Guards inadequate; inmates in control

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32536, 20 February 1971, Page 12

Guards inadequate; inmates in control

(Newsweek Feature Service)

Society has never quite decided whether prisons are primarily for

rehabilitation or for revenge. If rehabilitation is the goal, the work has barely begun. But if the aim is to punish the criminal for his offences against the straight, square world, to degrade him and make his life behind bars as miserable as possible, then the goal has been achieved many times over.

. Yet this achievement —if achievement it is—is due Jess to the men who are nominally in charge of the

prisons than to the men who actually run them the inmates themselves. “I have never understood,” says New York’s parole board chairman, Mr Russell G. Oswald, “how we believe we can take sick people, lock them up with a lot of other sick people, do nothing to cure them and then expect them to turn out well.” It has been said many times over that to live in prison is to live in a jungle. This is manifestly unfair to the measured, logical and, above ail, natural world of the wild. Prison life is a perversion of the rules of nature and, predictably enough, it produces a perverted society. In Washington, D.C., gaol, for example, any young white man under 1501 b is likely to be the unwilling host of a “blanket party.” As soon as the guards leave the barrack-like dormitories, a blanket is thrown over the new arrival’s head, dozens of hands pummel him and a series of unseen men commit homosexual rape upon him.

The guard force is inadequate to control the situation. Usually there is one guard posted outside each 50-man dormitory. “He’s not going to enter that dormitory at night even if he thinks 10 people are being murdered,” says Mr Kenneth Hardy, director of Washington’s Department of Corrections: ‘What’s more, the victim wouldn’t identify his attackers even if he could, but he usually can’t We find him beaten and bleeding on the next round of the guards and take him to the hospital.” Gang rapes Washington prisons, of course, have no monopoly on the gang homosexual rape. It goes on all across the country. An investigation by the Philadelphia district attorney two years ago revealed that there are at least 1000 aggressive homosexual assaults a year in the city’s gaols and prisons. Some even took place in the van between court and the gaol buildings. “Virtually every slightly built young man committed by the courts is sexually approached within a day or two after his admission to prison,” said the D.A.’s report. “Many of these young men are overwhelmed ana repeatedly raped by gangs of inmate aggressors. (Shers are compelled by the terrible threat of gang rape to seek protection by entering into a ‘housekeeping’ arrangement with an individual tormentor.”

The investigation uncovered other chilling facts. Two-thirds of the aggressors in these attacks were in gaol for serious, assaultive crimes; on the other hand, the victims were usually charged with minor offences. Conditions are nearly as

bad in women’s prisons and in some there is a pattern of complicity on the part of the staff. The director of one East Coast women’s reformatory was accused of lesbianism and, after a statepolice lie test, left her job.

“Nobody seemed to care about that stuff around here,” says a former inmate of the Washington gaol. “There was a matron who used to sit in the room where we watched television while the girls were making out, and she never did anything. She just stared.” Graft rampant Other forms of corruption are common in the nation’s prisons. Drugs, especially, are available for a price. They come in taped to the undersides of trucks. Girls pass them to boyfriends with a kiss on visitors’ day. Guards are in the traffic.

Everyone has a deal, an angle, a gimmick. An inmate of Maryland institution made $l7OO over a threeyear period selling Benzedrine inhalers for $3 each. He kept $1 for himself, paid $2 to the guard lieutenant who brought them in. Food is a regular source of graft Though jpmates of most prisons are fed on budgets of 60 to 80 cents a day, even these spare rations do not always reach the prisoners. “Sandwich men” who buy or steal meat

from the galley go about at night selling meat sandwiches. One man made $4O a day at the business, splitting the take with the prison officer who gave him the food.

Money buys everything, not only all types of drugs and pills, but the privilege of being moved from one cell to another to join a homosexual partner—or to get away from one. Many guards are corrupt; some meet the bribe more than halfway. “You lean on a guy a little bit . . . harass him . . . jostle him ... write him up,” recounted a guard who was later fired from a Maryland institution. "Then one day you tell him. ‘lt doesn’t have to be this way,’ and the next time his wife comes to visit him, she brings $lO for you. You’ve got to pick a guy with a little money, that’s all.” How do they get away with it all? Why isn’t the public up in arms at the way its $lOOO-million-year-prison system is being run? Public apathy In part, the reason is that the public would just as soon not know. The prisons at least serve the function of burying the criminal—for the time being—and what goes on behind the walls is comfortably invisible to the average American who hap-

pens never to have got into trouble with the law. But the invisibility is carefully cultivated from within by prison staffs. With considerable success, prison officials control all the information that flows in and out. Personal letters are censored, letters from unauthorised persons stopped. In the vast majority of cases, it is impossible tor a prisoner to complain to an outsider —even an elected official—about his treatment If he smuggles such a letter * out, the chances are that he

will become a victim of retaliation by the staff. Recently, however, the California legislature passed a landmark law, allowing prisoners to write sealed, uncensored letters to members of the state legislature or to the governor. “No one knows what goes on in the prisons and we’ve got to find out,” says the law’s author, Assemblyman Alan Sieroty. “There has to be some check, some surveillance, somebody looking at what prison administrations are doing.”

U.S. Prisons—ll