***** The New York Times April 15, 2001, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk HEADLINE: Little Sympathy or Remedy For Inmates Who Are Raped BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN
Eddie Dillard, a prisoner at Corcoran State Prison in California, 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 Mr. Dillard rejected Mr. Robertson's sexual advances. And Mr. Dillard, a 120-pound inmate serving time for assault, had been worried enough about future encounters to put Mr. Robertson's name on a list of known enemies with whom he should not share a cell.
But on Friday, March 5, 1993, Mr. Dillard was moved into Mr. Robertson's cell. On Saturday, Mr. Dillard was raped. Mr. Robertson, who is serving life without parole for murder, testified that he sodomized Mr. Dillard "all night long."
On Sunday, Mr. Robertson raped him again. On Monday, Mr. Robertson was taken to a hearing, and when the cell door was opened for his return, Mr. Dillard ran out and refused to re-enter the cell.
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.
The widespread social reluctance to address the issue is reinforced by many legal constraints. A 1996 law barring the Federal Legal Services Corporation from financing legal aid organizations that represent prisoners reduced the number of lawyers available to litigate on behalf of inmates.
That same year, the Prison Litigation Reform Act made it far more difficult for inmates to challenge the conditions of their confinement. In the few incidents that do lead to legal claims, the victims, as convicted criminals, do not garner much sympathy from politicians, prison officials or juries.
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 on Thursday. "They tell them to act like a man, to deal with the problem themselves. There are very few prisons that follow good procedures for counseling, or sending inmates for a medical examination."
Because almost half the states do not collect statistics on prison rape -- and many inmates quickly learn that there is nothing to be gained in reporting rape -- there are no reliable national figures on its frequency. And many prison systems play down the problem, suggesting that rape is so rare that there is no need for data.
Prison officials say that much of the sexual activity in prison seems to be consensual -- or if it is not that it is impossible to detect coercion. But lawyers who have spent substantial time investigating prison conditions say guards are too quick to assume consent.
Donna Brorby, lead counsel for the prisoners in a decades-old lawsuit challenging Texas prison conditions, explained it this way:
"In the Texas prison system, where I spent months interviewing prisoners, the policy, of course not written, is to leave it up to each prisoner to defend himself, and to consider people who don't fight off their attackers to be consenting. But many people feel powerless to fight off predators. Rape is the top of the pinnacle of a whole spectrum of violence and victimization in prisons."
With two million Americans 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 2000 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.
A 1996 survey of prisoners in Nebraska state prisons found that 22 percent of the inmates said they had been forced to have sexual contact while incarcerated, most of them having submitted to forced anal sex at least once.
Still, the next year, when Human Rights Watch asked for information on prison rape, Nebraska prison officials said such incidents were "minimal." Other states, like New Mexico, said they had "no recorded incidents over the past few years."
A survey in one Southern state, which provided information to Human Rights Watch on the condition that it not be named, underscored the confusion. While the survey found that prisoners estimated that one in three inmates had been coerced into sex, prison guards said it was about one in five. Prison officials in supervisory positions estimated about one in eight.
The Dillard case -- first in criminal court and now in civil court -- is one of the few to come to public attention. Mr. Dillard's court papers charge that prison guards set up the rape, transferring him into the cell of Mr. Robertson, known as the Booty Bandit, to punish him for kicking another guard.
Mr. Robertson backed Mr. Dillard's account. He told a state investigator in 1997 that he had asked Robert Decker, a guard, to place Mr. Dillard with him, and that Mr. Decker agreed to the move so Mr. Robertson could show Mr. Dillard "how to do his time."
Mr. 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 Mr. Robertson, 36, would attack Mr. Dillard, 23. or that the two were enemies. The guards said that Mr. Dillard had not complained about the cell transfer and that it had been a mistake, not an act of retribution.
But Mr. Robertson and Roscoe Pondexter, a former prison guard who worked the weekend of the rapes, testified that the guards had knowingly exposed Mr. Dillard to sexual assault.
"They knew Dillard was my enemy, and they knew who I was," said Mr. Robertson, whose records include more than a dozen complaints from inmates of being raped, choked or attacked after they refused his advances. "They put Dillard in for something to happen to him."
The four guards were acquitted in the criminal trial.
Mr. Dillard is now out of prison, living with his wife and two children in California. His civil suit against the guards is scheduled for trial in 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 Ms. 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 slavery, in which inmates are sold or rented to other inmates for sex. The report also establishes that many men, rather than being beaten into submission, are coerced into sexual submission by those who seem to offer protection in a gang-ridden and terrifying environment.
The study began in 1996, with announcements of the research project in Prison Legal News and Prison Life Magazine, two publications widely circulated in American prisons. Ms. Mariner was soon deluged with more than a thousand letters from inmates, many of them detailing rapes.
One Texas inmate, whose experience was documented in the Human Rights Watch report, was raped by another prisoner eight times from July through November 1995. The first time he was raped, the inmate said, he told the prison chaplain, who had him write a statement for the prison's internal affairs department, whose investigator brought him into a room with the rapist and asked what happened. The inmate repeated his accusation, he said, but after the rapist said it had been consensual sex, the investigator sent both men to their cells, telling them he was not interested in "lovers' quarrels."
The rapes continued, becoming increasingly violent, the inmate said, adding that although he filed several grievances, they were rejected. On the last day of December, he said, the rapist attacked him with a combination lock in a crowded prison dayroom, threatening to kill him.
The inmate has no memory of the attack, the report says, but others in the dayroom watched as he was raped and beaten so forcefully that he suffered a concussion and a broken neck, jaw, collarbone and finger. The rapist hit him so hard with the lock that the word "Master" -- the brand of lock -- could be read on his forehead, and four years later, the circular mark was still visible to the Human Rights Watch researchers. The rapist was never prosecuted.
The consequences of prison rape go beyond immediate physical injuries. Some inmates contract AIDS through rape.
Kendell Spruce, an Arkansas prisoner serving time on a fraudulent-check conviction who said he was raped by more than 20 inmates in one year and contracted AIDS as a result, sued prison officials, charging cruel and unusual punishment.
The prison warden, Willis Sargent, testified in Mr. Spruce's lawsuit that prisoners bore the responsibility for fighting off sexual advances, by letting others know they were "not going to put up with that."
A Federal District Court found that even if the warden should have known of the risks to Mr. Spruce, his actions did not amount to deliberate indifference, the standard for holding him accountable. An appeals court reinstated the accusations against the warden and the case against him is continuing. Mr. Spruce's accusations against two other officials were dismissed.
Even men who suffer no serious physical consequences are profoundly shaken by the experience of rape, some sinking into depression or attempting suicide, the Human Rights Watch report says. Many tell of deep shame that they did not put up enough resistance.
"I feel that maybe some women might look at me as less than a man," said one inmate. "My pride feels beaten to a pulp."
In recent years, some correctional systems, including those in North Carolina, Arkansas and Massachusetts and the San Francisco jails, have taken action to train prison officials to prevent inmate rape and to respond when it happens by seeking criminal charges against the perpetrators and medical and psychological attention for the victim. But these initiatives are the exceptions.
"We all know that when a woman is raped, it's a serious, traumatic event," Ms. Mariner said. "But it's at least as serious for men. They need to talk about it. They need counseling. Prison staff needs to respond appropriately to inmates who have been threatened with rape or actually assaulted. And we all need to recognize that this is a deeply rooted systemic problem." *****
Yoshie