Regimes Of Systemic Rape Helps Prison Officials Keep Control-- "Keeps 'Em Out Of Our Hair"

When a criminal is found guilty and consigned to a real prison-- not a Club Fed where they put politicians and wealthy corporate types like Mike Carona or Duke Cunningham-- society is also consigning them to a special kind of hell that is rarely discussed in polite company. But we don't have to worry about that at DWT. Rape in prison is rampant-- the estimate from the Bureau of Justice Statistics was that 88,500 adults were sexually abused in prison last year; the Justice Department says it's 200,000-- and as much a part of the system as anything else-- another tool for a sociopathic internal gulag force which takes delight in its own virulent, uncontrollable homophobia. They claim they can't clean up the rape regimes in prison because it would be too expensive.

You've probably never heard of Scott Howard a career criminal from a Tennessee Baptist background and a gay lifestyle. In the late '90s, he discovered major security flaws in the payroll systems of large corporations and he used a Trojan program to steal data from corporate websites, then submitted payroll requests to staffing agencies, either in his own name or someone else's. It was a surprisingly simple and lucrative scam, as long as he moved quickly to the next pigeon before the fraud could be detected. He slipped up and was arrested in 1999, was sentenced to 8 years and didn't let the bars slow him down at all. He filed a bogus tax return, claiming a $17,155 refund-- and the IRS actually paid it. The next year he asked for $1.2 million, complete with forged letters on charity letterheads acknowledging enormous contributions. This time they caught him.

He was repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by the white supremacist 211 Crew. "That 211 shot-callers could simultaneously proclaim their hatred of 'fags' while engaging in sexual acts with said fags no longer baffled him. Logic was not the gang's strong point. Intimidation was. Prison officials called him a "whiner" and told him to try to get along and to "keep a low profile." He was disliked for filing too many grievances and considered a "strain on case management."

Rape and coercion have long been regarded as an inevitable part of prison life, particularly among the most targeted populations-- inmates who are young and slight of stature, effeminate or gay, the mentally ill and first-timers. Yet the national commission established by PREA found that a number of fixable problems, from poor staff training and inadequate screening of vulnerable inmates to overcrowding and an almost complete lack of prosecution of perpetrators, could and should be addressed to reduce the rate of assault.

Howard's journey through Colorado's prisons points to another problem the commission report scarcely mentions: the utter indifference of many staffers. Howard met with several case managers and supervisors at Sterling and filed grievances over his placement there. The officials have divergent stories about what happened in those meetings and how explicit Howard was about his plight. But their tendency to downplay his complaints and insist that he "name names" helps to explain why the system's number of reported assaults is so low.

...[S]everal 211 members surrounded [Howard] and showed him a single piece of paper. They figured it would persuade him to get busy raising the big cash needed for the defense fund.

There were two notable things about the document, an intake form from Howard's own file. It had to have come from a staff computer, which meant the Crew had a DOC employee working with them, either for pay or unwittingly. And it contained the names and address of Howard's parents, listed as emergency contacts. Someone was waiting on the outside, one of the group explained, to see if Howard was going to do what was expected of him.

Howard understood. "My family had never done anything to anybody," he says. "To know they could reach out and touch my parents-- that was a big move on their part."

..."Even after naming all the names, they just sent me back to my cell," Howard says now. "I told a captain these people were going to kill me if I didn't come up with $300,000 by March. Her response was, 'Let's see what happens in March.'"

After locking him in a cell with one of the rapists he had reported, the prison officials refused to turn over paperwork he needed to prove his court case. Boned again. Passed in 2003, Prison Rape Elimination Act created a national commission to study the causes and costs of sexual assault behind bars and to come up with federal policies to attack the problem. Seven years and several blown deadlines later, backers are still waiting for United States Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt new standards incorporating the commission's findings.