9781422280027

An Introduction

to Prison

Words to Understand

Berated: Scolded someone vigorously and lengthily. Disposition: Settlement of a legal matter. Geriatric: Relating to senior citizens. Sociopaths: People whose behavior is antisocial and who lack a conscience.

In the early 1970s, Stephen was arrested for about the most nonviolent criminal act possible: He was part of a group that peacefully protested the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia with a “pray-in” on the White House lawn. The horrors of prison assault began for him before he even entered prison. While awaiting trial in a Washington, DC, jail, Stephen was gang-raped more than 60 times in two days. It only ended because he was removed from the jail for emergency surgery. While Stephen was in prison, the rapes continued, as prison staff looked the other way or, as Stephen alleges, purposely housed certain inmates together because they knew rape would be more likely. Stephen was raped in eight different prisons, which led him to contract HIV. He later Prisons vary in security from double-barred steel cages inside high-walled, high-security fortresses to unlocked rooms inbuildings surrounded by openfields. Prisoners’ experiences of discomfort vary from living in sensory-deprived isola- tion inwindowless, tiny rooms to living at work camps with no physical adversity. There are prisons that are like farms where prisoners spend their days working, unwatched, in the community. There are “weekend prisons” and “day prisons,” and there are prisons with tediously boring routines broken only by incidents of violence and cruelty. There are prisons where the only exercise allowed is an hour died of an AIDS-related illness. What Are Prisons?

A guard locks down a hallway in a Serbian prison.

9

The Treatment of Prisoners and Prison Conditions