JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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Why does our pro-gay society tolerate the prison rape of men so much if they truly respect any persons sexual identity? Because they think more homosexuals are recruited that way?
Legal Affairs
People who think that if they tolerate homosexuals and say they support gay marriage and the Gay Mafia will leave them alone are fools. It never ends that way.
From Sodom and Gomorra open public rape gangs to Theban tolerance of male rape, the history of any social setting becoming dominated by homosexuals allows for the rape of the innocent and the voiding of Age of Consent Laws.
Legal Affairs
Compiling statistics on prison rape involves the same pitfalls as compiling conventional rape statistics. Male rape victims may be even more likely than female victims to underreport out of intimidation or shame. Tom Cahill, whom I talked to at his home in Northern California, heads the board of directors of the advocacy group Stop Prisoner Rape; he was gang-raped in 1968 in a San Antonio jail where he was being held on a civil disobedience charge. "For males, it's the ultimate humiliation," he said. "And that silences most of us." Even without taking this reticence into account, the numbers are staggering. The most authoritative studies of the problem, conducted by the University of South Dakota professor Cindy Struckman-Johnson, found that over 20 percent of prisoners are the victims of some form of coerced sexual contact, and at least 7 percent are raped. Extrapolating from Struckman-Johnson's findings suggests that some 140,000 current inmates have been raped. The corrections industry itself estimates that there are 12,000 rapes per year, which exceeds the annual number of reported rapes in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York combined.
Despite its prevalence, prison rape has generally been treated by courts and corrections officials as it has by novelists and filmmakersas a problem without a solution. Prison rape is rarely prosecuted; like most crimes committed in prison, rapes aren't taken on by local district attorneys but left to corrections officials to handle. When inmates seek civil damages against the prison system, as Johnson has done, they must prove not merely that prison officials should have done more to prevent abuse but that they showed "deliberate indifference"that is, that they had actual knowledge that an inmate was at risk and disregarded it. Showing that a prison guard should have known is not enough, no matter how obvious the signs of abuse.
This standard was established by the Supreme Court in the 1994 case Farmer v. Brennan, in which a transsexual inmate imprisoned for credit card fraud sued federal prison officials for ignoring his rape behind bars. While the court affirmed that prison rape is a violation of an inmate's constitutional rights and stated plainly that sexual assault is "not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses," it set up formidable barriers to establishing the culpability of corrections staff. At the cellblock level, the "deliberate indifference" standard discourages prison guards from shining a light into dark corners. What they don't know can't hurt them.
RODERICK JOHNSON CONTENDS THAT THE AUTHORITIES at the Allred Unit knew that he was being raped and both passively and actively facilitated the assaults. In his time at Allred, Johnson went before the Unit Classification Committee, which determines where each inmate is housed, seven times. Each time, he requested safekeeping, arguing that his life was endangered, and each time he was denied.
Johnson claims that high-ranking officials on the classification committee mocked him during his hearings. "If you want to be a 'ho,' you'll be treated like a 'ho,' " he says one official told him. He also alleges that officials crudely suggested that because he was gay, all the sex was consensual. In his legal complaint, Johnson quotes one official as saying, "I personally believe you like dick. You like this shit. . . . I don't think you need no safekeeping. You need to be placed on high security where you don't have anything but one cellie and then you can get fucked all the time."
Johnson also alleges that high-level prison staff told him to use violence to resist his attackers, to "fight or fuck." But when Johnson did resist, he was punished, once earning 15 days of solitary confinementa punishment he says he found even more psychologically traumatic than his daily ordeals on the cellblock.
Johnson accuses cellblock-level officers of being complicit in his suffering. He claims the guards called him "Coco," the female name assigned to him by the other inmates. According to his legal complaint, in one instance a guard let another inmate into Johnson's cell to be serviced. "They're their own gang," Johnson said of the corrections staff at Allred. "Their idea is they stick together. . . . If the major or the warden doesn't do anything about it, then everybody else kind of goes along with whatever's happening."
Johnson's allegations are as difficult to substantiate as they are shocking. Carl Reynolds, TDCJ's general counsel, wrote in an e-mail that he did not have time to go through Johnson's allegations one by one, but he questioned Johnson's credibility. During the investigation of Johnson's complaints, Reynolds wrote, his "stories kept changing." Reynolds's e-mail also noted that other inmates described Johnson as "highly manipulative" and suggested that he requested safekeeping not out of fear for his safety but "to be closer to a particular inmate."
Reynolds said prison officials "in some instances took remedial action short of placing him in safekeeping, but had great difficulty responding to Johnson's allegations." Johnson "often failed to identify the other participants, and when he did identify other inmates, the information typically did not check out."
But Johnson says his experience as a business consultant taught him the importance of keeping a paper trail, and he methodically copied every letter he sent to TDCJ officials, as well as requests for medical attention and grievances against corrections staff.
At the end of March 2002, the ACLU's National Prison Project took Johnson's case. Less than two weeks later, he was transferred to the Michael Unit, where he was placed in safekeeping, almost a year and a half after he had first requested it. A few weeks after his transfer, Johnson noticed new informational posters going up around the facility. Geared toward prisoners and staff, the posters explained what each group could do to prevent sexual assaults. The posters were based on the state's "Safe Prisons Program," meant to guide corrections officials in determining which inmates were potential victims of sexual assault and should be housed separately. One of the characteristics to look for, the materials state, is "homosexual tendencies." Of the Allred officials, Johnson said, "Every one of them knew that I was a homosexual." Johnson says that one of them explained to him, "We don't protect punks on this farm."
People who think that if they tolerate homosexuals and say they support gay marriage and the Gay Mafia will leave them alone are fools. It never ends that way.
From Sodom and Gomorra open public rape gangs to Theban tolerance of male rape, the history of any social setting becoming dominated by homosexuals allows for the rape of the innocent and the voiding of Age of Consent Laws.