Editor’s note: This commentary is by Chandra Bozelko, who is the author of “Up the River: An Anthology” and who blogs about her prison experiences at www.prison-diaries.com. She was an inmate at York Correctional Institute in Connecticut for more than six years.
[B]y implementing a policy and installing equipment that will search all incoming guards for all forms of contraband, the State of Vermont is poised to reduce prison sexual assault significantly.
In past interviews, the commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Correction Andrew Pallito has claimed that inmate-staff sexual contact happens approximately once a year.
Sex between inmates and prison staffers is a problem in every prison in the country. The number of inmates who are sexually assaulted by guards every year is in the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Because reporting usually invites retaliation, even the Bureau of Justice Statistics admits we don’t know the real numbers of guard-inmate sexual encounters because so many remain unreported. The real rate of prison sexual assault is likely higher than Commissioner Pallito knows.
Perhaps because of this low rate of reported sexual contact, the State of Vermont became the last state in the country to outlaw these encounters as statutory sexual assault in 2006; even the federal government had criminalized inmate-staff sexual contact three years earlier in the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
In their lack of humanity, they stop seeing interpersonal contact as human interaction but rather transaction. Every interface with another person has a goal, every conversation is conquest; you must come away from it with a prize, something you couldn’t score by yourself: contraband.
Even with PREA’s passage and other states’ laws prohibiting inmate-staff sexual contact, though, the hanky-panky hasn’t stopped anywhere. The security chief for Delaware’s only women’s prison was arrested recently. Alabama’s Tutwiler Prison is in the process of ending a 20-year reign of a sexualized-violence culture that allowed assaults and fondling. Here in Connecticut, three guards were arrested in the past four months for having sex with a prisoner. Each of the encounters involved not only trading body fluids but also things like: doughnuts, sushi, chocolate covered cranberries, cellphones, booze or cigarettes.
After serving six plus years in the maximum security women’s prison in Niantic, Connecticut, I know what happens to incarcerated women. If years of prior abuse hasn’t accomplished this already, prison dehumanizes them. In their lack of humanity, they stop seeing interpersonal contact as human interaction but rather transaction. Every interface with another person has a goal, every conversation is conquest; you must come away from it with a prize, something you couldn’t score by yourself: contraband.
Many social scientists and attorneys who have studied sexual assault in prisons attribute the prisoner-guard sex phenomenon as a combination of power politics, loneliness and loosened libidos but, from what I witnessed, it wasn’t that complicated. Negotiating the dirty was as clean a transaction as you can find in a prison. The guard bargains for an orgasm and hands the inmate a root beer and a pair of tweezers. Both parties satisfy their obligations to the contract. It’s not rape, it’s commerce. And if there’s no currency for commerce, there will be no rape.
This is not to defend sexual interaction between inmates and employees of a prison; in their effect on the inmate, these liaisons are always bad. Because so many inmates suffer from histories of sexual abuse – histories that many times push them to prostitute themselves before they enter prison because they have misvalued physical intimacy for so long – even these sanitized deals dredge up sordid and painful pasts. And often cause an inmate to leave prison in emotional pain that she self-medicates with illegal drugs and returns to criminal behavior. With all the time I served, I feel safe saying that the guard-prisoner tête-á-tête helps cause recidivism.
Now, with prison staffers being searched for any contraband whatsoever, the reward is gone for inmates in Vermont. There is nothing to barter over. The statutory-but-possibly consensual-sexual-assaults will dry up. In my opinion, this is such a sure-fire solution to the problem of sexual assault behind bars I wonder why more prisons haven’t done already what the State of Vermont is doing.
