Prison Rape: Our laws will not protect us.

Nor will our silence, so speak out or there will most certainly be neither justice nor peace.

The following post comes from the excellent blog Solitary Watch - appropriate for International Women's Day today, particularly given Arizona's history with the Justice Department on the issue. Men are victims of prison rape all too often too, of course, though we are less inclined to call it what it is. Approximately 300 prisoners will be raped today in America alone. One of every eight children we incarcerate will be sexually abused or exploited in custody.

Please take a few minutes to follow the embedded links and defend those whose voices have been so effectively shut out by our courts and legislatures - and ignored by the communities in which they are imprisoned. If you email us a copy of your comments, we'll probably post it. Send them to prisonabolitionist@gmail.com.

--------------------------------------

Prison Rape, the PREA, and the PLRA

March 7, 2011
SOLITARY WATCH

Guest Post by Jennifer Wedekind

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Wedekind is a journalist whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, In These Times, and the Multinational Monitor. She is a 2011 JD Candidate at Georgetown Law.

The public comment period for the PREA regulations extends through April 4, 2011. To submit a comment or read the full text of the proposed standards, go to this page on the website of Just Detention International, an organization devoted to exposing and eliminating the epidemic of prison rape.

≡≡≡≡≡

The Department of Justice in early February opened a comment period for proposed regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Passed in 2003, the Act requires the Attorney General to promulgate national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction and punishment of prison rape. While its ultimate aim is to stem the rampant sexual abuse that occurs in prisons and jails across the country, up until now PREA has largely been an aspirational and fact-gathering statute.

The proposed regulations are structured around recommended standards put forth by the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, established by PREA, in a comprehensive 2009 report on the “the penological, physical, mental, medical, social, and economic impacts of prison rape in the United States.” However, subsequent comments by interested parties citing concerns about prison security and inmate “gamesmanship” have resulted in some of the recommendations being largely neutered. Additionally, a statutory mandate that no regulation impose substantial additional costs on prison authorities may limit the types of programs the regulations can implement. However, the comment period will allow for criticism and revision of the proposed regulations and provides an open forum for prisoner-rights advocates to be heard.

The problem of prison rape that PREA is attempting to address is nothing short of staggering. An estimated 88,500 adult inmates — 4.4 percent of prison inmates and 3.1 percent of jail inmates — reported at least one instance of sexual victimization in the previous year, according to a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. At a Hughes Unit prison in Texas, the facility with the highest rates of reported victimization, 8.6 percent of inmates reported being sexually assaulted by another inmate. Sexual victimization by guards is equally as prevalent. In the Crossroads Correctional Facility in Missouri, the male facility with the highest rates of guard sexual misconduct, 8.2 percent of inmates reported being victimized. At the women’s Bayview Correctional Facility in New York, 11.5 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by guards.

When a prisoner comes forward and reports a sexual assault, he or she is more likely to face retribution than redress. Complaining prisoners frequently face retaliatory harassment, discipline or further abuse. A full 25 percent of inmate victims are summarily sent to solitary confinement, according to the Department of Justice’s own numbers.

Additionally, an inmate complaint will rarely result in legal sanctions for the perpetrator or prison authorities, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has held that placing an inmate at risk of sexual assault with deliberate indifference can be a violation of the 8th Amendment. The main obstacle between inmates and a courtroom is the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Congress passed the PLRA in an effort to prevent “frivolous” inmate lawsuits and created considerable hurdles that an inmate must overcome to see his or her day in court. Significantly, any regulations passed under PREA will have to be in compliance with the PLRA, which may hamper its effectiveness in some areas.

In cases of sexual assault, inmates are most often stymied by two PLRA requirements — an exhaustion of all administrative remedies and a showing of physical harm. If a prisoner fails to comply with the technical and often arbitrary requirements of the administrative procedures, or if the inmate misses one of the filing deadlines — which may be as short as 48 hours — his or her right to sue is forever forfeited. Cases are frequently dismissed because of technical errors, because the wrong form was used or because the complaint was submitted to the wrong entity within the sprawling prison system.

In a notable 2003 case, Human Rights Watch reported that sixteen female inmates filed suit alleging systematic sexual abuse by prison staff, including forcible rape, coerced sexual activity, oral and anal sodomy, and forced pregnancies. The federal court hearing the case refused to address the merits, instead taking nearly five years to conclude that the women’s use of informal reporting procedures provided by the prison resulted in a failure to adequately exhaust all administrative remedies.

The PLRA also requires a showing of physical injury — and many jurisdictions do not consider a sexual assault to constitute a physical injury per se. This provision in particular is frequently relied upon to dismiss claims by victims of sexual assault, who frequently have no proof of physical injury due to delay in reporting, lack of additional violence during the assault, or inadequate prison medical providers, who often do not have the resources or willingness to administer a rape kit.

Advocates hope the final PREA regulations will provide more services for inmates and more accountability for prison administrators. However, while the regulations may be able to ease some of the administrative burdens currently on inmate victims, it will not provide a private cause of action and the PLRA will still dictate access to courts.

The proposed regulations would ban cross-gender strip searches, create minimum standards for investigations following a report, require correctional facilities to provide medical and mental health care, and institute a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault and harassment. The regulations also purport to make the prison grievance systems more accessible, however they don’t go as far as most advocates think necessary. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the regulations will have.

Utah's Supermax Blogger: Brandon Green.

Brandon Green writes an excellent prisoner blog from a supermax in Utah. Here's an excerpt about solitary confinement.

If anyone knows of any AZ prisoners out there who want to set up a similar blog, drop me a line at prisonabolitionist@gmail.com. Just make sure they know that if they use their real name, they'll be out on a pretty high limb...

"Home Sweet Home"

From: Solitarywatch:

October 16, 2010

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

Brandon Green is imprisoned in Uinta 1, a supermax unit at the Utah State Prison in Draper. His writings appear on a blog created for him by Utah Prison Watch. In this piece, he challenges readers to imagine what is like to live in solitary confinement, as he vividly describes the physical and psychological deterioration that take place in an isolation cell.

Go to your bathroom door and kick a hole in it. Now lock yourself in tight. Throw all your hygiene items, except a tooth brush and toothpaste tube, out the hole. Everything. Now go to your tub and flip it over. This is where you’ll sleep. Now sit. The light switch disappears and the shower spigot. A little speaker replaces them. It listens and sometimes speaks to you. Laughs at you. Taunts you. Tells you your suffering is entertaining. You can’t shut off the light with no switch and you’ll have to shower using the sink.

As you sit, you hear ten or so voices outside the door. That’s funny. Sounds like that guy who robbed my mother’s house last year and put her in a wheelchair after brutally beating and raping her. It can’t be! Is that the judge that let the man run free too? And his twisted attorney? Why are they here!?!
The worst enemies you could imagine, or put a face to, have just moved into your house. As you sit in the bathroom. These people only wish you harm of the utmost. And your death would be nothing but joy for them. All your food, and any mail you might be expecting, will have to come from these “squatter enemies.” Good luck!

To make matters worse, these enemies of yours control all your heating, air conditioning, water from your sink and to your toilet. And to top it off, if they see you sleeping they’ll kick the door and yell at you. They laugh.
You can hear these men day and night right outside your door. You smell them barbecuing  and smoking. You’re hungry. You can hear these men torturing people. Sometimes other people in similar bathrooms next to yours are pulled out and placed in body bags. To the  amusement of these squatters.
 A day passes this way.

“My god,” you say, “what have I done to deserve this?”
A week passes.
 You cry.
A month.
You attempt suicide but your vein closes up before death.
A year.
You are now talking to yourself and running around naked. You are convinced the food you seldom receive, that’s halfway edible, is poisoned. As you eat the rotten “meat” your beard and mustache get in the way of the teeth chewing. You couldn’t cry if your life depended on it. And it used to. But you’ve forgotten why.
Two years.
You can’t remember. You’ve forgotten. Forgotten what? You don’t know. The “squatter enemies” come around and you look at them. They look at you. They laugh. You start to laugh too. You forgot why. But you do.
Three years.
You sleep 20 hours a day. You can’t help it. But your floor is clean. You keep it spotless. You don’t know why. But you do. You’re skinny. You’ve lost an easy 60 lbs. Your skin is turning yellow and your legs cramp up and atrophy. You don’t want to die anymore. Why bother? You’d rather sleep and dream. The dreams are so vivid. More real than these walls.

Five years.
You go home, you leave your bathroom, this year.
They tell you that. But why? Where do I go? I don’t want to leave now. I like my tub and sink…

Back from the Dark Side: pondering transformative justice.

A twitter by Solitary Watch (good site on solitary confinement) turned me on to this blog, Prison Culture, and this page below that I landed on there couldn't be more appropriate right now (I also lifted the picture to the right from their site). The correspondence I've had with the survivor of a murder victim, the Kingman escapes, and a gang's attack on a friend's son in the AZ Department of Juvenile Corrections have been disturbing of late - as have the assault on me in May and the recent theft of my laptop from my home. My faith has been challenged by my outrage - I even wrestled briefly with my opposition to both life without parole and the death penalty upon learning about the older couple murdered by those Arizona escapees.


I don't have the answers for what to do with all the "bad people" in the world. I do still believe that what we're doing in the way of crime and punishment in America is a colossal tragedy - far more people get victimized and brutalized by the state and corporate America than we have in prison for lesser crimes. In fact, many of those in prison are the ones who have been - and are being - victimized by our misplaced fear and rage, and targeted by the bad people in power.


That's not to say that there aren't bad people in prison - there are plenty enough there. Many such people I would vote myself to segregate from the rest of society somehow, lacking better options for protecting the community from sociopaths. But a lot of sociopaths are extremely successful business leaders, police officers, lawmakers, psychiatrists, and so on who aren't about to be stopped by the systems they currently control, even though they harm far more people in more torturous ways than your everyday burglar or street gang member. It is the legitimacy of their conduct, in fact, that makes them so much more dangerous than people who have been criminalized due to their poverty, race, or citizenship status. Abuse is abuse, whether it's called a crime or not. So is discrimination, exploitation, and slavery. Most good sociopaths are obsessive about following the letter of the law, in fact, because the law is what favors and protects them, not the rest of us. It is their law, by and large, not ours.


Anyway, this post from Mariame at Prison Culture touches on a lot of the issues that compelled me to start blogging on the prison industrial complex in the first place, a little over a year ago now. I've just had a lot on my hands getting involved in the lives of the people being chewed up by it. It makes sitting down and pondering things once in awhile more difficult, while at the same time it makes such pondering more relevant and necessary, too - otherwise my every action becomes reaction which all too often stems from my own fears. I guess even abolitionists aren't immune from thinking and acting from a place of indoctrination rather than deliberation at times.


With that, here's the start of the piece that helped me begin to get focused again tonight - don't worry, I didn't stray too far. I'd encourage you to follow the link and read it through, then explore their blog and other links a little further if prison abolition is something that really interests you. Their focus is on ending the incarceration of youth. I'm presuming Mariame won't mind the compliment and promotion, but will be dropping her a line about setting up a link so you can find the site again.

----------------------------------

What Does Transformative/Restorative Justice Actually Look Like?

August 7th, 2010

by admin (Miriame Kabe, according to twitter)

Whenever I talk about my work with others, I make sure to stress that it focuses on developing community-based alternatives to the traditional criminal legal system. I add that we do this using a transformative justice approach and lens. Many have responded to me by saying: “that’s not something that I can wrap my mind around.” This is usually followed by the questions: “What does transformative justice look like?” and “How would it work?” Actually I should back up to say that the first question is usually: “What about the violent and bad people? Surely you are not advocating letting them out of prison!”

I understand the fear that people have of the so-called “unknown.” People would rather rely on a criminal legal system that they KNOW is ineffective and unjust than to move to an approach that they view as “unproven” and perhaps even Utopian. It provides them with a sense of safety, however fragile. Hence, the constant and persistent question: “What about the bad people?”

I understand that people want to have some sense of accountability for harm that was done. I often answer questions about the “bad people” by asking individuals whether they feel that every “bad” person is currently incarcerated. If they say, no, I ask them if it is realistic to incapacitate every “bad” person on the planet. In fact, what does it even mean to be a “bad” person? Then I ask them to think about what factors determine who ends up behind bars. This is intended to push people to acknowledge the fact that not every “crime” is punished and that certain groups always seem to be more of a target for punishment than others. I point out that the majority of people who are incarcerated are non-violent offenders. I tell them that if they would agree to release all of those people only then am I willing to entertain their questions about the “bad” people. This serves as a way not to get bogged down in the endless discussion about whether “bad” people need to go to prison. Once all of the non-violent prisoners are freed, I am confident that we would be able to make the case that prisons are in existence to mask our failure for addressing the root causes of oppression. As such, more people would be freed still. We need to start opening the doors of the prisons and this necessitates deploying alternative approaches to addressing violence and crime.

I am prompted to write this post today after reading an article in the Daily Progress about restorative justice. I wanted to write about this topic because it is past time that those of us who are anti-prison activists step up to the plate and create actual community-based alternatives that do not rely on the criminal legal system to solve issues of violence and crime. We cannot simply rely on analysis of the problem of mass incarceration as important as that work is. We have to test our theories about using transformative approaches to addressing violence and crime. We have to be willing to take some risks and to also be prepared to fail some times. More of us have to put our ideas in practice. It takes courage because it is lonely and difficult work but we cannot expect to dismantle the prison industrial complex if we do not develop vehicles for community accountability with respect to violence and crime. We can start small and that is exactly what we are attempting in our organization.

Many people of good will are looking for concrete examples of restorative and transformative practice in action. Restorative justice as an approach to addressing violence and crime is only one step on a continuum of community accountability. That continuum is ultimately pointing our society towards TRANSFORMATIVE justice...

(go here for the rest. It's worth it.)

Keeping All Students Safe from...Republicans?

Interesting how that vote turned out. What does that say about the Republican Party these days? How did ours vote, I wonder?

This bill just doesn't go far enough. Many of the children who survived such ordeals still need to be protected from the state as prisoners and patients...

From  Solitary Watch via the Real Cost of Prisons blog: 

 ___________

Most House Republicans Vote to Let Schoolchildren Be Held Down, Tied Up, and Put in Solitary Confinement

By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella | March 5, 2010
Solitary Watch
 
On Wednesday afternoon, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 4247, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act (now being called the Keeping All Students Safe Act), by a vote of 242-153. In the final vote count, 238 Democrats and just 24 Republicans voted for the bill, while 8 Democrats and 145 Republicans voted against it. 

H.R. 4247 was introduced in December by Education and Labor Committee chair George Miller (D-CA) and Committee member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and bill passed out of committee with bipartisan support. Their goal, Miller and Rodgers wrote in a joint op-ed for CNN, was simply to "outlaw child abuse in schools."

The bill's stated purposes include the following:

(1) prevent and reduce the use of physical restraint and seclusion in schools;

(2) ensure the safety of all students and school personnel in schools and promote a positive school culture and climate;

(3) protect students from—

(A) physical or mental abuse;
(B) aversive behavioral interventions that compromise health and safety; and
(C) any physical restraint or seclusion imposed solely for purposes of discipline or convenience;

(4) ensure that physical restraint and seclusion are imposed in school only when a student’s behavior poses an imminent danger of physical injury to the student, school personnel, or others....

It's hard to decide which is more shocking: the fact that 153 members of the United States Congress would see fit to vote against such a bill, or the fact that it was needed in the first place.

In fact, the bill's findings state that "physical restraint and seclusion have resulted in physical injury, psychological trauma, and death to children in public and private schools." The House Education and Labor Committee conducted hearings on the subject last spring, after the Government Accountability Office published a report that began with the following statement:

Although GAO could not determine whether allegations were widespread, GAO did find hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades. 

Examples of these cases include a 7 year old purportedly dying after being held face down for hours by school staff, 5 year olds allegedly being tied to chairs with bungee cords and duct tape by their teacher and suffering broken arms and bloody noses, and a 13 year old reportedly hanging himself in a seclusion room after prolonged confinement.

Special education students were especially vulnerable to this kind of treatment, the report found:
For example, teachers restrained a 4 year old with cerebral palsy in a device that resembled a miniature electric chair because she was reportedly being “uncooperative.”....Teachers confined [a 9 year old with learning disabilities] to a small, dirty room 75 times over the course of 6 months for offenses such as whistling, slouching, and hand waving....In another case, a residential day school implemented a behavior plan, without parental consent, that included confining an 11-year-old autistic child to his room for extended periods of time, restricting his food, and using physical restraints. The child was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of this treatment.

A report published earlier last year by the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) provided additional examples, including one in which a 7-year-old Wisconsin girl, who was diagnosed with an emotional disturbance and ADHD, died of suffocation after several adult staff pinned her to the floor in a "prone restraint" because she was blowing bubbles in her milk.

A handful of earlier accounts also exposed the widespread use in schools of "seclusion rooms" or "time-out rooms"--basically, solitary confinement cells for difficult-to-control children. Mary Hallowell wrote about one such case in her 2009 book Forgotten Rooms. According to an article the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Education researcher Mary Hollowell spent months chronicling an alternative high school in rural Georgia before she discovered the awful secret that continues to haunt her today. Walking with the principal down a hall, Hollowell heard a loud pounding. She followed the principal into a room and then through a connecting doorway that led to a solitary confinement cell double bolted from the outside.

“The cell was dark inside and had a small, square window,” she said. “It was the kind of set-up you saw in a mental institution, not a school.” Inside the cell was a boy Hollowell recognized; she had tutored him in reading and even had artwork from him. “I felt like I had been punched in the stomach when I realized what I was seeing,” she says. “The principal’s comment to me was that most people didn’t know this room was there.”


As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported: “Seclusion rooms are allowed in Georgia public schools provided they are big enough for children to lie down, have good visibility and have locks that spring open in case of an emergency such as a fire. In 2004, Jonathan King, 13, hanged himself in one such room, a stark, 8-foot-by-8-foot 'timeout' room in a Gainesville public school.” Jonathan was also a special ed student, who had ADHD and depression. He had talked about suicide to the school psychologist, but she concluded it was "an escape or attention-getting technique," according to the Gainesville Times. A civil rights lawsuit brought by his parents was thrown out of federal court.

These are the sorts of abuses that H.R. 4247 seeks to address. And the pressing need for federal legislation is clear from the GAO report: "GAO found no federal laws restricting the use of seclusion and restraints in public and private schools and widely divergent laws at the state level," it said. In addition, "GAO could not find a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects information on the use of these methods or the extent of their alleged abuse."

Yet 153 members of Congress chose to vote against a law that would expose and limit what can in some cases only be described as the torture of schoolchildren.

Perhaps not so shocking after all: In a country that condones torture not only in its military detention centers, but in its state and federal prisons, immigration jails, and juvenile detention centers, it was only a matter of time before it trickled down, even into our schools.

http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/most-house-republicans-vote-to-let-schoolchildren-be-held-down-tied-up-and-put-in-solitary-confinement/

Turn the Eyes of The World: Solitary Watch News.

Hey all -

Here's Jim Ridgeway's Solitary Watch News.


We've been waiting for this sister "prison watch" site for a few months now - it's turning into an awesome resource. I've been hoping more institutions of higher learning would take similar responsibility as these folks have for coordinating and maintaining something like this. Can't seem to get anyone at Arizona State University all that interested in the prisons, so we're just freelance bloggers figuring this out as we go.


Thanks, Jim, for bringing the secrecy and shame of solitary confinement in the US into the light of day. Thanks to all you folks out there at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who are working on this project. I believe it will help bring some measure of human suffering to an end. 

Spend some time at the site, folks - there are some great resources there. Let's put an end to this practice in 2010. Start talking now, and use the political campaign season to get candidates to make public commitments to restricting the use of such conditions of confinement, be they employed for prisoner management, administrative convenience, "therapeutic" reasons, protection, or punishment, they end up serving as torture.

------------------------------------------

This Solitary Watch News site is part of an emerging project called Solitary Watch, which will serve as the first centralized source of information on solitary confinement in the United States. The full Solitary Watch web site will be launched in the spring of 2010.

Many Americans have recoiled from the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and polls show that a clear majority oppose the use of torture under any circumstances, even on foreign terrorism suspects. Yet conditions of confinement in U.S. prisons and jails that transgress the boundaries of humane treatment have produced little outcry.  The use of solitary confinement in the United States is the clearest example of this.  Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades; today, at least 25,000 prisoners, and probably many more, are being held in long-term lockdown. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.

Solitary Watch is conceived as an innovative public web site aimed at bringing this issue out of the shadows and into the light of the public square. The mission of Solitary Watch is to provide the public—as well as practicing attorneys, legal scholars, law enforcement and corrections officers, policymakers, educators, advocates, and prisoners–with the first comprehensive source of information on solitary confinement in the United States. Combining a database compiled through state-by-state research with background, analysis, and breaking news, the site will serve as an information clearinghouse, educational resource, and online community.


This project is being launched at a pivotal moment, coinciding with several important developments in U.S. criminal justice. As Americans’ support for executions wanes in the wake of numerous exonerations and excessive costs, the alternative punishment of choice seems to be long-term solitary confinement, whether on prison death rows or in supermax lockdown units. Solitary confinement also awaits accused and convicted terrorists as they are transferred onto American soil from Guantanamo and elsewhere. Finally, in the absence of appropriate medical care, solitary confinement has increasingly been used as a way to control and warehouse mentally ill prisoners. As these trends continue, there will be an increasing need for a comprehensive, reliable source of information on this practice, and on the many practical, legal, and ethical questions it raises.

Solitary Watch is a collaboration between investigative journalists, scholars, and law students. Originally proposed by journalist James Ridgeway, the project has been developed in collaboration with the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse (VC3), a clinical program of the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia directed by veteran death penalty attorney David Bruck.

The Solitary Watch site will be hosted by Washington and Lee Law School. Bruck and his VC3 students will be responsible for gathering information for the Solitary Watch database, as well as contributing to other portions of the site. After developing a model, they will work to enlist other law school clinics across the country in collecting information on solitary confinement facilities and practices within their states.  This information will be fed into the database, and also displayed on state-specific pages designed and maintained by each participating law school clinic.

Solitary Watch News–original reporting on solitary confinement, as well as the Solitary Watch news blog, the archive of information and resources, oral history project, and social networking elements of the web site–is overseen by James Ridgeway in collaboration with writer and editor Jean Casella, with assistance from interns and additional contributions from law students and others. This site is a temporary home for Solitary Watch News, and will be integrated into the larger Washington and Lee site once the database and other elements have been developed.

Solitary Watch News is a project of the Community Futures Collective, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, which serves as its fiscal sponsor for all grants and donations. Contact: Marina Drummer, Community Futures Collective, 221 Idora Avenue, Vallejo, CA 94591. 707-644-6575. marina@communityfuturescollective.org.