Dept. of Justice Report: Sexual Violence On the Rise in US Prisons

Sexual Violence On the Rise in US Prisons
By Liliana Segura
Posted on August 17, 2007, Printed on August 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/liliana/60064/

More bad news out of the Justice Department. While the Bush administration reveled in its successful conviction of "dirty bomber"/torture victim Jose Padilla yesterday, the DOJ quietly released a report on sexual violence in American prisons. The findings in a nutshell: It's on the rise.

According to the report, 6,528 cases of sexual violence were reported in 2006 (and those are just the reported cases), which is a 21 percent jump from 2004, the year such data started being officially collected. In more than half the cases, prison guards were the perpetrators.

It's hard to get people riled up about prison rape. Rampant though it may be, it's widely treated as little more than a cultural punchline; the subtext being that most prisoners probably deserve it. But with the US prison population the largest in the world, a spike in sexual violence behind prison walls means the cesspit that passes for our criminal justice system is getting even worse. And while feeble efforts have been made in recent years to legislate solutions, the root problem lies with outdated policies that have led to the prison boom--and the politics that keep them in place.

This past spring, for example, an LA-based human rights group called Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR) released a study linking the ineffectual (yet enduring) farce known as the War on Drugs with the rise in sexual violence in prisons. "The War on Drugs has had a profound impact," SPR's directors wrote earlier this year. "just not the impact that was intended."

"Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. today, more than 500,000 are imprisoned on drug charges, with hundreds of thousands more convicted of drug-motivated crimes.

...Studies show that as many as 20 percent of male prisoners have been pressured or coerced into sex, and 10 percent have been raped. While any detainee can become the victim of prisoner rape, people serving drug sentences, many of whom are young, unschooled in the ways of prison life, and non-violent, are among those at greatest risk.

With little or no institutional protection, prisoner rape survivors are left with physical injuries, are impregnated against their will, contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and suffer severe psychological harm."

Once upon a time, prisons functioned on the quaint ideal that jail time should be about rehabilitation. Few such pretensions exist anymore (although California did recently tack on the word to its Department of Corrections; an apparent attempt to re-brand the most overcrowded prison system in the country.) If Secret Prisons are to the War on Terror what US prisons are to the War on Drugs, whether it's rape or waterboarding, there are a lot of tortured prisoners out there. And unlike Jose Padilla, few people know their names.

Liliana Segura is a writer and activist living in New York

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/liliana/60064/

A tough question and a reluctant answer

On April 29th, a friend that I made on people.tribes.net, Lama Jime Gyatso, asked me a question that has been racing through my mind like a train through a subway tunnel.

>Lama-Jigme Gyatso wrote:
>
> Dear Daniel,
>
> Right now,
> in THIS moment;
> what are some of the specific things in your life
> that your heart could hunger to heal?
>
> Om Mani Padme Hum,
> Lama Jigme


It has taken me ten days to be able to come up with an answer.


Dear Lama Jigme,

I have been thinking of this question every day since you sent it to me. I am sorry that I have not responded sooner.

I was molested by a group of boys when I was five years old. I have spent years writing about it, sharing about it, being in therapy about it, praying and meditating about it, and suffering from it. There have been years when I thought the pain of it was going to drive me out of my mind. For 15 years, I tried to drink myself into oblivion over it. [Thank goodness I have been sober now for almost 20 years.]

For years I thought I was gay. At 30, I entered into my first gay relationship. It lasted for almost ten years. I thought "coming to terms" that I was "gay" would stop the pain. Instead, the pain just took a nap.

I have been on a three-year fast from sex, quieting my mind, hoping to discover the solution. Now I realize that thinking I was gay was a defense mechanism to not face the trauma of being essentially gang-raped. Believing that I had "asked for" being molested, I needed to think that I must be gay: that was how my little boy mind tried to comprehend what happened to me and why. Now I understand, that had I not been molested, I might not have ever thought of myself as gay. But that doesn't erase the experience.

I now regard myself as a straight man with a bisexual past and uncharted future. This, to me, represents a lot of healing and growth of consciousness. However, that has not removed the scars of the sexual trauma. I still feel a part of me wanders this earth, like a ghost, looking for a healing that I cannot conceive. Today I don't feel straight, gay, bisexual, or necessarily asexual; I don't fit in anywhere. Still feeling defensive, I think and behave like a sex-phobic sexual anorexic, as though that were going to cure me.

When I share this with most people, all of their sex phobias come up, and little to anything good comes of it. That just makes me feel more dislocated.

At various times in my life, I have lived as a monastic. Not surprisingly, those experiences did not address my sexual pain and shame. I have been a buddhist for a long time, but the pain remains.

I have run out of ideas what to do. But I think part of the problem is that I have been running on my old ideas. I have been running with those old ideas wrapped around me, not knowing what else to do.

Right now, in THIS moment, the thing that my heart is hungering to heal is my sexual trauma. I am not attached to what the consequences of this healing might be. What my heart hungers for healing is not about the sex; it's about my ability to connect with life and with others, who in many ways I have shut out.

Thanks for asking me this question. It's exhausted me, but I feel more heart conscious.

Sincerely yours, Daniel Jordan

Thanks for the question, Lama Jigme!

Link to Lama Jigme's web page.