DoJ Spends $1 Million Studying Prison Rape and Concludes it Never Happens

Linkage
Fleisher said he spent more than 700 hours interviewing 564 randomly chosen inmates at dozens of institutions across the country. He said he never met anyone who claimed to be a victim of sexual violence.

"Prison rape worldview doesn't interpret sexual pressure as coercion," he wrote. "Rather, sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening."

The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.

Oh Boy, Oh Boy, a Link!
In the 1999 training manual of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the agency acknowledged that, on average, "three out of 10 newly admitted offenders will be forcibly raped within 48 hours."

The Missing Link

Prison rape has become a hidden epidemic. Some experts estimate that between 300,000 to 600,000 men and boys are victimized every year. Dr. Cindy Struckman-Johnson, who did a comprehensive study of the Nebraska prison system, found that 22 percent of male inmates acknowledged being pressured or forced into sex acts. A horrifying 25 percent of this group say they endured gang rapes, leading many inmates to enter into a "consensual" relationship with another inmate, who then protects him from far-worse gang rapes. Sexual assault and forced prostitution thus become a second form of punishment, especially for young offenders.

These gruesome statistics are all too personal for me. I've visited inmates in over 600 prisons and talked with many rape victims; I've seen fresh blood on cell floors where an attack had just occurred.

Heriberto “Eddie” Seda waited 35 years to have his first romantic kiss. It happened last spring, when Eddie pressed his mouth through the three-inch-wide space between the prison bars and found fellow Attica inmate Synthia-China Blast, a preop male-to-female transsexual, No. 97A0308.


“It was weird, I thought he was going to eat my lips,” Synthia recalls. “I’d read a lot of books about serial killers, and I didn’t trust him, like he might bite my face off or something.” But instead, Eddie Seda, known as New York’s copycat Zodiac Killer, started shaking. “I felt like I was 11 and having my first kiss with a bowl of Jell-O, because he didn’t know how to kiss for nothing. He was a virgin,” adds Synthia, 29. Then she laughs. “Let’s just say he’s a pro now.”


Seda has been locked up since 1996 for killing three people and trying to kill five others. The only person who has ever visited him in the maximum-security prison is his mother, Gladys; and before his incarceration, he says, “I had no friends. I had nobody.” After seven years behind bars, he was lonely, he says, and couldn't help but be attracted to Synthia, with her tweezed eyebrows and her handmade dresses. He was so taken with her that he was willing to overlook the fact that she was a former drug dealer and Latin King gang member—the exact type of person he’d wanted to extirpate from his Brooklyn neighborhood.

newyorkmetro.com