Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (19 page)

These events, Chino told the commission, left a lasting mark.

Even though a number of years have passed since I was in custody, I still struggle with the memories of the attempted sexual assault against me, the rape of my friend, and male corrections officers taking advantage of girls they were supposed to be protecting. To this day, I have trouble sleeping through the night, I can't undress in front of other people, and I am very uncomfortable with sexual intimacy. . . .

Please understand that even for someone like me who was able to fend off a vicious attack, the struggle to move on with life—without being consumed by rage—is a difficult one that I must manage on a daily basis. Something was stolen from me that I cannot get back, and I speak out today to prevent other young people from going through this.

Not once in Chino's saga of abuse and degradation was there even a hint that a guard might face consequences. The impunity granted to sexually abusive guards sends their victims a strong message about how little they are valued. Unprotected, young people learn they are unworthy of protection. Stigmatized, they learn that “what they get” is their own fault.

In a particularly telling example of this attitude, a Louisiana parish defended itself against charges that a guard repeatedly raped a fourteen-year-old girl in custody by arguing that she wanted it. According to court papers, lawyers argued that the guard “could not have engaged in sexual relations within the walls of the detention center with [the victim] without cooperation from her.”

“These girls in the detention center are not Little Miss Muffin [
sic
],” one official told the local paper. The age of consent in Louisiana is seventeen.

Sexual assault is merely the extreme end of a spectrum of violation that is part and parcel of life behind bars. The full-body contact that can occur during a restraint, for example, regularly re-traumatizes already victimized youth.
Commonplace incursions such as being ogled in the shower, humiliated during strip searches, fondled during pat downs, subjected to “cavity searches,” and forced to use toilets without doors all underscore the message that young prisoners have lost not only freedom of movement but the most basic right to privacy and bodily integrity.

The HRW/ACLU report offers
multiple examples of staff touching girls, watching them dress and shower, and taunting them about sex. “They ask things like, have you ever had sex? How did it feel?” Wendy M. testified. “The girls can't do nothing about it, because if you complain, you'll be overruled.”

The report includes a detailed description of agency protocol for conducting a strip search:

The girl is required to take off all of her clothes. The staff member then performs the following: visual examination of mouth; visual examination of the nose and ears; resident runs fingers through her hair and staff visually examines; resident lifts arms to expose armpits to visual examination; visual examination of hands, between fingers, bottom of feet and between toes; resident lifts breasts to expose areas to visual examination; resident separates body folds or creases to expose areas to visual examination; resident removes any sanitary articles from body or clothing, i.e. tampon, sanitary napkin; resident squats and coughs deeply to dislodge any articles concealed in the anus or vagina; resident bends over and spreads the buttocks to expose the anus and vagina to visual examination; staff search of each article of clothing.

These strip searches required no probable cause, or even suspicion. They were routine procedure whenever girls returned from the doctor, dentist, or other appointment. “Strip searches are performed regardless of how little time was spent away from the facility, and even though children are always monitored by facilities staff and almost always handcuffed and shackled when they are taken outside facility grounds.”

“You get strip searched any time you have shackles and handcuffs on,” Devon A. told investigators. “It feels like a violation.”

A teacher who works with juveniles held in an adult jail writes of
“the everyday rape of random body searches—on the block, coming back from court, before seeing family on a visit. As Marcus, a seventeen-year-old who never shied away from speaking his mind, put it, ‘Being searched by police makes you feel dirty. They make you strip down, bend over, and . . . you know. They call it cavity search. I call it rape.'”

One of the lesser-known facts about sexual abuse in juvenile prisons is how frequently
the perpetrator is a woman and the victim a boy. According to the Department of Justice, 10.8 percent of males reported “sexual activity” with facility staff, compared to 4.75 percent of girls.

Roland, who spent nearly seven years journeying among various California State facilities, said sexual contact between staff and wards was commonplace. Roland characterized these incidents as primarily transactional: youth traded sexual acts or access for various forms of contraband, from a T-shirt to a burrito.

Even if staff are caught in the act, he said, consequences are rarely serious. “Other staff be seeing it and they write a report and she don't come to work no more. Then you happen to see her while you're at visiting and she's in another job duty, and you ask what happened.”

The answer, he said, is often that she has been transferred because she is under investigation. “A lot of the female staff go under investigation for sexual contact with a ward.” Roland had not encountered a scenario in which these incidents might lead to anything more serious than a transfer, however—much less to criminal charges.

Roland did not seem to be aware that the kind of exchange he described is illegal. One can hardly blame him. In its comprehensive report on sexual abuse in juvenile facilities, the Department of Justice itself evinces a similar lack of clarity about what constitutes “consent” on the part of captive youth.

The authors tip their hands early on with this reassuring spin:
“Violent sexual assault in juvenile facilities was relatively rare and facility staff, for the most part, did not victimize juvenile offenders.” (This is the same investigation that revealed that 12 percent of youth experience one or
more instances of sexual abuse in a given year, primarily at the hands of guards.)

Only half of those youth reporting sexual abuse, they observe, described physical threats, force, coercion, or “unwanted genital contact.”

“The remaining incidents involved
sexual relations
between staff . . . and confined youth” (emphasis mine), concludes the federal agency charged with protecting incarcerated youth, splitting hairs more finely than does the law itself, which defines sexual contact between adults and those below the age of consent as illegal (just as it does sex
between
minors, as teenagers who find themselves behind bars for having sex with their also underage girlfriends learn the hard way). When the adult involved is in a position of authority, these boundaries are often—on paper, at least—even more explicit.

But in the through-the-looking-glass world of the juvenile prison, anything short of physical force or coercion is described by the Justice Department as “sexual relations”—a term that implies a kind of consent that minors are legally unable to grant.

That the very agency charged with protecting the rights of incarcerated youth would
misconstrue, or misrepresent, the law—which makes clear that there is no such thing as “sexual relations” between adults and minors over whom they have authority—speaks volumes about the culture of impunity and victim blaming that persists to this day, no matter how many new laws and regulations are put in place.

As
Lovisa Stannow, executive director of the watchdog group Just Detention International, has pointed out, “Testimony from the [Department of Justice] report makes clear that many youth corrections administrators consider staff sexual abuse of detained youth to be largely consensual, or the result of youth manipulation. The Department of Justice perpetuates that view by insisting that most staff sexual abuse of juveniles is not ‘violent.'”

“These are teenagers and children we're talking about,” Stannow writes, “and corrections staff have immense power over their lives. They can influence when juvenile detainees are released; they can put them in solitary confinement; they can house vulnerable youth with inmates who are known to be violent or sexual predators; they can even deny these kids
basic hygiene items. The very notion of any sort of consensual sexual relationship between juveniles and adults in such circumstances is grotesque.”

“People think rape is rape only when someone has a gun to your head,” one young survivor wrote in a letter to Just Detention International. “Prison officials don't need a gun; they already have full control over you.”

“Every act of sexual contact between a staff member and a detainee, under any circumstances, is a crime in all 50 states,” Stannow continued. “If the detainee is a minor, it is also child abuse. The Panel failed to acknowledge these basic legal facts in its report.”

When it comes to denial, this is the tip of the iceberg. In its report, the Department of Justice's
Review Panel on Prison Rape described what it called “competing narratives” presented by corrections administrators to explain (or discount) the widespread abuse of male wards by female corrections officers.

“One narrative is that sophisticated older youth manipulate young, vulnerable female staff into emotional relationships that evolve into sexual ones. The other narrative is that female staff members who are unable for a variety of reasons to build satisfying personal relationships with men gravitate, by design or by default, to juvenile facilities, where they find young men who are only too ready under the circumstances to enter into relationships with them that have a sexual component.”

It is hard to know where to begin to unpack these “narratives,” both of which involve insulting assumptions about all involved, and both of which describe sexual contact between guards and wards as “relationships”—again, despite the fact that this contact is clearly criminal. While the sexist assumptions are different from those evoked when male guards abuse incarcerated girls, the bottom line is the same: either way, the kids are to blame. In the view of the Review Panel on Prison Rape, young males who are (by law, anyway) victims of sexual abuse at the hands of female guards are characterized either as smooth operators who take advantage of “vulnerable” young women (who just happen to control their every movement) or as hard-up, perpetually horny boys-will-be-boys who are “only too ready” to service their captors. Female guards in this portrait are either helpless, easily manipulated creatures unable to resist their “sophisticated”
young charges or desperate spinsters who cunningly pursue a career in juvenile corrections because they are sexually unfulfilled.

If the very panel tasked with remedying the epidemic of sexual abuse behind bars fails to acknowledge that sexual contact between a juvenile prisoner and an adult guard, whether obtained via violent assault or the promise of a burrito, is
intrinsically
abusive in a setting where consent is doubly impossible (because the victim is a minor, and because he or she is entirely under the power of prison staff)—fails, for that matter, to acknowledge existing law—it should not be surprising that young people also might be confused by the experience. In the context of the extreme powerlessness juvenile prisoners experience, it may be preferable to accept the official narrative—to see oneself as “getting over” by trading sex for cigarettes—than to see oneself as a victim with no rights or recourse.

That youth sometimes come to believe the party line, with its haunting echoes of historic attitudes toward rape victims everywhere—
you know you wanted it; a girl like you; you were asking for it
; and the like—sends a troubling message about what these young people have learned behind bars about justice, power, and the sanctity of their own bodies. When representatives of the law engage in illegal conduct, victimizing their young wards with obvious impunity—when even the federal body charged with stemming this contact implicitly endorses it by imputing to captive youth a capacity to “consent” that does not exist under the law—it erodes any prospect that young people will carry from their incarceration an enhanced respect for the law.

In early 2007, the
Texas Observer
's Nate Blakeslee opened Pandora's box with an article on sexual abuse at the West Texas State School in rural Pyote, Texas.

Blakeslee has a reputation for exposing horrors hidden in plain sight (his early coverage of racism and police corruption in Tulia, Texas, ignited a national scandal), but this story was troubling not only for what Blakeslee reported—the ongoing sexual violation of youth in state custody—but also because of how many people in positions of authority had known about what was going on for years and allowed it to continue.

The saga began when a source gave Blakeslee a copy of a hundred-page report by the Texas Rangers (the investigative arm of the Texas
Department of Public Safety) on sexual abuse at the West Texas State School. Egregious as it was, that report, it would turn out, was only the beginning.

As Blakeslee reported, two high-ranking West Texas State School officials—assistant superintendent Ray Brookins and principal John Paul Hernandez—had both been accused of having “sexual relations” with a number of students over a period of years. Investigators had
“collected dozens of statements from students and staff, conducted polygraph tests on students, and collected DNA samples from semen-stained carpet and furniture at the school.” Neither man, however, had been arrested, and—until Blakeslee came along—the public had little knowledge of what was going on.