practice, called it "one of the principal untreated human rights abuses in America today" and though President Bush signed the bill into law in September, few believe it is even more than start at dealing with the problem.
The primary impetus for the Kennedy bill was male-on-male rape, but as a growing number of women enter prison, the rape and sexual abuse of women by prisoners and correctional officers has also become a national problem.
To many with the vast flood of prisoners entering institutions and the sharply reduced state budgets for correctional officers and control of prisons, the situation many believe will remain largely out of control.
"In the overcrowded prisons of today, however, the practical demands of simply finding available space for inmates have overwhelmed classification ideals. Inmates frequently find themselves placed among others whose background ... make them an obvious threat," was a conclusion in the compelling Human Rights Watch book "No Escape," a national report on male rape.
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At 16, Rodney Hulin was small, 5-foot, 2-inches tall, weighed 125 pounds and had a boyish face, but that didn't prevent a Texas judge from "making an example" of him, his mother said, and sentencing him to 8 years in an adult prison for setting a dumpster on fire.
"We were frightened for him from the start," she told a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last summer, her voice often catching with emotion, because as "first-time offender, we knew he might be targeted by older, tougher adult inmates.
"Then our worst nightmares came true. Rodney wrote us he'd been raped." A medical examination confirmed the boy's letter. The doctor found "tears in his rectum" and ordered an HIV test.
Rodney's mother, Linda Bruntmyer, was one of a panel of witnesses that told Kennedy and other members of the Senate committee that Rodney was one of an estimated 250,000 to 600,000 male inmates in the U.S. jails, prisons and reformatories who are raped, sodomized or sexually violated every year.
Thousands of these rape victims are traumatized for life, often leaving prison physically scarred, infected with the HIV virus or dangerous venereal diseases and filled with anger.
Rodney Hulin was not so lucky. He knew if he was sent back to the prison's "general population" he would vulnerable to further assaults and pleaded to be segregated from the older prisoners.
"After the first rape," his mother said, "he was returned to the general population. There he was repeatedly beaten and forced to perform oral sex and raped."
Desperate, he wrote to prison authorities again: "I have been sexually and physically assaulted several times, by several inmates. I am afraid to sleep, to shower, and just about everything else. I am afraid that when I am doing these things, I might die any minute. Please sir, help me."
The family tried everything to get him help. His mother said she called the warden. "He said Hulin needed to grow up. He said 'this happens every day, learn to deal with it. It's no big deal.'"
She said Hulin began to violate rules so he would be put in segregation. And when he was in a segregation section, she finally reached him for a 10-minute telephone call. He told her that he was "emotionally and mentally destroyed."
"That was the last time I heard his voice. On the night of January 26, 1996, my son hanged himself in his cell," she said.
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In 1998, a "special rapporteur" [why in quotes?] from the United Nations was invited to visit U.S. prisons and jails to report on violence against women.
The rapporteur, Radihika Commaraswamy, (check nationality, I think correct spelling of last name is Coomaraswamy) visited among other places the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, Calif., where she found the case of "V," a 32-year-old inmate from Long Beach, Calif. The woman had been sentenced to an 8-year, 6-month prison sentence for dealing in drugs by telephone.
Two months after she entered the facility, she was put in segregation for pushing a unit manager. "As a result," said the report (is this report by the rapporteur and if so do we have a date it was filed?), "she was targeted."
Soon after she entered administrative segregation, she and five other inmates were taken by a guard captain and put in cells in the wings of the prison for male prisoners. The women's cell doors were kept open and the men came in and raped the women. One woman was badly sodomized. V alleges that prisoners paid male correctional officers $50.
After she was raped the first time, V stayed awake for 21 nights, sitting against her door so it could not open easily. She was later moved to Danbury Federal Correctional Institute in Connecticut far away from her family.
V joined the other women and brought a lawsuit against the Dublin prison authorities that were settled out of court. V, the report said, "is deeply traumatized. She finds it difficult to sleep at night, and the sound of the keys that male corrections officers carry makes her shake with fear. She does not eat in the canteen because she finds the pat searches conducted by male correctional officers extremely disturbing." The report said that there is a mental health officer working with to overcome her trauma.
Stories like this are repeated in almost every prison interview and by hundreds in official reports and analysis of prison problems.
Tawanna "Tonie" Rhones, a husky, 45-year-old African-American woman who has spent nearly the last 20 years behind bars, told United Press International she became the protector for women in several institutions because "nobody wanted to mess with Tonie." The tall robust woman said she was an avowed lesbian and this protected her from advances by male guards, but in most institutions men work as the guards who search the prisoners daily, patrol their sleeping quarters and supervise everything from medical appointments to showers.
"When women heard about me, they come to me and say so-and-so is trying to rub up against me or go to the commissary with me. I'd take the person and go see the woman and say leave her alone!" Tani (Rhones?) recalls.
Among the institutions where Tani (Rhones?) was incarcerated was the women's section of the District of Columbia's prison system, which was vastly overcrowded and had come under investigation for abuse of women by the corrections staff. She said in addition to rape, there was a lot of consensual sex between correctional officers and inmates. "They'd find a way to get together," from storerooms to walk-in freezers to empty cells.
But Human Rights Watch in its seminal 1996 report on the abuse of women in prison, "All too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons," said it concluded there could be little voluntary between inmates and guards.
The shortage of female correction officers in almost every state has meant women are under supervision of male guards with all the issues for privacy and sexual harassment that might suggest. [Repetitive of end of graf introducing 'Tani'] In "All too Familiar," Human Rights Watch documented abusive language, violations of a female's privacy and derisive treatment about their special needs. If a woman became pregnant from a guard, they were subject to mistreatment and harsh investigations.
Based on thousands of reports like this, Kennedy and Sen. Jeff Sessions R-Ala., sponsored the "Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2003," which for the first time directs the U.S. Department of Justice to take a role in assisting states to reduce the incidents of rape and sexual violation in their prisons.
Calling prison rape an "epidemic," Kennedy said the bipartisan bill directs the Justice Department to conduct an annual statistical review and analysis of the frequency and effects of prison rape. It calls for the Department of Justice to conduct hearings where incidents of rape are high and to assist the states in information and training to help prison authorities and provides $40 million grants for this.
But the evidence before the Senate last summer gave Kennedy and Sessions a stark picture of the problem.
Early (Earley?) said a study in Nebraska state prisons found that 22 percent of male inmates said they were forced to have sexual contact while incarcerated. A southern state was studied under an agreement to keep the state's name secret. Prisoners estimated one in three prisoners had been raped; guards estimated one in five prisoners had been raped and officials said one in eight. "Even the lowest estimate pinpoints an astonishing 250,000 prisoners as rape victims," Early (Earley?) testified.
Between 1996 and 1999, Human Rights Watch conducted what is regarded as the most thorough examination of male rape. It said the rapes occurred because of overcrowding and lack of control of prison populations, but the report also charged that prison officials like Hulin's warden were indifferent to the situation.
Early (Earley?) quoted in his testimony a colleague at the Prison Fellowship, Jack Cowley, who is former warden in the Oklahoma state prison system: "Prison rape to a large degree is made more serious by the deliberate indifference of most prison officials. Oftentimes these officials will purposefully turn their back on unspeakable acts in order to maintain 'peace' allowing aggressive predators to have their way."
Lara Stemple, executive director of the non-profit human rights group Stop Prisoner Rape told UPI's Steve Mitchell "rape and HIV in prison is eight to 10 times as high as in the general population." Her group views AIDS as an un-adjudicated death sentence because people receive only a short sentence for their crime but contract AIDS while in prison have essentially had their sentence extended to death.
Stemple said the people most likely to be raped in prisons are non-violent and first-time offenders, who also are the most like to be released back into the general population. In addition to AIDS, herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases have been spread in prisons and hepatitis C is an epidemic in certain prisons.
Toni Rhones and other women at Our Place, DC, work on a program called "Educate Your Sister," which tells women ways to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases. [Is this a prison-based program? Or, has Rhones been released?]
