Crimwife (19 page)

So here’s the chapter about sex in prison. Everything you wanted to know about prison sex but didn’t know who to ask, or who to believe. Who’s having it? Who knows about it? Is there any consent? Do men get raped the moment they hear the clink of the cell-door closing? Are the girls prancing about in jail lingerie having pillow fights on the bunk beds? These are the most important questions on any self-respecting voyeur’s mind. People who find the goings-on of prison life interesting always want to know about the sex.

The presumed sexual tension that comes from being locked up has made prison porn a popular genre in its own right. The set is generally a cell where inmates, guards and the odd janitor put aside their previous differences for the sake of a good old-fashioned jail orgy. Stereotypes include dominatrix female officers who love punishing other guards and hapless inmates. It’s porn for the man who loves either a strong woman, or one who’s helpless and in chains. Then there’s gay prison porn, which is self-explanatory. Something for everyone.

There is, however, a major stumbling block when discussing prison sex. It’s hard to get honest and accurate responses from anyone if the topic is personal and uncomfortable. It is even more difficult when the interview subject is highly trained at not saying anything that could incriminate them, now or at a later date. Both blue and green uniforms pride themselves on staying true to their set of morals and gender roles, which they attempt to impart to the other side. They won’t easily admit to anything that doesn’t reinforce this set of proud values.

Prison is a shrine to secrecy. Secrets protect inmates and staff alike from the wicked plans of the other. Those in blue are responsible for rules, safety and security. As soon as the inmates know too many details, strategies must be changed. There’s no point in carrying out cell searches if the targets know they’re due and, having inserted, eaten or flushed the evidence, sit smiling and waving at staff as they tear the room apart. Even rosters are supposed to stay varied so that inmates can’t learn the officers’ patterns.

Security always overrides confidentiality. If information given in a private conversation or therapy session may threaten safety or security, professional confidentiality must go out the window. If the wrong secrets are kept and trouble results, the staff member will be punished. There is a huge responsibility placed on any jail employee to know what to tell and what to keep to themselves. This applies even more seriously to the activities of their co-workers. Telling their secrets can have terrifying consequences.

The crims are devout about keeping the right secrets and telling the right lies. Silence is one of the last things they can still control. Knowing what to say can prevent them from being robbed, beaten, ending up with more jail or getting killed. They’ll plead not guilty to any charge, especially that of having sex with another man in jail. They’ll cop bedding their hot young female psychologist, sure, but not the man they are locked in a cell with for three-quarters of the day, year after year.

Even those who haven’t experienced life in the Big House know that you keep your mouth shut in there. What happens on the Mile stays on the Mile, and all that jazz. Most inmates, relying on their best version of masculinity to survive, and who are locked up for stealing, fraud and drug dealing are prone to telling lies as well. To be fair, their memories aren’t helped by the head injuries that over half of them have suffered, as well as the drug and alcohol abuse that over half report in the weeks before being arrested.

The psychologists and prison chaplains are sworn to confidentiality unless security considerations intervene. Academics rely on university social research methods, which don’t always translate the language of the illiterate particularly well. And a study funded by the Department of Corrective Services will tend to arrive at different conclusions than one from a prisoners’ advocacy group.

Both green and blue are made keenly aware by their peers and their opposition what not to discuss. Anything that can’t be sorted out, punished or rewarded in jail can be followed up on the outside. Those who have left the jail generally want to forget the whole thing ever happened, apart from the anecdotes about glory days and heroism.

As a result, stories from jail are half-truthful, semi-accurate, third-hand information at the best of times. No one on the outside knows what really goes on behind the great walls. And everyone on the inside tells a different story that they swear by.

But there are some things we do know for sure.

Prison is a highly sexually charged environment, where power struggles are multiple and frequent. Officers have control of others’ lives and the literal keys to their freedom. Inmates are the oppressed, always plotting a revolution. Both are always ready to fight. Between the crims and the screws, there is an enormous amount of adrenaline and testosterone in one small area.

We know that hundreds of men and women separated from their partners, or any potential partners, won’t be satisfied with spending every night in the cell doing cross-stitch. But apart from those cells used for observation, there are no cameras recording private moments.

The results of the researchers, the eyewitness accounts of guards, confidants and participants, and the public reports about those who were caught in one act or another lead me to conclude that we know as much about sex in jail as we do about the extent of the criminality of its inhabitants – about 5 to 10 per cent. The rest is covered up, denied and, without proof, gets forgotten by everyone except for any victims.

*

As in many workplaces, there are frequent affairs among staff. Guards fall for each other all the time. For a new employee, being courted by a senior officer can make or break their career. The whole of Corrective Services is a beehive of gossip, and promotions can depend on whispers. I have no way of verifying this, but many times I was told that the prison system has many Freemasons in high positions, which might explain even more of the emphasis on secrets.

Prison officers, like police, have divorce rates twice that of other blue-collar workers. Their job is intensely emotional, surrounded by violence, death, misery and the results thereof. They spend long hours sitting around in an enclosed space, talking about life, the universe and their work. The shifts are ever-changing. The stress of the job, its long hours and violent situations can prove isolating for officers. Their spouses and families can’t understand what they see and hear at their workplace, or not nearly as well as their colleagues can.

For an officer to date a prison psychologist or social worker has an entirely different meaning. Culturally, the Carebears are not accorded the same respect that prison officers give their own kind. For an officer to enter into a relationship with one could be seen as a security risk. At the very least it’s a sign that the officer has softened towards crims if they are willing to listen to a Carebear’s point of view.

Some young prison officers marry each other. I am grateful that I am not the product of such a marriage.

If there’s a gay male community among the officers, I never saw a sign of it. The prison staff is either very heterosexual or, in the female jails, very lesbian. There is an abundance of lesbians in the job, and their networks are very strong. They are some of the most powerful and fearless women I have ever met, but nepotism is rife.

There are a few rumours of female officer–inmate relationships, but not many. The female officers’ tastes are more for the fresh meat of new employees. They laughed about the whitegoods raffle, which happened way before my time, and which, they said, would never happen now. The raffle ran like this: recently hired female staff were encouraged by their new lesbian besties to come along to a barbecue. If an older staff member managed to seduce the newbie, they would be rewarded with the whitegood bounty that had been placed on the unsuspecting officer’s head. The attractiveness of the new officer, as well as their perceived straightness, was in proportion to the quality of the item. If I had been there, I hope I would have been worth a fridge.

Prison officers also have sexual relationships with inmates. These are murky waters to explore. You would assume that true and full consent is impossible because the officers hold the keys to freedom as well as food, phone calls, medications and the easing of suffering. Yet there are a range of scenarios, and those playing the roles of predator and prey differ.

Prison officers have long had a reputation for demanding sex from their vulnerable female charges. This may not technically amount to rape, but if a phone call to her children is at stake, the concept of consent changes for a woman. As most of the women in jail are there for drug-related crimes, using sex as a commodity is not unusual and predatory officers know this.

The exchange, though, is not always clear-cut, and the players don’t play fair. A female inmate, who has been in and out of jail for fifteen years, told me stories. She said that over time, she had seen women who had caught the eye of a senior officer or a parole officer. Pretty and young, their parole applications were consistently denied, and their cell location was changed to the most accessible for the staff member. Their minor offences were complicated by new jail charges against them, and they could end up spending years, not the months of their original sentence, being used by an officer. As with any rebellion, these women could not complain, because their charge list would grow longer and their treatment worse.

This inmate told me she had seen women forced to have sexual contact with guards in order to receive their allocated toiletries. Their tiny soap and shampoo was then thrown on the floor at them.

There are also numerous cases of non-custodial staff using their power to gain sex from inmates. In Queensland, the senior prison psychologist Michael Lannen was sentenced to four years’ jail in 1996 for intimidating inmates into giving him oral sex in exchange for favourable reports.

On the other side of the coin, an officer who genuinely falls for an inmate might find himself at her mercy if she threatens his job or his family. The studies show that, perhaps for reasons of complacency, being in the job a long time does not prevent officers from being manipulated.

While working at Mulawa, on my way out of the house one morning I bumped into a neighbour on his way to work, a happy-go-lucky bearded guy in his thirties. Somehow the topic of my job came up, and he smiled and said, “Ah, Mulawa. My father was a senior at Mulawa. Gave it all up for a works release girl.”

I had no idea what any of that meant at the time. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, he fell in love with her when she was out on works release. Lost the lot, his career of twenty-three years, my mother, the house, his family, everything. Could have been governor, too.”

“But why?” I screwed up my face. “He would have known what he was risking.”

“Dunno,” said my neighbour, still smiling, as he got into his car. “She left him a year after she got out too.”

So sometimes the power is stronger on the inmate’s side than the employee’s. Or is it abusive and parasitic on both sides?

There can be terrifying and life-threatening consequences for a female officer who falls for a dangerous criminal. In February 2012 the NSW
Sunday Telegraph
reported that a female psychologist had fallen in love with a gang rapist after counselling him as part of the sex offender’s program at Parklea Prison. This inmate had been a participant in the notorious gang rape of a young woman in 2000 that was led by the two brothers Bilal and Mohammed Skaf. The inmate’s name cannot be revealed as it was suppressed by a judge ten years ago for reasons of his mental health.

The psychologist’s name has been suppressed as well, as she was deemed a “serious breach of security” by Commissioner Ron Woodham. The
Telegraph
reported that the woman had changed her name by deed poll and had visited the inmate over twenty times, wearing an Islamic scarf and sunglasses.

There was concern that the two had married in a phone ceremony. She was stood down by the department and referred to ICAC. She will never again practise psychology in New South Wales, and perhaps Australia. She may well be charged with fraud, among other things.

Surely this is nothing like the plans she had when she applied for the job, unless she had a pre-existing fascination with sex offenders. But now she has visited him over months and has shown her commitment repeatedly. How can the loss of her professional licence, employment and status be worth the love of a gang rapist? Could she not see the warning signs?

But I wondered, as I read the short
Telegraph
article another ten times, what future this woman has. Until recently, she was in prime position to assist a close-knit group of inmates and their families. Now that she has been sacked, she can’t do much from the inside, but she may also know too much. If she wants to leave him, the family may not approve, unless, now that she has no access to inmates, she is of no use to them.