I washed them first, but then I definitely wore them. (Inmates are issued only khaki pants, which D likens to a burlap sack.) Prison underwear is similarly prickly, so when Josh offered D a pair of his own boxers, he couldn’t refuse. So when a friendly guy named Josh offered him a pair of shorts, he took them. “I was naive and didn’t know what was going on,” he explains. Of course, he has no money, and the only alternative is sexual favors.”įor D, that favor came in the form of shorts and underwear.
“Soon, however, the victim is asked to repay - right away. “They’re tricked into owing a favor with the perpetrator seeming to be a really swell fellow,” he wrote. “J.S.,” a male inmate in Tennessee, explained in a letter to Human Rights Watch that victims are typically “groomed” over a period of time before being assaulted. “When prisoners feel unprotected and know that their escape routes are closed, the question isn’t simply, ‘Did the inmate consent to sex?’ but also, ‘Did the inmate have the power to refuse unwanted sex?’’’ “Consent assumes the existence of choice,” she explains. ( which is credited with prompting unanimous passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA) says concepts like consent and coercion are slippery in prisons because they’re inherently coercive environments. Prisons,” an influential, book-length 2001 report by Human Rights Watch on male prison rape in the U.S. Joanne Mariner, author of “ No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. “There’s a deep assumption among both inmates and prison officials that if you’re gay, you’re going to be a sex toy,” he says. Prison guards warned D that he needed to protect himself, so he began “barking loudly” and “yelling in very large people’s faces” whenever they said sexual things. “I was constantly and relentlessly propositioned for sex,” he says, likening it to a shady dive bar with sloppy drunks whispering in his ear about “how sexy he’d look in a thong.” He was regularly asked “what color the biggest cock he’d ever taken” was. He was found guilty, declared a sex offender for life and sent to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, where he was placed in protective custody with 50 other sex offenders. The Texan - who asked me to call him “D” here - had just been released from 27 months in federal prison for “transferring obscene materials to a minor” after he sent naked selfies to an undercover agent pretending to be a 15-year-old boy. No one is more aware of this than the 32-year-old Texan I happened to reconnect with a couple of months ago while emailing all 1,342 of the men I’ve encountered on Craigslist M4M. She also clarifies that “rape” in prison most often comes in the slightly more nuanced form of “sexual coercion.” “Men have told me that they purposely get more tattoos, grow beards and become as masculine as possible to avoid any perception they might be gay or vulnerable,” she explains. and found that gay and bisexual inmates are twice as likely to perceive rape as a significant threat.
Led by Mina Ratkalkar, a clinical social worker for inmates before, during and after incarceration, the study sampled 409 male inmates housed in maximum-security prisons across the U.S. I wasn’t surprised, then, by a recent study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that revealed gay guys are much more afraid of prison rape than straight ones. I’d first seen it in college, shortly after agonizingly (and sloppily) losing my anal virginity, thereby swearing off my bottoming career for what’s going on two decades now. More than anything, though, my terror of being raped by a carousel of violent convicts stems from the Shawshank Redemption. Family Guy loves prison rape jokes, as do Get Hard, Let’s Go to Prison, Half Baked, Dave Chappelle, John Oliver and SpongeBob Squarepants. I credit my irrational, yet very real, fear of being raped in prison to a combination of things. In other words, I’m the guy they’ll rape first. He adds that someone like me would be better off in the warden’s office as a “trustee,” which means wearing all white and sycophantically shadowing prison guards so that they’ll protect you. “I just can’t see you being successful doing that,” Mark says, rightly, when I reach back out to him last week. Gangs are based on race, so as a Whiffenpoof ( third from left), my options were probably the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood, both aligned with the hardcore Sureños Latino gang.
That’s why Mark advised me to promptly join a gang if I had ultimately been sentenced to prison (luckily, I was not).