Prison Rape -- A Crime That Mostly Goes Unpunished - NY Times
Tamar Lewin, New York Times
Sunday, April 15, 2001
Eddie Dillard, a prisoner at California's Corcoran State Prison, knew what was in store the instant he heard who his new cellmate was to be: Wayne Robertson, a 230-pound sexual predator.
Two years earlier, the men had fought after Dillard rejected Robertson's sexual advances. And Dillard, a 120-pound inmate serving time for assault, had been worried enough about future encounters to put Robertson's name on a list of known enemies with whom he should not share a cell.
But on March 5, 1993, Dillard was moved into Robertson's cell. The next day, Dillard was raped. Robertson, who is serving life without parole for murder, testified that he sodomized Dillard "all night long."
Inmate rape has such an established place in the mythology of prison that references to confinement often call forth jokes about sexual assault.
But while rape is accepted as a fact of prison life, the subject has received little serious attention and legal remedies are rare. Few prison rapists are ever prosecuted, and most prisons provide little counseling or medical attention for rape victims, or help in preventing such attacks.
And the legal standards for prisons' liability create a perverse incentive for guards to ignore the problem. Generally, prison officials can only be held liable for an assault if they had actual knowledge of a substantial risk to a prisoner and ignored it.
"Many inmates find that when they try to report a rape, the guards don't want to hear it," said Joanne Mariner, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, who recently completed a study of prison rape, to be released Thursday. "They tell them to act like a man, to deal with the problem themselves."
Although 2 million Americans are incarcerated nationwide, only Texas, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported more than 50 sexual assaults a year in response to a Human Rights Watch request for information.
But one study of inmates in seven men's prisons in four states -- published in the December issue of The Prison Journal, an academic quarterly -- found that 21 percent of the prisoners reported at least one episode of forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent reported that they had been raped.
The Dillard case -- first in criminal court and now in civil court -- is one of the few to come to public attention. Dillard's court papers charge that prison guards set up the rape, transferring him into the cell of Robertson, known as "The Booty Bandit," to punish him for kicking another guard.
Robertson backed Dillard's account. He told a state investigator in 1997 that he had asked Robert Decker, a guard, to place Dillard with him, and that Decker agreed to the move so Robertson could show Dillard "how to do his time."
Decker and three other guards at the prison were charged with aiding and abetting sodomy. At the 1999 trial, they said they had not known that Robertson, 36, would attack Dillard, 23, nor that the two were enemies. The guards said that Dillard had not complained about the cell transfer and that it had been a mistake, not an act of retribution.
The four guards were acquitted in the criminal trial.
Dillard is now out of prison, living with his wife and two children in California. His civil lawsuit against the guards is scheduled for trial in U.S.
District Court in Fresno in January. If he wins, prisoners' rights advocates believe it could open the door for other such cases.
"This is about as strong a case as there is," said Mariner, of Human Rights Watch. "If Dillard loses this one, it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that there's no point taking these cases to court."
The Human Rights Watch report documents just how common and brutal prison rape can be -- and how it can escalate into repeated assaults and even sexual slavery, in which inmates are sold or rented to other inmates for sex.
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