by Sid Holt
Assistant Warden Parker tells us the DOC has required CCA’s corporate office in Nashville, Tennessee, to report what CCA is doing to fix the mess at Winn. An obvious remedy would be to raise the pay of nonranking officers to the level of DOC officers—which starts at $12.50 per hour, $3.50 more than ours—and reinstate rehabilitative and recreational programs for inmates. Miss Lawson says such requests hit a roadblock at the corporate level. “There were years that the wardens would beg for more money, and it was like, ‘Okay, on to the next subject,’ ” she tells me.
Instead, corporate takes a different approach to show it means business: A few days after I worked suicide watch, it removed the local officers from Cypress and turned the unit entirely over to members of the company’s national SORT team. These are guys who “use force constantly,” Assistant Warden Parker says at a morning meeting. “I believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid, and if inmates want to act stupid, then we’ll give them some pain to help increase their intelligence level.” DOC data shows that during the first ten months of 2015, which includes part of the time I worked there, Winn reported twice as many “immediate” uses of force as the eight other Louisiana prisons combined. (“CCA expressly forbids retaliatory force,” its spokesman tells me.)
Over the next four months, Winn will report using chemical agents seventy-nine times, a rate seven times higher than that reported by Angola. Collinsworth recalls an inmate who insulted a SORT officer’s mother. The officer cuffed him, stood him in his underwear out of view of the cameras, and covered his whole body with pepper spray for “about eight seconds or so.” When Collinsworth filed a report, standard procedure following a use of force, he says he was ridiculed by members of the SORT team, who told him “that I should have said I didn’t see anything.” He says an assistant supervisor admonished him for “tattling.” (CCA says the officer who sprayed the inmate was fired.)
I enter Cypress briefly after SORT takes over. At six-thirty in the morning, the air is so saturated with pepper spray that tears stream down my face. The key officer is doing paperwork in a gas mask. A man screams and flails naked in a shower, his body drenched with pepper spray. Cockroaches run around frantically to escape the burning.
Sex and Violence
One day, as prisoners go to chow, Bacle runs past me shouting, “Code Blue outside!” I dash out the front door of Ash, through a crowd of inmates. A couple of prisoners are pinning each other up against the fence, and a frail-looking, young white guy is rolling around on the ground.
I run to him. He rolls from side to side, whimpering and heaving in panic, grasping at small cuts and lumps on his arms. They are not deep like stab wounds; they are shallow and there are many. Under them there is a multitude of tiny scars, cut crosswise—the trademark self-mutilation of the sexually abused.
“Calm down, man,” I say, leaning over him. “We are going to take care of you. Just calm down.” He keeps rolling and crying.
“He didn’t get nothing he ain’t deserve!” someone shouts from down the walk.
A sergeant and the captain come and cuff the inmate who’s been pinned to the fence. When the crowd around him clears, I am shocked. It’s Brick. The guy on the ground is probably about twenty-five years old. As Brick is taken off to Cypress, he calls the man a “bitch.”
A couple of officers look down at the young man disdainfully, pull him off the ground, and take him away. Brick beat him with a lock in a sock. He was angry because the young man had stayed in Cypress for seven months, partly by his own choice. He was supposed to come back to Brick. He is Brick’s punk.
There are many things about this incident that I don’t know—intimacy and rape in prison are complex issues. Did the young man stay in Cypress to escape Brick? Does he belong to Brick like a sex slave? Or would he say the relationship is consensual in the way a battered woman might say she stays with her husband because she loves him? Did he agree to exchange sex for protection? Did he understand that once he crossed that bridge, there would be no going back?
Once a punk, always a punk. Miss Carter, the mental-health director, told us she’s seen just two inmates reverse their punk status in the eight years she’s been here, and both cases involved stabbing a lot of people. Guards here do not turn a blind eye to overt rape, but the more subtle abuse of punks is accepted. Inmates and COs know a punk when they see one. He will do menial tasks when someone demands it. He is expected to keep his face clean-shaven at all times. He has to pee sitting down or by backing up to the urinal with his penis tucked between his legs. He must shower facing the wall.
Since 2003, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has required prisons to take measures to prevent sexual assaults. At Winn, this includes teaching new cadets about the law. “Why is the law so important?” our instructor Kenny asked us during training. “Liability.” It was never fully clear whether the goal was to eliminate rape or to suppress homosexuality in the prison. Even consensual sex could lead to time in seg. “Don’t even go there and entertain nicknames,” Kenny said. “There’s homosexuals down here got nicknames: Princess, Malibu, Tiki, Coco, Nicki. By calling them nicknames, that’s entertainment. They think they got you goin’ along with what they got goin’ on. We can’t stop 100 percent of the homosexuality that goes on down there, but we try to prevent and slow it down as much as possible.”
Nationwide, as many as 9 percent of male inmates report being sexually assaulted behind bars, but given the anti-snitch culture of prison, the real number might be higher. According to the Louisiana budget office, Winn reported 546 sex offenses in the 2014 fiscal year, a rate 69 percent higher than that of Avoyelles Correctional Center, a publicly operated prison of comparable size and security level.
A survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showed that in 2011 the rate of substantiated rapes and other “nonconsensual sexual acts” between inmates in a sampling of CCA prisons was similar to that of public prisons. CCA prisons reported less serious incidents of “abusive sexual contact” at more than twice the rate of public prisons. CCA says this data may be inaccurate because it predates the final implementation of the PREA standards. The company states it has “a zero-tolerance policy with regard to sexual abuse.”
Prison has a reputation as a place of homosexual predation, but it’s not that simple. Inmates like Brick rarely see themselves as gay and typically go back to pursuing women once they get out. Self-identified gay or transgender prisoners are, however, often on the receiving end of abuse: Federal data shows that 39 percent of gay ex-prisoners reported being sexually assaulted by another inmate. One study found that 59 percent of transgender women in California’s prisons for men reported being assaulted.
But not all sex in prison is violent; many of the letters from male lovers I read in the mail room were full of tenderness and longing. Take, for example, this one from a man in Angola, written to one of the most flamboyant men at Winn:
You are the only same sex person in my life. So you have to never worry about anyone taking your place, not even a female … Sweetie, you are a good wife. I don’t give a damn what anybody said because I saw the good in you; the true you. That’s why when we had sex I’d always look you in the eyes. To truly understand you was my hardest goal but when I did our relationship got so good.
An hour after the young man who was attacked went to the infirmary, he walks into Ash, his arms still bleeding. It’s not clear whether Brick’s absence is good or bad for him. Now, he has no protection. A couple of well-muscled inmates stand at the bars and look at him lustfully, telling him to try to get placed on their tier. He speaks with Miss Price and she abruptly tells me to put him on B1—Brick’s dorm. Inmates have complained to me about this sort of thing; even people who have stabbed each other are sometimes put back in the same dorm. I open the gate and watch him walk down the tier.
Minutes later, he asks me to let him out. I do. He talks to Miss Price, telling her that he is in danger. People think he’s a rat. Maybe
they think he snitched on Brick to get away from him. Miss Price doesn’t give it a moment of consideration, telling him to get back on the tier. When I open the door, a large, bearded man inside pushes him back out onto the floor. “You was asking her to put you on another tier?” he says. “If you think you can’t live in here, you can’t live in here. We don’t need that kind of shit on the tier anyway.” He slams the bars behind him.
The young man has two options: Go back on the tier or go to the count room, where they will assign him to another unit.
Miss Price tells me to take him out.
“You gotta go,” I tell him halfheartedly.
“I don’t want to go on no PC, man,” he says to me. He thinks they are going to put him in protective custody.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. I really don’t.
Consider the options swirling in his mind: He could go back to his tier, where a man twice his size has made it very clear he is not welcome. There, he would risk nights as a punk without a protector. He might get robbed. He might get raped. He might get stabbed.
Then there is the alternative, the only one that Winn, like many other prisons, offers to inmates like this: the protective-custody wing in Cypress. He would be put in a cell, maybe alone, maybe with another man, for twenty-three hours a day. He would be branded a snitch just for going there, which means that when he eventually left, the odds of getting stabbed would be high.
He storms past me, back to the key. “I ain’t going on no PC, man,” he shouts at Miss Price. “I just came from Cypress!” He paces back and forth, working himself up. “Y’all go’ have to drag me out this bitch, man. Real talk. I ain’t trippin’ on what the fuck y’all fixing to do to me,” he says, pointing at Bacle and me. “Real talk! ’Cuz I ain’t going on no PC.” Miss Price screams for him to get out.
“Man, I can live on any fucking tier you put me on!” he shouts. I escort him out of the unit; he’s eventually placed in another one.
• • •
During our training, Kenny warned us how easy it was to be manipulated into sex by inmates. Even male guards “fall victim to bein’ involved in a relationship wit’ a inmate,” he said. “We got some folks come in here with relationships on the outside, and it just blows my mind how these inmates get in that ear and they wind up falling victim. That’s just the way it is. They don’t call ’em cons for no reason.” He warned us to be vigilant because even in a consensual relationship, the guard could be classified as a sex offender. He told us about one captain at Winn, Charlie Roberts (his real name), who got “involved wit’ a inmate. Havin’ oral sex wit’ him. So guess where he is sittin’ at? A federal institution.”
This story came up several times as an example of a guard who had to face the consequences of his weak will. Nothing was ever said about the inmate who gave Roberts blow jobs. When I looked at the files from Roberts’s case, I learned the inmate was a transgender woman who went by the name China. She had identified as a girl from age eleven. Her father beat her repeatedly, and by the time she turned thirteen she had left home and begun stripping on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In 2000, she was sentenced to four years in prison for a “crime against nature”—oral sex for pay—and sent to Winn. During her first year, she was serving a stint in seg for a dirty urine test when, she later testified, Roberts shackled her, brought her to an office, and told her to give him a blow job. If she didn’t, he said he would put her in a cell with an inmate who would “handle” things. When she later told two administrators what had happened, one allegedly told her that if she ever lied about one of his guards again, he would “plant [her] ass under Cypress.”
Over the next two years, China said, she was raped several times by inmates, but she kept it to herself. “I was ridiculed and picked on by the staff, and that made it to where I couldn’t go to the staff for help at all,” she said in a deposition. “If an inmate did want to rape me … who could I turn to?” She became another inmate’s punk. One day in 2003, Miss Price sent her to the count room for having an “outrageous” feminine haircut. There, an officer ordered her to take another urine test by peeing in a cup while standing. China had been through this with him before—she’d told him she couldn’t pee standing up. After a long standoff, Roberts showed up and told her she could sit on the toilet. The other guards left. As she peed, Roberts entered the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He told her that if she didn’t give him oral sex again, he would taint her urine test and send her back to Cypress.
“Stop playing,” China said. Roberts slapped her in the face. She dropped to her knees and did what he asked. When she finished, he said, “Bitch, you better swallow.”
“I would die before I ever fucking swallowed anything he put in my mouth,” she later recalled. She held the semen in her mouth and spit it out onto her shirt. After she filed a grievance and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, she called the FBI. An agent came to the prison, took the shirt, and interviewed Roberts. The next day, CCA shipped China off to a publicly operated state prison, where she was held in a solitary cell “no bigger than a broom closet” and never let out for exercise. She was released from prison eleven months later.
“If I knew that the prison was going to shave me bald and send me to another prison and put me on maximum-security lockdown,” she later testified, “I would have swallowed.” Even harder than the solitary was knowing that, had she swallowed, she would have been able to finish her auto-body class, which might have kept her from having to live on the streets and going back to sex work when she got out. “I would have swallowed and I would have kept on swallowing until I got that piece of paper.”
CCA denied all of China’s allegations, but it settled the case out of court for an undisclosed amount. Roberts also denied her allegations when the FBI interviewed him, but the bureau found that the semen on her shirt was his. Roberts ultimately pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting China and making false statements to the FBI, and he was sentenced to six years in federal prison and a $5,000 fine. I have not been able to track down China. Roberts served his sentence and was released in 2012.
Nearly half of all allegations of sexual victimization in prisons involve staff. In the 2011 BJS survey, CCA prisons reported a rate of substantiated staff-on-inmate sexual assault similar to that of public facilities. However, CCA prisons’ rate of reported staff-on-inmate sexual harassment was five times higher. Another federal report found that former inmates of private state prisons are twice as likely to report being sexually victimized by staff members as inmates who were in public prisons.
Prisoners also sexually harass and abuse officers. A recurring issue is inmates standing at the bars and masturbating at women guards sitting in the key. I see some women’s reports of sexual abuse by prisoners handled swiftly, but I hear other female guards complain that their sexual-harassment charges have gone nowhere. (CCA says it “takes any allegation of sexual harassment very seriously and has strong policies and practices in place for investigating such claims.”) I once write up an inmate for masturbating in front of a nurse, a violation that should cause him to be moved to Cypress, but he isn’t. I regularly see the macho culture of prison transcend the division between guards and inmates—male officers routinely ignore the harassment of their female colleagues. “Some of them staff, they’ll wear clothes so tight you can see everything they got,” Kenny lectured in class. “They’ll walk down there and they just struttin’ they stuff. We got one, shoot, trying to sue the company ’cuz an inmate touched her on the butt. Man, you was down here every day shaking your stuff! If you do all this trying to draw attention to yourself, you go’ get some, and if you ain’t mindful, you’ll get more than what you asked for.”
In a class on “inmate manipulation,” Kenny told us that when he was a unit manager, there was a female officer he didn’t like. Many prisoners didn’t like her either, and one in particular was “bound and determined to get this girl fired.” One night, the woman fell asleep in a
chair on a unit floor, he said. She had also left the inmate’s tier door open. The inmate crept out of his tier, pulled his penis out, and “went to town wit’ it” inches from her head. Not long afterward, the inmate was released, and he sent a letter to the prison, telling them to look at the surveillance footage from that night. CCA fired the guard for sleeping on the job and for leaving the tier door open, Kenny recalled.
“Ain’t nuttin’ we could do to him,” Kenny said of the inmate. “That’s over wit’. He gone home.” (CCA says it is unaware of such an incident and that it would have reported the inmate to law enforcement.) “I laughed, but it’s also kind of scary. I don’t want nothing bad to happen to nobody.” But, he added, “We was lookin’ to get her too. He got her for us. It worked out on both ends.”
Cracking Down
In the morning meeting, the supervisor and Assistant Warden Parker admonish us about the topic they’ve been lecturing about all week—cracking down on sagging pants and homemade clothing. They are frustrated because no one is doing it. In private, the officers grumble that if the supervisors don’t want inmates to wear bleach-stained jeans instead of their “CCA blues,” they should confiscate the pants themselves. Why should the guards put themselves on the line? Parker seems to be aware of this, and he’s keen to show he’s not a front-office kind of guy. His personal goal is to become “lord of the do-rags,” taking the prohibited head coverings whenever he sees them.
“Does anybody know why we don’t want them to individualize their uniform?” Parker asks us. “We want them institutionalized. You guys ever heard that term? We want them institutionalized, not individualized. Is that sort of a mind game? Yup. But you know what? It’s worked over the couple hundred years that we’ve had prisons in this country. So that’s why we do it. We do not want them to feel as though they are individuals. We want them, for lack of a better term, to feel like a herd of cattle. We’re just moving ’em from point A to point B, letting them graze in the dining hall and then go back to the barn. Okay?”