Reporting sexual assault often lands prisoners in solitary confinement for their “protection.”
When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford broke a decades-long silence about nearly being violently raped by Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court nominee, her allegations were met with death threats. Her address was published, forcing her family to relocate; people followed her on freeways and attempted to enter her place of work. At the same time, her detractors questioned the legitimacy of her accusations, noting that she did not report the attempted rape. These criticisms are nothing new—countless survivors have faced similar challenges for not reporting assaults and attempted assaults. This is particularly true for incarcerated survivors, who know that reporting sexual abuse is more likely to result in more punishment for them—and little to no accountability for the person who harmed them.
When Carolee first entered the Texas prison system in 2016, she was shown a video explaining what to do if she were sexually assaulted. “The video did not show any difficulties and it made you feel comfortable and safe if you told,” Carolee recalled. One year later, however, she found out just how wrong the video was.
While in the shower, Carolee’s cellmate grabbed her breast. Carolee shrieked, her cellmate backed off, and nothing more happened. The next day, Carolee approached a prison officer, reported the assault and asked to be moved to another cell.
“After that, things just got absolutely ridiculous,” Carolee, who is still imprisoned in Texas and asked that her last name not be used, told Truthout. Staff did move her—to “segregation” (otherwise known as solitary confinement), where she spent 15 days locked in a cell by herself. “Then I was taken to an interrogation room where the Safe Prisons person asked me all these questions,” she said. “I told them it wasn’t that bad, she didn’t rape me or anything, I just felt uncomfortable being in the same room with her and I didn’t want her to try it again the next time we were alone in the shower. They came up with the assumption that I had made the entire thing up…. For filing a ‘false’ OPI [Offender Protection Investigation], I couldn’t go to commissary for 30 days.”
To make matters worse, her cellmate learned about Carolee’s report. Once Carolee was allowed out of segregation, her cellmate physically attacked her. Carolee fought back, staff tear-gassed both women, then placed them in segregation.
Looking back on the experience, Carolee concluded, “I never would have told had I known what process I would go through. They put me in seg to seclude me and interrogate me. Yes, it was supposed to be protective custody, but it ended up being an interrogation… I wanted no trouble. I just wanted to be moved discreetly.” To anyone else in a similar situation, “I would say, ‘Just keep your mouth shut and make up a lie instead to get moved.’ I definitely would have done it differently. When I was put in seg for the 15 days, I felt absolutely embarrassed. The other girls in seg found out from the [Prison Rape Elimination Act] sign on my door that I had reported sexual assault… I felt on display and judged. I felt like I was in trouble instead of being the victim.”
The use of solitary confinement as “protection” has long been reported by rape survivors in jails and prisons nationwide. In 1996, Human Rights Watch found that, in at least six states, incarcerated women were routinely placed in solitary after reporting sexual abuse by prison staff. Prisons claim this placement is for the survivor’s protection. More than two decades later, this remains one of the only national studies acknowledging the prevalence of placing survivors in solitary. But advocates, family members and people in prison report that this practice continues, discouraging many from reporting sexual abuse by either staff or, as Carolee’s experience demonstrates, other incarcerated people. In addition, many jails and prisons utilize solitary as “protection” for people who are visibly gay, lesbian or transgender.
Under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, prisons and jails that receive federal money must adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual violence. This means that prisons are supposed to discipline people, whether staff or incarcerated, who sexually harass, abuse or assault others; prisons are also required to protect those who are vulnerable to sexual violence. By the end of 2015, jails and prisons nationwide reported 24,661 allegations of sexual abuse, nearly triple the number in 2011. More than half (or 58 percent) of these allegations were against prison staff.
Blasey Ford’s treatment shows what women behind bars have long known to be true—sexual assault is not considered to actually have happened unless it has been reported. At the same time, they know that saying #MeToo rarely, if ever, stops the violence. Instead, it brings more problems and additional punishments, including being cut off from all human contact.
When Venus Williams, a 25-year-old trans woman incarcerated in east Arkansas, arrived at the state’s male prison in March 2010, she was immediately placed in segregation. Why? Because she informed staff that she was trans and, during her previous incarceration in 2007, had been caught having consensual sex with another incarcerated person. At the time, she was told that consensual sex does not exist in prison, was written up for violating the prison’s rule against sexual activity, and was placed in segregation until her release a year later. In 2010, when she re-entered the prison system on a parole revocation, staff labeled her “victim-prone” and placed her in segregation, where she has remained for the past eight years.
But isolation has not kept her safe. “The past eight years have been pure hell and full of verbal harassment, discrimination and physical assault by a correctional officer back in 2012,” the 33-year-old told Truthout in a series of letters. Any time she is taken out of her cell to the shower area, she is shackled, or placed in handcuffs and leg irons. “When I walk past inmates’ cells fully shackled to be escorted to shower, inmates throw urine on me, throw batteries, pieces of trash and soaps at me and the guards do nothing about it but laugh. The guards do not even try to protect me at all.”
Not only have staff failed to protect her from other incarcerated people on the unit, but they have also inflicted their own violence upon her. “Guards have scarred my ankles and wrists because they have placed leg and hand restraints on me too tight, to harm me. I have been maced because I refused to allow a male guard [to] strip search me and told him I was a woman and needed a female guard to conduct the search. The male guard laughed and maced me multiple times until I couldn’t stand my skin burning no more. I was forced to submit to a strip search. And I cried from humiliation [throughout] the whole search.”
Isolation as a form of protection isn’t limited to Arkansas. In California, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department has been placing LGBTQ people in a unit called the “Alternative Lifestyle Tank.” Since 2012, nearly 600 people had been locked in their cells 23 hours each day. They were not allowed to attend the jail’s job training, education, drug rehabilitation, religious or community re-entry programs. Instead, during their one hour out of cell, they were allowed only to shower, make a phone call or watch television. In August 2018, the sheriff’s department agreed to a settlement in which it provided LGBTQ people with expanded housing options, access to programs, additional staff training on LGBTQ safety, and a million-dollar payment to be split among those who had been isolated in the Alternative Lifestyle Tank.
In New York City, the Department of Correction started tracking the initial housing placements of the trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex individuals in its jail system. According to figures provided by the Board of Correction, the city agency tasked with monitoring jail conditions, from November 2017 to May 2018,49 trans women and three trans men were in the city’s jails. Of those, the Department recorded 16 movements to its Trans Housing Unit, a 26-bed unit for trans women that, according to advocates, is rarely full. The Department reported nearly the same number of placements (15) in Protective Custody, a form of isolation in which people spend up to 23 hours each day locked in their cell, to “protect” them from physical and sexual violence.
According to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 40 percent of trans people in state and federal prisons and 26 percent in local jails reported sexual victimization behind bars—a rate ten times higher than their cisgender counterparts.
How often is isolation utilized with the justification of protection against sexual violence? It’s fairly common, says Jesse Lerner-Kinglake of Just Detention International, an organization working to end sexual abuse behind bars.
