Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (17 page)

“What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?” an interviewer once asked Elie Wiesel.
“What is abnormal,” Wiesel responded, “is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life—that is what is abnormal.”

Darren and I were sitting at one of the café's outside tables, and he grew quiet for a moment as two mounted police officers passed by on quarter horses, their chestnut coats gleaming in the near-dusk light.

“That's pretty,” Darren reflected, growing silent for a moment as he followed the horses' brisk transit through the intersection, then up a hill, and finally out of sight. I remarked on his ability to enjoy the horses' beauty rather than reacting reflexively to their uniformed riders.

“You take it for what it's worth,” he answered with a rare smile. Then the moment passed, and he picked up where he'd left off.

6

AN OPEN SECRET

Sexual Abuse Behind Bars

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

—Rachel Carson

“A
NSWER THE QUESTION
,” THE officer ordered.

Lamont was eight years old at the time of this impromptu interrogation. He'd been riding his bike near his home in San Francisco's heavily policed Hunters Point neighborhood when a squad car pulled up and stopped him in his tracks.

Local police suspected Lamont's older brother of being a gang leader and wanted details about his activities and whereabouts. It was not the first time this officer or one of his colleagues had pulled Lamont off his bike or stopped him on his way home from school, demanding information he did not possess. But this time the officer upped the ante.

“Answer the question, or I'll take you to jail,” he growled. “You'll get raped there, and have babies out your butt.” It was a threat the third grader was inclined to believe, coming, as it did, from the voice of authority.

There is no way to overstate the corrosiveness of the lesson Lamont learned so early: that the law is a force of violation, not protection. And the officer's threat, while obviously exaggerated, was anything but empty. More than 12 percent of juvenile prisoners will experience sexual assault
behind bars, and many more will live in fear of it each day they spend locked up.

In 2010, the Department of Justice's
Review Panel on Prison Rape released its report on sexual victimization in juvenile correctional facilities. The report highlights findings of the National Survey of Youth in Custody, based on confidential interviews with more than nine thousand young people in 195 facilities across the country.

The survey found that 12 percent of juvenile prisoners—more than three thousand young people—had been sexually abused at least once over the previous year. In some facilities, as many as 30 percent of the wards had been abused within that time frame.

About one in fifty youth in the study reported being sexually abused by other youths. A much higher number—one in ten of
all
incarcerated minors—had been abused by a member of the staff. Dayrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms—no place, it appeared, was off limits to uniformed predators.
Sexual abuse rates are higher in juvenile than in adult prisons, per the report, specifically because of the frequency with which guards assault their young charges—the proclivity of adults, in other words, to prey upon the young.

The study—the first of its kind to rely on confidential interviews rather than official reports—found a rate of sexual assault that was more than seven times higher than reported in a 2008 Justice Department investigation based on sexual abuse claims filed with facility administrators. This gap underscores the degree to which sexual abuse in juvenile prisons generally goes unreported, and so underestimated.

The 2010 Department of Justice study belies the common perception that new arrivals must watch out for other inmates, making clear that their guardians pose a far greater threat.
“In essence,” the
New York Review of Books
summed up, “the survey shows that thousands of children are raped and molested every year while in the government's care—most often, by the very corrections officials charged with their rehabilitation and protection.”

Sexual assault, needless to say, is traumatic for anyone, regardless of age, but children are particularly vulnerable to post-traumatic stress syndrome and other lasting effects. According to the authors of “Defending Childhood: Children Exposed to Violence,” victims of childhood sexual
abuse may go on to
“detach physically and psychologically, leading to symptoms of psychological dissociation, such as ‘blanking or spacing out,' or acting on ‘automatic pilot' without conscious thought, as a way of escaping overwhelmingly intense feelings of fear, horror, rage, and shame.”

Lamont's initiation may have been particularly early and gratuitously graphic, but it was otherwise unremarkable. Many young people in high-incarceration neighborhoods learn to associate the law with sexual violation as early as they learn to look both ways before crossing the street.

The widespread understanding that incarceration is likely to include the threat of sexual violation is among the darkest aspects of our juvenile prison system. Everyone who has any connection at all with these institutions—and many who do not, as evidenced by the cliché status of “don't drop the soap” jokes—knows it takes place, yet we profess ourselves scandalized each time a new spate of violations is revealed. The truth is closer to what Lamont learned at the knee of the neighborhood beat cop: rape behind bars is part and parcel of the punishment.

“Certain staff ‘like' you,” Cherie ventured tentatively. “Certain staff might rub up on you.”

Otherwise direct and open about her time behind bars, Cherie shifted to more stilted language as the conversation turned to sexual abuse. She chose each word with care, avoided naming names, and grew vague with her pronouns—was she talking about her own experience, what she had witnessed, or both?

“I heard some stuff . . . ,” Cherie continued with uncharacteristic hesitance. “A couple of different instances, know what I'm saying, where a couple people got taken to get abortions.”

These girls, she clarified, had not entered the institution pregnant. Pregnant girls were forced to identify themselves by wearing pink shirts, while the rest wore blue. Cherie recalled one girl who turned up in pink after she had been locked up for quite some time.

“It wasn't no boy . . . ,” Cherie clarified, her point unmistakable.

Sexual abuse, Cherie learned, was part of the underground prison economy. A girl whose keepers “liked” her could, if she acceded to their sexual demands, win small privileges that are highly valued in the culture
of deprivation that exists behind bars. She might get out of her cell when others were confined, receive extra phone calls, and even gain access to a more private shower (private except for the presence of her abuser). Her diet might be supplemented with treats from the free world, the rough prison soap replaced with scented scrubs and lotions.

“It's all on the tip of my tongue,” one girl responded when a newly arrived Cherie inquired about the source of the largesse bestowed upon her. When Cherie did not immediately understand, the young woman cut to the chase: she received these small privileges, she explained, in return for performing oral sex on a correctional officer.

According to Cherie, uniformed predators selected their prey from among the most vulnerable and isolated girls. “The ones they knew wouldn't say nothing” were seen as “fair game,” she explained.

“A girl doing five or six years, knowing she ain't got no family?” Cherie elaborated. “They're gonna watch and see. If she ain't got nobody? She's perfect.”

“If I was in there longer, I wouldn't have been above it,” she added. “ 'Cause I didn't have nobody. That's how I know.”

“That's exactly the thing,” she continued in a tone of discovery. “Just think about it—what I came from, my mom strung out on drugs, no help, you feel me? All the shit [that goes on behind bars], you're that far away, you gonna do what you gotta do to survive. It's always been like that. That's why so many girls get into trouble in the first place.”

It's always been like that.
According to the Department of Justice report, young people who have been sexually abused prior to their arrest are especially likely to be targeted again behind bars. Nearly 25 percent of young people who had been sexually assaulted before their incarceration were abused again while in custody.
Fully 65 percent of those who had been sexually abused at a previous correctional facility were targeted again at their next destination.

The cycle does not stop there. Among those young people who reported having been abused by staff, 88 percent had been abused repeatedly. Twenty-seven percent had been assaulted more than ten times and 33 percent by more than one employee. Among those victimized by other youth, a similar pattern emerged:
81 percent had been sexually assaulted more than once and 43 percent by more than one person.

Roland, who spent time in various California state facilities, explained how this latter cycle is perpetuated. Ward-on-ward assaults, according to Roland and others, are—like those by staff—generally met with impunity. Even investigation, in Roland's experience, was more or less unheard-of. Staff, he said, simply “let it happen. . . . They turn their back. Too much paperwork. Too much questioning.”

There are also power differentials among wards (albeit of a different order than those between wards and guards). “I knew some people that got sexually abused by other wards,” Roland said. “If you are about four-ten, you got guys who are about two hundred pounds, no fat, nothing but muscle, and they grab you and are like, ‘Ey, you about to do this and that,' and you're like, ‘No,' and they are like, ‘You gotta do it' . . .” He left the rest unspoken.

In this sort of scenario, the most a young target might hope for is to be moved out of range of the initial perpetrator. Even when this happens, according to Roland, “the word always gets around. . . . ‘He's a gay, he did oral this, he did that.' So it kinda just follows 'em everywhere, even if they move institutions, 'cause word goes through the grapevines. It is better communication [behind bars] than out. Somebody moves, he tells everybody everything. Somebody else moves, and he confirms it.” At that point, a victim's fate is sealed.

Sexual abuse is so deeply entrenched in prison culture that it has spawned not only its own subgenre of humor but also its own law—necessary, apparently, despite the fact that both sexual assault
and
the sexual abuse of minors are already illegal.

Passed unanimously by Congress in 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (or PREA) established the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, tasked with recommending a set of standards to the attorney general. Those recommendations were duly submitted, then sat in a file while six years—and countless more assaults—passed by. In 2009, the attorney general finally officially acknowledged the recommendations, at which point a working group was formed to review them. Toss in time for public comment, and it was
May 2012—fully ten years after PREA was signed into law—by the time the Justice Department finally released its “Final Rule to Prevent, Detect and Respond to Prison Rape.”

While advocates welcomed the PREA rules, few young people I met had so much as heard of them, and none believed any system existed to which they might have recourse in the face of a sexual assault.

Their lack of faith is well founded. “There are outs all through it,” said a parent and advocate who had long looked forward to the release of the PREA rules. “Outs for the state. Outs for the federal government. . . . There are loopholes throughout that entire thing. It looks pretty on paper, but there is nothing about it that is binding that I saw.”

She is right: the new rules are not actually binding. Only federally run facilities are required to adopt them, while states may opt out, though those that do will be docked 5 percent in federal prison funding (an amount that speaks volumes about the value placed on the safety of this particular group of children).

“There is language that says ‘try' not to put kids in solitary confinement,” she added with a mirthless laugh. “That's a good way to hold people accountable!”

The very fact that the new rules call for “a zero-tolerance policy” when it comes to the sexual abuse of children speaks volumes about the blind eye that has been turned to date. So does the suggestion to “terminate” those staff members who assault the youth in their care. While one would think that firing rapists would not require special legislation and regulation, a full quarter of all
known
staff predators (
a small percentage of the total, based on evidence that most abuse goes unreported and that prisons rarely substantiate charges against staff even when a report is made) not only have avoided prosecution but have kept their jobs, giving them continued access to their victims as well as to new ones.

A report from the Office of the Inspector General underscored the lightness with which sexual abuse of incarcerated youth is treated.
“Even when prosecuted,” investigators write, “the punishments for sexual abuse of inmates are not significant. Of the 65 subjects who were convicted of sexually abusing inmates, 48, or 73 percent, received a sentence of probation. Ten of them, or 15 percent, were sentenced to less than 1 year incarceration. Only 5 of them, or 8 percent, were sentenced to more than 1 year incarceration. One of them, or 2 percent, was required only to pay a fine, and another one's sentencing is pending.”