Rape in the American Prison
February 25, 2015
Three years ago, the young man who would later be known as John Doe 1 shuffled into the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. The town of 11,000 residents, which sits in the remote center of the state, houses five prisons, and over the years, it has earned the nickname “I Own Ya.” John, who was 17, had already gotten over the initial fear of going to an adult prison—he had spent several months at a county jail near Detroit and an intake facility in Jackson—but he also knew he would be spending longer at this lonely outpost, a minimum of three years for a couple of home invasions. It was still wintery in April, and his state-issued jacket was poor protection against the drafts coming through the broken windows, shattered by men who had passed through before. “It was pretty ragged,” he recalled recently, “a tear down.”
Over the next few days, while bringing trays of food around the blocks for his new kitchen job, John would learn that he had been placed in one of the nicer units (another he saw “looked like a basement, with the lights busted out”). But he also noticed that he was one of the youngest prisoners on the block. The other prisoners noticed too. He was what they called a “fish.”
When prisoner advocates talk about PREA’s passage over a decade ago, they use use words like “miracle” and “victory.” But those same advocates acknowledge that this rare moment of bipartisanship was born out of tragedy. In 1996, a 17 year-old prisoner named Rodney Hulin Jr. had torn up his bed sheet, tied it above the door of his cell in the Clemens Unit in Brazoria County, Texas, and jumped down from the top bunk of his bed. When correctional officers cut him down, Hulin was comatose, and he died four months later. Hulin had been raped, beaten, and forced to perform oral sex within three days of his arrival at the unit. He asked to be placed in protective custody and was turned down. After his suicide, a picture of his small shoulders and thin face circulated on major news networks and Hulin became a symbol of two related phenomena. One was the prevalence of new laws that allowed youth to be sent to adult prisons, rather than juvenile facilities, for non-violent crimes (Hulin had committed second-degree arson, resulting in less than $500 of property damage). The other was prison rape.
Among prisoners and their keepers, Hulin’s experience was hardly notable. It was widely known that younger, smaller inmates were at constant risk of sexual assault. Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro Boys, wrote that when he got to Alabama’s Atmore Prison in 1937, he found that young men were beaten into submission and eventually “sold themselves around on the weekends just like whore women of the streets.” In 1980, Louisiana prison-newspaper editor Wilbert Rideau won national journalism accolades for an essay called “The Sexual Jungle,” in which he wrote that “rape in prison is rarely a sexual act, but one of violence, politics, and an acting out of power roles.” Being raped, or “turned out,” he explained, redefines the male victim “as a ‘female’ in this perverse subculture, and he must assume that role as the ‘property’ of his conqueror or whoever claimed him and arranged his emasculation. He becomes a slave in the fullest sense of the term.”
Some corrections officials have pointed out that sexual assaults regularly occur in juvenile facilities as well as in adult ones. But many non-violent crimes lead to probation, rather than incarceration, when they’re handled by the juvenile system, and a 1989
study found that inmates under 18 in adult prisons reported being “sexually attacked” five times more often than their peers in juvenile institutions.
At the same time, John appears ready to be called as a witness should the case against the prison agency go to trial. He has become something of an expert on prison rape. When asked about racial dynamics—many believe that black prisoners tend to rape white prisoners in a kind of revenge for power dynamics in the outside world—John shrugged and said, “If you’re vulnerable it doesn’t matter what color you are.”
