Inmates' Coercion Makes Sex a Currency
Originally published in The Beacon Journal, March 17, 2002
In a jail primer pamphlet put out by former Watergate conspirator turned prison minister Chuck Colson, a young, first-time inmate gets a whispered piece of advice from an older prisoner:
Accept no favors, never gamble, never accept loans.
It's a warning repeated by defense lawyers and others preparing novice convicts for the realities of life behind bars.
It's a warning about the kinds of missteps that can lead heterosexual men into sex with other male inmates—and the risk of contracting the AIDS virus.
According to inmates and experts alike, most of the sex going on in men's prisons is voluntary. It's forbidden by Ohio law and prison rules but winked at in other regulations—such as the one allowing inmates to request and pay for an HIV test "after consensual sex."
But not all sex on the inside is voluntary.
Rape happens in Ohio prisons. So does another form of coerced sex—to settle debts.
The state anted up $136,000 just a year ago to compensate an inmate who was repeatedly sodomized, with a makeshift knife held to his throat, after guards put him in a cell with a known sexual predator at the Allen Correctional Institution near Lima.
Both men were in a segregated ward, the victim for signing a guard's name on a work document, and the rapist for trying to sexually assault other men.
Overall, the state reports a handful of rapes annually, culled from a much higher number of rape complaints.
Ohio had 27 substantiated sexual assaults in its prisons from 1998 to 2000.
The state doesn't routinely keep track of rape complaints, although it did in 1999; inmates reported 55 rapes. Correctional officials ruled that 47 of those reported incidents were either made up or were voluntary sex, not rape.
Human Rights Watch, a Washington, D.C., think tank, concluded last year that rape was vastly underreported. The organization took out ads in prison newsletters soliciting stories from inmates. The stories, including some from Ohio, were chilling.
Most of the prisoners who told Human Rights Watch they'd been forced to have sex never complained to guards, because of embarrassment and fear.
Two academic studies also indicate that forced sex is more common than prison officials say. Both are by Cindy Struckman Johnson of the University of South Dakota, one of the top prison-behavior researchers in the country.
Struckman Johnson found that about 20 percent of the inmates who filled out anonymous surveys said they'd been forced to have sex in prison.
She also found that less than a third of those who said they'd been raped reported it.
(Struckman Johnson agreed not to reveal which Midwestern prisons she researched, as a condition of being allowed inside.)
"Fear is by far the most widely used tactic to get people to do things they wouldn't do on the outside," one inmate told researcher Christopher Krebs.
"It's do this, or I'll kick your ass," said Richard Tewksbury, a University of Louisville professor and another top researcher of prison life.
Most coerced sex is a result of debt—the debt that Colson's fictional older inmate warns about.
"If you are indebted in any way, shape or form inside prison, sex is one of the most common ways to get payback," Tewksbury said.
Gambling is a major route into debt in prison.
"They bet on everything," said Randy, a former inmate from Cuyahoga County. "You play ball in the rec center, and you lose, you got to pay up."
Accepting a gift or loan, even of something as small as a pack of cigarettes or the popular Black & Mild cigars, can get an inmate in trouble, too.
Stores run by prisoners plying their outside hustling skills inside are bootleg competitors to the prison commissaries: "It's like when they sold dope on the outside, except it's a different product now," said Derek, who was released from prison last summer.
A few packs of smokes can leave an inmate owing more than $100, while inmates in debt have only their $18 to $20 monthly prison pay and their families to rely on.
"They say, 'My people will send money,'" Derek said.
But inmates' friends and families get tired of sending money, particularly when it's never enough, Derek said.
Then sex becomes money: "That's when the trauma starts," he said.
From time to time, guards sweep through and crack down on gambling and its offshoots, "usually after a family member on the outside complains about extortion," Derek said.
The problem is worst when more hard-core prisoners earn their way into less-restrictive prisons, he said.
"One of these guys comes into a minimum-security place and sees a means of being an intimidator," Derek said.
"He comes from Lucasville or Mansfield, and he knows how to play the psychological game."
Young inmates are particularly vulnerable, said David, another former inmate from Akron: "They don't have a clue. They're perfect puppets. You can get them to do anything if you finesse them. You can con them, a lot more than you can con an older guy."
Men who have sex in prison don't talk about it when they get back outside—particularly those coerced into it.
The inmate who won the $136,000 settlement from the state, for instance, has never told any member of his family what happened to get him that settlement, according to his lawyer.
Rick Lange, an AIDS prevention specialist under contract with the Akron Health Department, recalls meeting with recently released state prisoners last fall at the Oriana House halfway house.
The meetings were part of Akron's preparation to bid in the next round of AIDS prevention funding, which begins in 2003.
Lange had asked former inmates to talk about what behaviors might have put them at risk.
The former inmates couldn't think of any, Lange said, other than the odd case of intravenous drug use, until one of them interrupted, saying "Come on, we all know what happens in there."
The former inmates then drew an eerie portrait for Lange, describing fellow prisoners who shaved their facial and body hair and took on a feminine gait in prison, then changed back shortly before their release.
Lange said it took him a minute to realize what the former inmates were saying: that men who'd had sex in prison were remasculinizing themselves, in preparation for their resumed lives outside the prison.
Once outside, heterosexual men who had sex in prison "go back to what they were, and they hope nobody finds out what they did on the inside," said Derek.
"The fear of being found out, it hurts."
