WOMEN IN PRISON

1.

Cassandra Collins was a thirty-four-year-old mother of two daughters
when she was sentenced to six months in Florida's Gadsden County Jail
for passing worthless bank checks. She began serving her time in
November 1995. Worried that her daughters, then twelve and fourteen,
were not being adequately supervised while she was in jail, Collins
asked a captain in the county jail if she was eligible for a furlough
program that would allow her to spend the night and part of each day
at home with her children. The officer agreed to permit Collins to
enter a program under which she would work in the jail laundry from 8
AM to 3 PM and then return home. But the captain warned Collins when
she began her furlough, "Now you belong to me!"

It was not long before Cassandra Collins learned what the captain
meant. At first he demanded that she pay him for being allowed to go
home after work. Collins, as he knew, had recently settled a claim for
a workers' compensation injury; she would eventually give him more
than $5,000.

Soon, however, the extortion took a different form. After insisting
that Collins come into work on Christmas Eve, the captain told her
that he would pick her up in his truck. But instead of heading to the
jail, he pulled into the parking lot of a funeral home. He briefly
showed Collins the gun under his seat and then forced her head into
his lap, insisting she perform oral sex. Collins jumped out of the
truck and escaped, but a few weeks later she was not so lucky. This
time, with the connivance of a sheriff's deputy, the captain got
Collins into his car, drove her to a deserted spot in a nearby wood,
and raped her.

When Cassandra Collins was released from jail, she told her story to
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLA). The FDLA decided
that it could not win a case against the officer and refused to press
charges. But, according to Collins, her accusations prompted one of
the captain's fellow officers to claim that she, too, had been a
victim of sexual assault at the captain's hands. In November 2000, the
captain pleaded guilty in that case and is now serving time in federal
prison.[1]

Cassandra Collins's experience of rape is unusual only in that it took
place outside prison property. The number of women in US jails and
prisons has more than tripled during the past fifteen years, from
about 39,000 in 1985 to close to 150,000 today, and with that increase
has come a sharp rise in reported incidents of sexual harassment and
assault.[2]

More than 75 percent of women in prison are doing time for nonviolent
offenses, thanks in large measure to increasingly punitive drug laws.
Women often act as the transporters, or "mules," of the drug trade;
when they are caught they rarely have the kind of information about
drug bosses that permits male drug dealers to bargain down their
sentences. According to one estimate, at least half of the overall
increase in women prisoners in state prisons is a result of
prosecution for drug crimes.[3]

The US prison system was established to serve a predominantly male
population, and men still make up 85 percent of the two million people
in American jails or prisons--the highest per capita prison population
in the world, with the possible exception of Russia. The prisons are
often unequipped to meet the special needs, including medical needs,
of women prisoners; even in female prisons, more-over, at least 41
percent of the guards are likely to be male, with far higher
percentages in some states.[4] Indeed, the National Institute of
Corrections concluded in 1998 that no prisons for women had an
entirely female custodial staff.[5] Part of the reason for this is
that US courts have ruled that anti-discrimination provisions in
employment law preclude assigning guards to prison duty on the basis
of gender.[6]

One result is that male officers are sometimes present during many of
the private moments in the lives of women prisoners, when they dress
and undress, take showers, or go to the toilet. Still more of a
problem is that in almost all states male guards are permitted to
carry out pat-down searches of female inmates, touching women through
their clothes, including their breasts and genitals. In five
states--Connecticut, Kansas, New Hampshire, New York,
Pennsylvania--and in the Federal Bureau of Prisons such searches are
routine.[7] Since a high percentage of women in prison have
experienced some form of sexual or physical abuse earlier in their
lives (as many as 37 percent report they had such experience before
they reached the age of eighteen[8] ), male touching of this kind can
be especially traumatic.

2.

Most prison guards are responsible employees who have never violated a
woman prisoner in any way. But allegations of sexual abuse of women in
prison and the number of successful lawsuits by women prisoners have
both been growing. Serious charges involving well over a thousand
women inmates have been brought, and in many cases substantiated, in
forty-eight out of the fifty states. And that number almost certainly
represents a small fraction of the incidents that occur.

Not all the assaults are carried out by the guards. One case that has
had wide consequences involved Robin Lucas, the owner of a hair salon,
who was convicted of cashing $7,800 worth of stolen travelers' checks
and sentenced to thirty-three months in the Federal Correctional
Institute in Dublin, California. One night, as Ms. Lucas lay sleeping
in her cell, she was awakened, as she later described it, "by the hot
breath of a man, his body pushing against me, tugging at my clothes,
demanding that I be nice to him." The man was a male inmate from
another part of the prison who had paid guards to allow him to go into
Ms. Lucas's cell. Though she managed to fight him off, she was
seriously injured. Three weeks later a far worse attack took place,
this time involving three inmates who handcuffed and repeatedly raped
and sodomized her. Upon her release, Lucas sued the federal
government, which settled the case in 1998 for $500,000, one of the
first and largest settlements of its kind.[9]

Since then dozens of other lawsuits have been filed and many have been
settled out of court for substantial sums. In addition to correctional
officers, prison medical officials, parole officers, and even
chaplains have had to acknowledge sexual offenses. In Valley State
Prison in California, for instance, the head medical officer was
reassigned after admitting to having given unnecessary pelvic exams to
female inmates because, he said, "they enjoyed the male contact." A
county sheriff in West Virginia was convicted and sentenced to seven
years in prison for forcing female inmates to engage in sex acts with
law enforcement officers.[10]

State laws are often inadequate to deal with such conduct. In 1999
fourteen states did not even have laws prohibiting sexual contact
between prison officials and inmates. Today, thanks to campaigns in
state legislatures, the number of such states has been reduced to
five--Alabama, Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The unions
that represent prison and jail guards are sometimes reluctant to
endorse laws prohibiting sexual contact with inmates, fearing that
officers may be falsely accused. Where there is no law on the books,
however, officers who are charged with a sex crime can admit that
sexual contact took place but claim it was consensual and thereby
escape conviction.

Even in states that do have statutes outlawing sexual misconduct
against prisoners, those laws sometimes fail to deal with the issue of
consensuality. Most advocates for prisoners would contend that no
sexual contact should be considered consensual in a situation where
the prisoner is entirely powerless, at the mercy of guards and other
officials. Women may offer to trade sex for privileges; but how freely
is that offer made when officers have total control over the inmates'
lives and welfare? Three states, Colorado, Missouri, and Wyoming,
while making sexual contact a crime, explicitly allow officers to
avoid prosecution by arguing that they had the consent of the victim.

In four states the situation is even worse. An inmate in California
may be prosecuted under state law if she reports having had oral sex,
even if she claims it was forced. In Arizona an inmate who makes a
complaint about alleged abuse must admit to having committed a sexual
offense and so, theoretically at least, she can be prosecuted even if
she was forcibly raped. And in Delaware and Nevada an inmate can be
punished if she makes a charge of rape and fails to prove it.[11]
Statutes such as these, coupled with the often legitimate fear that
guards will retaliate against an inmate who complains, make it almost
inevitable that many offenses will not be reported.

At least six criteria drawn from international human rights standards
could reasonably be used to determine whether a law against sexual
misconduct in prisons is adequate[12] : (1) No punishment should be
inflicted on a prisoner reporting the custodial misconduct; (2) The
statute should cover all forms of sexual abuse, not just those
involving penetration, and should include threatened sexual assault
and inappropriate touching[13] ; (3) Consent should not be allowed as
a defense; (4) All those who come in contact with inmates, including
contractual employees such as kitchen workers, should be liable to
prosecution, not just officers; (5) All places in which prisoners are
held under detention should be legally protected--city and county
jails as well as places outside prisons in which inmates are under
custodial control; and (6) Cases involving first- and second-degree
assault by guards should be treated as felonies, not
misdemeanors.

Astonishingly, only two states, Kansas and Oklahoma, meet all six
criteria. That a law may be on the books is of course no guarantee
that it will be adequately enforced or that sexual abuse will decline.
(In Kansas, Patrick Jones, a prison guard, pleaded guilty in January
2001 to raping two female inmates.[14] ) But a well-framed law would
send an important message to everyone who comes in contact with
prisoners that, whatever those prisoners may have been imprisoned for,
they were not sentenced to be sexually abused.

3.

Women inmates are not the only ones whose lives are affected by sexual
violation. With the acquiescence of guards, men in prison are often
subjected to rape and sexual assault, usually by other inmates. This
appalling situation is known and tolerated throughout the prison
system as if it were an additional punishment inmates must suffer.[15]
What is less well known is that when women are abused in prison, the
hidden victims are often their children.

Children may suffer from the physical abuse of women inmates even
while the children are being born. At least 1,000 babies are born to
women in custody every year. Many states permit and some even require
that pregnant inmates be held in restraints, including iron shackles,
during transport to a hospital, throughout labor, and again
immediately after the child is born. Not only is this a humiliating
experience for the mother but it may be dangerous. As Dr. Patricia
Garcia, a gynecologist at Northwestern University's Prentice Women's
Hospital, said in an interview,

Women in labor need to be mobile so that they can assume various positions
as needed . Having the woman in shackles compromises the ability to
manipulate her legs into proper position for necessary treatment. The
mother and baby's health could be compromised if there were complications
during delivery . If there were need for a C-section , a delay of even five
minutes could result in permanent brain damage for the baby.[16]

Inmates in labor are hardly likely to be a danger to themselves or
others and they are surely at the lowest possible risk for escape.
Such regulations sound as if they have been written by men who know
nothing of labor pains. But no matter who wrote them, they obviously
seem designed for male prisoners who might conceivably require
restraints during transport to a hospital. That the rules have not
been adapted to the needs of women seems particularly cruel.[17]

Once a child is born, moreover, he or she joins approximately 200,000
other children whose mothers are behind bars. This is tragic for
everyone concerned but it is also potentially dangerous; mothers who
have been sexually abused in prison may be less effective parents as a
result. The children of imprisoned mothers are as much as eight times
as likely to be prosecuted for crimes as the children of
nonoffenders.[18]

It should not be impossible to prevent the sexual violation of women
inmates through a combination of tough laws, fair enforcement,
thorough training, and new regulations limiting male guards to
administrative duties in women's prisons. But nothing will change
unless politicians and departments of correction are willing to
recognize that sexual abuse harms everyone. It cruelly humiliates and
damages prisoners who may soon be back in society again, not to
mention the spread of venereal disease that sometimes results. It
seems too much to hope that the US will soon reexamine the often
irrational laws that are putting so many women in prison in the first
place. It is surely not too much to ask that it provide decent
physical protection once they get there.

Footnotes:

1 William F. Schulz, interview with Cassandra Collins, March 30, 2001.
See also http://www.fairsira.freeservers.com and "Retired Sheriff's Captain
Gets Prison," Tallahassee Democrat, January 19, 2001.

2 Amnesty International, "Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the Human
Rights of Women in Custody," March 1999.

3 The Sentencing Project, "Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice
System," 1999.

4 "Not Part of My Sentence," p. 51.

5 US Department of Justice National Institute of Corrections
Information Center, "Current Issues in the Operation of Women's
Prisons," September 1998.

6 Smith v. Fairman, 678 F.2d 52, 54 (7th Cir. 1982); Michenfelder v.
Sumner, 624 F.Supp. 457, aff'd 860 F.2d 328 (9th Cir. 1988);
Johnson-Bey v. Foster, 1990 US Dist. LEXIS 17248; Timm v. Gunter, 917
F.2d 1093, 1100 (8th Cir. 1990). The employment of men to guard women
is, however, in violation of international human rights standards
(Rules 53(2) and 53(3) of the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment
of Prisoners). European Union countries allow only female officers to
guard women prisoners though such provisions do not guarantee that
prisoners will not be mistreated. The number of reported incidents of
sexual harassment of women inmates by women guards is minimal. But
Susan Macdougal, whose treatment in prison was widely regarded as
particularly harsh and who now champions the rights of women in
prison, reports that male guards often tended to be more sympathetic
and forgiving of female prisoners than women officers did (Susan
Macdougal, Amnesty International USA press conference, March 6, 2001.)

7 Amnesty International, "Abuse of Women in Custody: Sexual Misconduct and
Shackling of Pregnant Women," March 2001, p. 6.

8 US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Prior Abuse
Reported by Inmates and Probationers," April 1999.

9 See William F. Schulz, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human
Rights Benefits Us All (Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 162-164, and "Sexual
Abuse: Guards Let Rapists in Women's Cell," The Progressive, July 1996.

10 "Abuse of Women in Custody," pp. 57 and 303.

11 "Abuse of Women in Custody," p. 5.

12 See, for example, the United Nations Body of Principles for the
Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment
and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. The
Special Rapporteur on Torture has called rape and other forms of
sexual as-sault against women in detention "a particularly ignominious
violation of the inherent dignity and the right to physical integrity
of the human being [that] accordingly constitute[s] an act of
torture," UN Committee on Human Rights, UN Doc. E/CN4/1992/SR21,
February 21, 1992, paragraph 35.

13 Many state statutes only punish sexual acts involving penetration,
as if the legislators who wrote those laws were too timid, naive,
puritanical, unimaginative, or indifferent to protect inmates against
all the other forms of sexual intimidation and abuse.

14 "Abuse of Women in Custody," p. 126.

15 See the Human Rights Watch Report "No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons,"
April 19, 2001.

16 "Abuse of Women in Custody," p. 23.

17 Such rules also reflect the fear that many people feel toward
anyone who is labeled a "prisoner." Susan Macdougal, who was widely
known not to be incarcerated for any violent offenses, reports that
when she was taken from her prison cell to a hospital for treatment,
the medical personnel begged her attending guards not to leave them
alone with her for fear she would do them harm.

18 Amnesty International, "Fact Sheet #3: Impact on Children of Women
in Prison," March 1999.