Indictment  

America's Prisons: Factories for Perverting Justice

by Ralph Reiland

Too often in America's prisons, the guards are criminals, and the criminals are victims.

---

When it furthers the U.S. government's interest, it will "protect" its citizens aggressively, like a cloying wet nurse. But when protecting its subjects would entail restraining its own power, the state is far more lax. For example, the government has two very different policies on hostile environments and sex.

Consider the recent murder of John Geoghan, the defrocked priest who was murdered in his prison cell on August 23. Reporter Meghan Dorney of The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, reported that "ongoing investigation into his death revealed that his killer might have plotted his murder for over a month. According to authorities, Geoghan, 68, was attacked by John Druce, 37, a fellow inmate, in his cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, just before noontime. Druce reportedly followed Geoghan into his cell after lunch and jammed the electronic cell door to prevent guards from opening it. He then tied Geoghan's hands behind his back and gagged him before repeatedly jumping onto his body from a bed. He also beat him with his fists before strangling him with a stretched out sock."

An autopsy showed that Geoghan's ribs were broken, his lung punctured, and that he'd died of strangulation and blunt trauma.

"Geoghan's attacker, a reputed racist and member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation, was serving a life sentence for the 1988 murder of George Rollo, a bus driver from Gloucester," reports Dorney. "When Rollo made what Druce felt was a sexual advance, he reportedly attacked and beat Rollo, who had picked him up hitchhiking, before stuffing him in the trunk of the car. Druce then drove to a wooded area in Beverly, where he strangled Rollo."

Mr. Druce, in short, may simply have executed his passions in prison in much the same way he did on the outside, only this time around with a more well-known and tarnished target. Dorney quotes Worcester District Attorney John Conte as saying that Druce had "a long-standing phobia, it appears, towards homosexuals of any kind." In addition, Druce seemed proud of the murder, said Conte, and "looked upon Geoghan as a prize."

Dorney concludes by suggesting that mismanagement had turned Geoghan's 9- to 10-year jail term into a death sentence: "Robert Assad, an inmate who was in the same unit as Geoghan, claims that he warned prison guards twice that the former priest was in danger, but his warnings were ignored. Reports have also surfaced that another inmate may have offered to pay Druce to kill Geoghan. Geoghan had been moved from the state prison in Concord to protective custody at the Shirley facility in April because he feared for his safety. He had reportedly told prison officials that inmates had been urinating and defecating on his pillow and tampering with his food."

Double Standard

When I heard about Geoghan's murder, I was reminded of the Goya controversy at Penn State. A female professor charged that the mere presence on a classroom wall of a copy of Francisco de Goya's painting "Naked Maja" constituted a "hostile environment," i.e., an actionable level of discrimination and sexual harassment. "What I am saying," she explained, "is that it's a nude picture of a woman, which encourages males to make remarks about body parts." The school, knowing how McDonald's gets sued by fat kids who've downed too many Quarter Pounders, and knowing how easily pockets have been emptied at the courthouse for the alleged creation or toleration of a "hostile environment," took down the painting.

The same government that's turning a blind eye to much of the violence and depravity that goes on in its own institutions is telling the rest of us not to tell too many jokes at the water cooler. Rodney Hulin, for instance, a 17-year-old, was incarcerated after setting a Dumpster on fire. After being raped repeatedly while housed in an adult prison, he committed suicide. At around the same time, a Minneapolis woman who took a job at a sex-toy shop filed a lawsuit. Seeking a sizable transfer from her employer's wallet, she claimed a "hostile environment" because of all the off-color talk that somehow happened to crop up during the workday.

Death Sentence

A few days after I heard that Geoghan had been killed, I spoke with Keith DeBlasio, who had served time in federal prison for a nonviolent securities offense. Part of his punishment was being raped 30 times or so over a four-month period in the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Mich. "I'm HIV positive," he explained. "I'm okay, so far. There are times when my hands give out and I can't hold a pen or a glass. I was helping my mother paint when I got out, and I couldn't hold the paintbrush. I just sat down and cried. At times, my legs give out, not being able to hold my weight. There are side effects from the medicine, and I worry about my immune system."

DeBlasio began his jail time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, W.Va., a minimum security facility. He says his trouble started when he reported that corrections officials were breaking the rules of the institution. "They were in charge, and they were doing worse things, financially, than what I was in for. One guy was billing the institution for materials and having them delivered to his landscaping business on the outside. They ended up charging me with misconduct, a charge I was later cleared of, and transferring me to Michigan.

"I told the prison officials even before the rapes began that I felt threatened by this certain person, a leader in a gang called the Vice Lords, when he started to harass and threaten me. Instead of doing anything, they ignored the warning. They put him in the bunk above me! I couldn't stop the attacks. His gang members would stand watch. If I said anything, there'd be repercussions. I'd seen officers tip off my attacker about pending searches, etc. He was dealing drugs, and he had AIDS. In the end, I got sick, HIV positive. I'm left with something I can't get rid of."

DeBlasio, in short, got a life sentence. He explains that his assailant got off with a plea agreement and that nothing was done to the prison staff. "Basically, they have immunity, the whole system. They're not accountable, unless they're directly involved. I've seen officials stand by and watch the assaults. I've seen them wait and watch in their booths until it's over. Some of them think the person being attacked deserves it.

"With mandatory minimums, there are 16- and 17-year-old kids going into the prison system, a lot of them for nonviolent drug offenses. We're bringing in kids, and they're being subjected to this. You have 17- and 19-year-old kids being traded for cigarettes. It's ridiculous to say they deserve this for what they've done. In hearings I attended at the General Assembly in Virginia, it was reported that 85 percent of Virginia's prisoners are in for nonviolent offenses. The system's doing more violence than they did."

Now an advocate for prison reform, DeBlasio told me what he remembers thinking, at night in bed, with his rapist in the bunk above. "I'm thinking, I could cut his throat; then it would be over. But it wouldn't have been. I'd have been in there for life, for murder. The biggest thing for me is that this happens so often."

The numbers aren't easy to come by. Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute and past president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, estimates that some 175,000 inmates in the U.S. prison system are sexually assaulted each year.

Here's one example, one story, provided by the mother of an ex-prisoner after I'd written about prison rapes: "My son, in 1976, when he was 19, committed an armed robbery. I'll never understand why. I don't think he did either and he was sent to prison. He was a kid from the suburbs, and he was thrown to the wolves. The first night he was put in with a man who was serving a prison term for murder. He was raped at Joliet prison in Illinois. I had always hoped he had been lucky and escaped this kind of torture, but I found out just a few months before his death that he had not escaped this horror. He told me how when we would deposit money for him to buy cigarettes and junk food, the gangs would come around to his cell for whatever he had bought. The prisons are controlled by the inmates.

"He was released after two and a half years and struggled for a few more years with alcoholism, and finally turned it around and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, and went on to receive a master's. He was an artist and taught part time at the Milwaukee School of Art and Design.

"It took my son 20 years to die from his experiences in our prisons. He killed himself at the age of 40. He was accountable for his crime, but no one is accountable for the heinous crime against him and so many others."

Some people feel that prisoners are getting what they deserve. Here, for example, is an email I received, a classic blame-the-victim take on things: "I was incarcerated for eleven years, began my sentence as a juvenile offender certified as an adult, and placed in a brand-new super-max with some of the most violent offenders in the world. I was never raped. These men who are raped, and I've seen it firsthand, are raped because they're cowards. That may sound mean, but it is true. I have limited compassion for these men. They could've stopped what happened."

Another reader, describing her ex-prisoner son as "a Grateful Dead-type who thought everyone was wonderful and we should all just get high together," took a more libertarian approach: "Good Americans who want to use drugs that are not 'government-sanctioned' are spending precious years of their lives in prison for no reason other than using their supposed freedom to control their own state of mind. My son spent five of his 27 God-given years in prison. He went to prison for only consensual drug use (never committed a 'crime') and did not come out a nicer guy.

"His grandma and I actually paid a member of a gang when he was in one prison for his protection. When he was moved and threatened with pain (rape, death, who knows), he got us a name and we sent money to that prisoner's family in Indianapolis. In another prison, he was able to hook up with the white Nazi group that protected him

"How can they ever think they can stop personal drug use in a free society? Even if they manage to turn our wonderful country into a police state in the misguided attempt to make us a 'drug-free America' (and further their own careers), drug use will continue just as today. But America won't."

Meanwhile, back at a place a bit safer, the University of Nebraska, seeking to steer clear of the justice system, ordered a graduate student to remove a photo of his bikini-clad wife from his desk because several of his more easily offended co-workers said they felt the picture was creating a "hostile environment."

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.