PREA: The Joke of Prisons.

Content Warning

This post addresses forced intercourse in prison. I'm not happy about it, but I paint a reality of this place. I apologize for the shock.

So, I saw someone I care about here in prison today in Medical as I was leaving from Insulin call. This was highly unusual. He looked shell shocked, his body keeping a score that I was afraid to read, but I needed to read it, needed to check up on him like we do our extended family behind the wires. I stop, and I ask the fella sitting in the adjoining hallway leading into the infirmary,

Hey (redacted), you okay?

My eyes were already in hypervigilance mode, checking him over for contusions, cuts, slashes -- the typical injuries that you find in a carceral setting from fistfights, improvised knives, and socks knotted with locks.
I was worried, but those items are, if you're just sitting casually in a chair in Medical, easily survivable and not that major. Maybe a few stitches, possibly a relocation to elsewhere in our tiny town of about 1884, and if the perp that did the damage got caught? They might get a shaking down, possibly some time in confinement ("The Box"), maybe lose some gain time if they had any.

My feathers were ruffled as he quietly gestured me closer, on the cusp of tears, and told me someone forced himself upon him.
That kind of forced himself.
I wanted to give him a safe hug, tell him he is in a safe place right then, but he's not to move from his seat. Medical needs to do their PREA protocol with him; touching him, even to be comforting (if there is even any comfort left in a brotherly gesture after this news), could backfire and land me under investigation.

I am powerless to help him.

PREA, or the Prison Rape Elimination Act, is largely toothless in the face of our current Presidential administration; it's been mostly dismantled by removing the oversights that gave it tooth and claw to function.

To wit, nominally a victim is to be placed in Protective Management and relocation to a different dorm is supposed to happen: either to a single cell confinement dorm (Y-Dorm at most Florida prison facilities, from what I can tell), or to a pod that is designed to house people who have PM status.
Here at my camp, E-Dorm gets a fair number of these people, because the bulk of this dorm is a programs dorm; the non-programs people that are here are in a relatively safe environment.
Those of us in programs like Horticulture, Technology Support Systems, the Faith and Character Based Program, or are actively enrolled in Ashland University's correctional education program (thank you for opening up to people with longer sentences, by the by) are generally more interested in staying in our programs than getting out of them.
Getting a Disciplinary Report (DR) can get you removed from all of those, depending on the severity. This makes the entirety of this dorm a lot safer than any of the other dorms: we've got goals and we don't want to lose sight of them.

The offender, if provably guilty (that is: DNA evidence, eyewitnesses, cameras; hearsay is inadmissible in these cases (gee, I wonder why /s)) is to be charged with a criminal sexual offense commensurate with the crime committed (Note: In Florida state prisons, there is no such thing as consensual intercourse, even when two residents who may be sweet on each other secretly canoodle under a blanket tent after mutual agreement was reached; as so, this is a criminal act if you see or know of it happening).
This should also be accompanied by one of the two residents being relocated to another prison camp. If it's the victim, it's usually to a small, quiet, and safe camp. If it's the offender, usually it's off to a steaming poop of a camp.

What doesn't happen at this camp as often as it should?

• The physical separation of victim and offender (and associates of the offender).

Yes, let's put the victim back into the very same dorm wing he was in just a few hours after he reported his rape.
This ENDANGERS the victim!
This exposes him to further, and often, increased violence, because now the offender has had a chance to go to his friends and stir the feces pieces.

"Oh nah, that muhfuh lied on me, said I tried ta do sum gay ish, bruhhhh"
Now that victim may very well have five, ten, twenty people waiting to fight or harm him the moment the officers stop watching.

Disincentive To Ask For Protection

So yes, here, it's not an incentive to tell the truth when someone draws their meat sword and tries to stab you with it. You are literally going to get more protection if someone drew a real sword and tried to stab you with it.

I hate to paint it

But a truth: my size and my abundance of melanin are an active benefit here. It hurts to say that small, Caucasian males (especially the ones who are straight) are often targeted by Arse Pirates, and the ones who are less likely to fight back violently are bigger targets still.

We're all in this ride together, no matter what we came to prison for. Shouldn't we be trying to improve ourselves, instead of seeking sense pleasures in deviant ways, or thinking that our warped actions are just "karma" for someone else's wrongdoing, so we're somehow in the right?
None of us marched up to a prison gate and bellowed, "MFer, LET ME IN, I DEMAND SATISFACTION! TAKE ME!". We all stood or sat in front of a JUDGE, were adjudicated guilty by verdict or plea or another mechanism, and assigned our stay in this distributed bed and breakfast network.

Dhammapada, v. 5

Hostilities cease not through further hostility; they cease through love alone.

I'm going to go cry for this little guy now.