News FeedWhy Can’t Guards Stop Prison Rape?
In my book, Inside:Life Behind Bars in America, one of the chapters describes a gruesome rape scene. The scene took place in a high-security penitentiary. Two wily and hardened convicts lured two new prisoners who were weak into a false sense of security. The group of four prisoners snorted meth and drank pruno together. Then, while the group was supposedly getting along inside a cell, the two stronger prisoners overpowered the weaker prisoners, raping and sodomizing them repeatedly.
One reader of the book wrote to ask how such a sexual orgy was possible in a high security prison. The reader felt as though someone should have been on patrol to help the weaker prisoners. She questioned how prisoners could get away with such behavior in a high-security prison.
High security prisons are dangerous places. They are dangerous because more than 1,000 prisoners are locked inside concrete and steel human warehouses, and administrative policies extinguish hope for the men inside. Administrators rely on surveillance cameras, metal detectors, locked gates and doors, as well as correctional officers to maintain security in the penitentiary. Yet the prisoners are locked inside the institutions for years, or even decades at a time. They know where the blind spots are. They know when the officers will make rounds and the prisoners develop a sense of who is weak and vulnerable. Like any predator, they can spot the easy prey.
Prison policy makers can post memorandums that encourage weak inmates to seek assistance from staff. Yet those platitudes miss the dynamics of penitentiary life. Prisoners who seek assistance from staff in high-security penitentiaries risk retaliation from those in the prison community who adhere to the tacit convict code. Once a prisoner is saddled with the snitch label, other prisoners will ride him for the duration of his sentence. Prisoners who are forced to serve their sentences in high security prisons should accept a viper pit, and use all of their creativity to persuade administrators that they are worthy candidates for reductions in their classification status.
I served longer than 16 years in higher security prisons before staff members transferred me to minimum-security camp. My disciplined adjustment enabled me to thrive through my prison term and avoid a single altercation with others. Whereas the two victims I described in my book engaged in activities that made them vulnerable, I recognized that the dangerous environment of prison required that I avoid interactions with those who courted trouble. Living a goal-centered adjustment enabled me to prepare for release while simultaneously avoiding problems in prison.
Mr. Santos,
After reading your book, this scene that you described this gruesome act gave me cold chills. It is disturbing to me and to others that this kind of thing could go on in an institution. It seems that at many times the guards know what is going on and allow it to happen. I overheard a group of guards joking one time that, “it will toughen up” the prisoners.
Even after seeking help and security from the staffers at the prison, it makes these prisoners more susceptible to abuse because the staffers may have some sort of agreement with some of the rougher inmates.
It seems like it is a lose/lose situation. You try to be kind to everyone and everyone thinks you are weak. You try to be tough, and everyone thinks you are trying to be better than them.
I have always wondered the same questions that your reader asked. But through this blog and through your book it becomes more clear. We really get a sense of what prison life would be like through your book and it helps us to understand. Although it is hard to imagine things like rape still occur in prison I also realize that prisoners are very much smart and find ways in which they wish to accomplish things.
Mr. Santos,
Would it not be better if the convicts try to get the inmates who appear to be weak and teach them how to survive in the prison settings? Once a inmate have been raped and the administration find out about it, what services are offered to the victim? Federal time is a day for day sentence right? So is there a way if a person know they are weak, they can go to solitare confinement in order to stay safe from the abuse that happens behind the prison walls?
Thank you for your time,
Jackie