US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/26/guards-may-be-responsibleforhalfofprisonrapes.html

by GuiA • 12 years ago

158 78 12 years ago

america.aljazeera.com

eurleif• 12 years ago

It seems that a majority of these cases were actually consensual, not assault:

Among the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases in 2011, 54 percent were committed by women, the report said. From 2009 to 2011, 84 percent of the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases involved a sexual relationship with a female staff member that “appeared to be willing,” compared to 37 percent of the cases involving male staff members during the same time period.

Those numbers imply that overall, 62% of substantiated staff-on-inmate cases were actually consensual. The headline seems inaccurate given that.

Of course, there are extreme sampling bias issues with this data. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it at all.

dpeck• 12 years ago

Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.

steve19• 12 years ago

I am in no way in favor of staff-inmate relationships, but in most relationships the power dynamic is uneven. For example, in most marriages with children the breadwinner has significantly more power, but that does not make sex an assault.

streetnigga4• 12 years ago

This brings up the question, how can a relationship be considered willing when the person is imprisoned against their will?

Let's see the numbers for those released that continue the relationship, call THAT consensual instead. What the article speaks of is sexual assault.

pmorici• 12 years ago

There is a new Netflix series out called "Orange is the New Black" based on a true life story of a woman who gets sent to prison for being a drug mule for her lesbian lover and only gets caught many years later when she is leading a normal suburban life.

At any rate, one of the plot lines is about a relationship between a prison guard and one of the female inmates. It comes up in the course of events that basically any relations between a guard and a prison inmate are considered rape because you can't consent when you are in prison to someone who has power over you. Sort of how a minor can't consent even when another minor is involved. Apparently it is illegal under any circumstance between a guard and inmate as a matter of law in all 50 states as of 2006.

http://www.7dvt.com/2013prison-guards-pregnancy-tests-vermon...

thaumasiotes7• 12 years ago

To my knowledge, it is generally true that sexual contact between an inmate and a prison guard is legally rape no matter whether consensual or not.

This is a kludge in the law; obviously, female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense, and neither are the prisoners (who are the notional victims).

However... we definitely do want to criminalize that conduct, and should be punishing it much more than we actually do; those guards are not on our side; they are on the criminal's side and routinely compromise the security of the prison.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-jail-case-depi...

Shinkei• 12 years ago

Same with intoxication. Technically speaking, any sex under the influence of alcohol is non-consensual.

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

Or it's because of the massive sexist cultural bias against female-on-male rape.

sdegutis• 12 years ago

I don't know much about prison, having fortunately never been there. So I just can't understand how an officer can have any kind of unsupervised and unseen time with inmates. I just assumed everything everywhere in a prison is monitored and recorded.

scarmig9• 12 years ago

Modern prisons are, ironically enough, reverse panopticons. Governments do very little to monitor and protect the people it's placed under bodily control, even going so far as to create vast dark privatized spaces where it can maintain a careful ignorance of all the horrible things that go on in them.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

And this is by, at least implicit, intent. Prison in the US fits into a punitive, even retributional model. If you hurt society you get hurt in return. If you do something bad you get punished. Fear and rememberance of punishment is what keeps people in line. In such a model it's undesirable for prison conditions to be mild or tolerable, the more intolerable and brutal the better, because that makes them a more effective punishment.

It's a model that has continued to be used in the American justice system for centuries, but it's not a system based on any scientific principles. Worse, it doesn't actually work. As often as not prison breeds worse criminals rather than keeping people on the straight and narrow.

streetnigga4• 12 years ago

Keep in who is doing the monitoring, guards who look to be often involved sexual assault. See comment on consent I responded to in this article's thread. The situation of the victim is one of imprisonment, nearly every variable of their life is defined by the (sometimes rapist) guards.

Correctional facility is what they call them, yep.

brc2• 12 years ago

I have a friend who works on security systems for jails. There are plenty of areas unrecorded. There is cost for one thing - prisons are large places and recording all of it is expensive. There is also the hardware - all cameras etc are a possible source of bits and pieces that could be made into weapons or other contraband.

Hearing the security procedures that goes into taking actual tools into a jail makes your realise how locked down they are - every single item (down to a set of keys) has to be inventoried on the way in, and on the way out. No phones taken in - no exceptions. Bear in mind that staff working on security systems never get in the same space as prisoners - it's not like they're fixing cameras in the cafeteria while the prisoners mill around.

As an aside, he is investigating the use of automated drones for doing perimeter patrols. They are good at flying a set pattern with a camera payload. But there are many kinks to work out.

calroc2• 12 years ago

Hacker News? (Maybe I'm not getting it. That happens a lot.)

streetnigga4• 12 years ago

Considering the negative connotations of the word "hacker" in the justice system, what with the federal penitentiaries and all, this news is relevant.

calroc2• 12 years ago

Ah, I'll buy that. Thanks.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

As the internet is pretty much constantly under attack by voyeuristic and censorious governments, civil rights are a matter of close interest to hackers. This spills over into civil-rights issues not directly related to the internet.

scarmig9• 12 years ago

American prisons are a disgrace and a national shame, and prison rapes are one of the most viscerally appalling reminders of that.

These statistics are likely misleading, though: it only includes the 9k or so cases that jail administrators reported. That's likely at least an order of magnitude less than happen in reality, and it's likely that the small minority that are actually reported by administrators have special aspects of them that make them highly non-representative of all sexual violence in prisons. They've passed through (at least) three filters already, for instance: the prisoner deciding to report it at all; the guard reported to seeing fit to report it to higher ups; and the higher ups deciding to report it to the overseeing agency.

Not sure which direction that'd go in, for the record, but it's worth keeping in mind while parsing this report.

joshfraser• 12 years ago

Adam Gopnik's piece on The Caging of America does a good job explaining what's going on and summing up my feelings on the topic:

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...

wlievens• 12 years ago

To better picture the severity of that normalisation, just reverse the genders and imagine a TV show where a male inspector threatens a female suspect with prison rape...

brc2• 12 years ago

I remember reading that piece when it came out. I've never made a prison rape joke since, and I always am willing to be the person who makes an uncomfortable pause to hose down someone prison rape joke. Racist and gay hatreds found their support in 'harmless' jokes, and for that to change, the jokes had to change. People still tell prison rape jokes (and include in plotlines) where they would never use a racist or homophobic joke.

So the best way forwards to work against the prison rape meme is to be that person who says 'well, I don't find jokes about rape funny at all.' You'll get rolled eyes and mutterings behind your back, but people will look back at this period and wonder why this was such a big public joke instead of a terrible injustice.

BrandonRead• 12 years ago

I strongly recommend checking out Dean Spade for more information on this. He has a very detailed book as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk

alexeisadeski3• 12 years ago

Well, technically they're responsible for all of them. Any crime which befalls someone within their custody is by definition their fault. The fact that the US government isn't held liable for such crimes is bizarre.

valleyer• 12 years ago

Counterexample: parents aren't in general held liable for the murder of their children.

hessenwolf• 12 years ago

When they forcibly lock their children in with murderers, they are held liable.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

It's funny, it's so easy to look down on the norms of the medieval era as barbaric but in many ways there are elements of our society which are just as bad, but somehow we continue to tolerate them. Fortunately there are aspects that are better, and maybe we can bootstrap ourselves out of this mess, it's still rather distressing to see how much work is left to do. But we've made a lot of progress on several fronts that is rather remarkable when you think about it. Growing backlash against drug prohibition, increasing acceptance of homosexuality, improving (gradually) racial relations, and so on. Even in the '90s the idea of interracial couples used to be a "big deal" now for the vast majority of folks under 35 it's fully normalized. And the issue of our broken criminal justice system is gaining more and more traction, so I have hope that we'll make progress there as well.

bayesianhorse2• 12 years ago

Consent is a complicated issue. Inmates in a prison can fully consent, but to determine if they are consenting is beyond even a simple psychological evaluation, and certainly beyond the judgement of a horny guard.

On the other hand, in Aljazeera's home country "sexual assault" is punishable for the victim, and if anything about conservative sharia based marriages holds true in Qatar, most sexual assailants are actually husbands. (Minors can't consent, and having sex with non-consenting minors even if she is married to her assailant is technically called a sexual assault)

To be clear: I'm not overly judging, not calling for action or hatred against the people of Quatar, just pointing out a perspective for Al Jazeera accusing the US. I do think the US needs to get its penal system in shape though, for the benefit of all concerned...

tobiasu• 12 years ago

The author (https://twitter.com/marisahtaylor) looks as American as it gets. Your smoke screen in the form of Quatar criticism is pathetic.

Look! The leader of the free world is better than North Korea. Everyone should shut up and be happy. Ridiculous.

bayesianhorse2• 12 years ago

Calling someone on hypocrisy does not imply asking him to shut up.

andyjohnson0• 12 years ago

"...Al Jazeera accusing the US"

Al Jazeera aren't accusing the US of anything. They are simply reporting the contents of a report [1] published by the US Department of Justice. The accusation is coming from the US Government, not Quatar.

[1] http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4881

adaml_623• 12 years ago

So we are all agreed that all prison guards should wear cameras that record 100% of the time that they are inside the prison?

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

So should police, etc. Footage automatically goes both to the police force, a neutral third party, and the the ACLU/whatever equivalent, so as to avoid any accusation of 'missing' footage.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

After watching "Orange is the new black" I thought prison was a really really dark place. Sexual assault is probably worse than worrying about next guy stab you.

While reading this article, I entertained the possibility of robot guards. The only problem is that prisoners can break them or alert the robots. Any idea how to keep these robots safe?

corobo• 12 years ago

Deploy more robots! For every robot that is damaged send out two to replace it, one in a "get the job done" mode and the other in a "cover that guy" mode

summerdown2• 12 years ago

Uk point of view here. I have no understanding what Americans want out of the prison system. This was brought home to me when I watched (ex UK minister) Micheal Portillo's programme on Death Row.

He is a believer in the death penalty, but went through the programme appalled by the torment suffered by prisoners. During the programme he researched, and found, a humane way of killing a prisoner. Then, he took it to a leading advocate of capital punishment in America, only to be told it wasn't painful enough.

Like I say, I have no understanding of this attitude, but I suspect the prison rape issue in the US won't change until the majority of people get past the idea that the prime thing to do to criminals is punishment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY

genieyclo• 12 years ago

If the point of prison for criminals isn't punishment, then what is it?

coldpie• 12 years ago

To keep them out of general society. Possibly to put them in a situation where they can be reformed to rejoin society. Setting aside ethics entirely, prisons cost resources and also take human resources out of society. It's in society's best interest to reform a prisoner and release them ASAP, provided the reform works and they are no longer a danger to society.

Obviously there's a lot of vague terms and wiggle room in that paragraph, but there's certainly a purpose to prisons aside from punishment.

eonwe• 12 years ago

One goal for prisons could be rehabilitation?

sanityinc• 12 years ago

Protecting the rest of the population from those incarcerated.

minako• 12 years ago

Rehabilitation, fighting injustice with injustice will just create an endless loop.

hyperpape• 12 years ago

I believe it is Norway or Sweden that has prisons dedicated to protecting society and rehabilitating the offender. As a result, the prison community looks remarkably like an ordinary society, the primary difference being that the prisoners are not allowed to leave. Reading about it was eye opening.

polymatter• 12 years ago

If you want to punish them, torture them. That is what torture is actually good at.

teh_klev2• 12 years ago

Well, there's punishment and there's "punishment". I think if you ask most sane minded fair persons they'd say that punishment would entail having your freedoms curtailed, being removed from society, having access to friends/family/associates controlled and restricted - i.e. loss of liberty.

However during this period of incarceration, prisoners have a right not to be physically and mentally abused by their fellow inmates and jailers. Incarceration is the punishment, not beatings and rapes.

As to the killing of death row prisoners, their punishment involves not just the loss of their liberty, but also their loss of the right to live the remainder of their natural lives. But it does not give the state the right to make participant endure several minutes of deliberate and avoidable excruciating pain whilst being put to death. I'm fairly certain your justice system doesn't codify that kind of barbarism as part of the death sentence.

If The Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland can provide pain free assisted suicides then surely it's possible to kill death row prisoners just as humanely in the US.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Some commenter here recently compared the likelihood there was a COINTELPRO-like operation in our DoJ to space aliens, implying that only stupid and paranoid people could believe such a thing.

Some people here are entirely too impressed with helping catch "bad guys" and need to put away their Cracker Jack badges and realize they are part of the problem.

This is the system that Manning and Assange and Snowden face. If you think they are cowards, think again. If you think Swartz was a coward, shame on you.

dannypgh• 12 years ago

Ugh, I didn't see that post. Implying that the probability that the US government engaged in COINTELPRO is significantly below 1 requires far more paranoia than belief to the contrary, given that the program was exposed, studied and publicly reported on at just about every level of government, and that the FBI itself confirms[1] that COINTELPRO did in fact exist.

Unless you meant the poster on here was saying that you'd have to be paranoid to believe that there is any sort of modern form of COINTELPRO. We are quickly going into the unknowable (to outsiders) and therefore faith-based, but certainly I wouldn't call it crazy to think that the US government might be engaging in some sort of covert operations today that are similar to covert-but-exposed operations from 40 years ago. To rule that out as inconceivable or stupid requires quite a lot of faith.

The DoJ itself has called various 21st FBI investigations of political dissidents troubling or improper[2]. And as far as I know, not one person in the FBI even so much as lost their job over COINTELPRO, so I'm not sure how one could suggest that we live in a world today where COINTELPRO-like programs simply couldn't exist. Of course the tactics would be different today, but that's probably more a reflection of the fact that technology enables all sorts of surveillance that wouldn't have been imaginable decades ago, than any sort of fundamental shift in what is or isn't considered reasonable or possible by the top echelons of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

[1] http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_oper...

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

So, what are you saying?

1. We're so much cleaner it couldn't happen again

2. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme

I'll go with #2

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

Guards and administration are also responsible for some portion of inmate-on-inmate sex assaults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail...

"On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained:

"'I also was protesting against the bail system, under which the privileged, the white, the middle class escape the pre-trial confinements which go automatically to the poor and black. In good conscience I could not take advantage of the privileges available to me.

"'Even in jail, however, I could not escape those privileges. I was sent directly to cell block four, third floor — the privileged area where I could and did play chess with Gordon Liddy, where one-man rooms for 45 respectable prisoners were never locked.'

"Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he heard that Donaldson worked for The Washington Post and, suspected him of being in prison 'to try to steal a march[(?)]' on Woodward and Bernstein by getting a first hand story", and expressed the wish that he be transferred elsewhere.

"However, Donaldson himself in 'The Punk Who Wouldn't Shut Up', states that guard captain Clinton Cobb had him moved to the most dangerous cell-block in the prison and his subsequent rapes arranged as he believed him to be writing a piece on prison corruption for The Washington Post.

"That night, Donaldson was lured into a cell by a prisoner who claimed that he and his friends wanted to 'discuss pacifism' with him in their cells. He was then anally and orally raped dozens of times by an estimated 45 male inmates. He suffered additional abuse a second night before he escaped from his tormentors (two of whom were pimping him to the others for cigarettes) and collapsed, sobbing, at the cell block gate where guards retrieved him. After a midnight examination at D.C. General Hospital (during which he remained handcuffed) he was returned to the jail hospital, untreated either for physical injury or emotional trauma.

"Donaldson later claimed that the guards told him he'd been deliberately set up by Captain Cobb. The following morning, Lucy Witt, one of the White House Seven, posted his bond and took him to a doctor."

jessaustin• 12 years ago

Thanks for the link. What a fascinating man.

omegaham• 12 years ago

A few things. My girlfriend is a prison nurse, and a good friend's brother is a CO at another prison.

1. The population of guards is pretty bad. The job pays approximately $shit, (Good overtime possibilities, though) and the staff's quality suffers as a result. Frequently, you end up with criminals guarding the criminals. Said guards are often compromised and either become indifferent to criminal behavior or actively aid it.

2. Female guards perform poorly compared to male guards. This is due to a variety of things, but the biggest reason is that inmates are much more willing to test female guards. "Testing" involves intimidation, trying to bribe them, seducing them, harassing them, etc. A male guard commands a certain amount of respect simply by existing that a female guard does not get. My friend's brother summarizes it by saying, "A male guard can point to the rules and say, "Sorry, just doing my job," and an inmate will understand that it's the Man keeping him down and not the man. A female guard, because she's perceived as weaker, doesn't get that ability. Prisoners think they can get away with it because the woman isn't going to enforce the rules." From this, he asserts that the ideal male guard is an unthinking robot. "Sorry, you have violated Rule 21. I have to write you up. No exceptions." Meanwhile, an ideal female guard is a "crazy, man-hating, psychotic bitch" who takes sadistic pleasure in making prisoners' lives hell. She won't get any respect otherwise.

Due to most women being decent human beings, this leads to even higher rates of women being compromised compared to men. Whether it's from being intimidated or seduced, women end up giving favors, fucking inmates, or turning a blind eye to drug activity, rape, and violence. Men do it too, (see the "criminals guarding criminals" section) but at lower rates.

3. Due to a variety of factors, including too many prisoners, not enough for them to do, and a pervasive atmosphere of the animals running the zoo, drama is the primary occupation of most of the inmates. After all, they have nothing better to do. So they make excitement. They fuck with guards, fuck with each other, gamble, (which leads to fucking with each other because debts are created) rape each other, try to seduce the female guards, harass the medical staff, do drugs, make bullshit accusations against the prison just because they can, and so on. To counter this, prison staff frequently collaborate with the gang bosses. They tell the gang boss, "Hey, Jerry's being a pain. Can you take care of him for us?" Jerry gets his ass kicked, and the problem goes away. In return, the prison turns a blind eye to the things that the gang boss is doing. This, of course, leads to prison-sanctioned violence and rape.

Fixing this requires a hard look at what we use our prison system for. I think that we use it for far too much. We shouldn't be sentencing minor drug offenders and petty criminals to prison; it overloads the system and turns the place into a teeming madhouse where the prison staff is focused on survival, not actually rehabilitating the inmates.

In combination with this, we need to get better quality guards. Currently, corrections officers are frequently the failures who couldn't become cops. We need to change that by offering competitive pay. Doing this requires the prison system to shrink and become a smaller organization. Prisons should be focused facilities rather than being a Walmart.

Finally, I'd also suggest segregating prisons by race, but all the hippie Integration Uber Alles people would whine about it.

US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults

Related Stories