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A new 7-Up commercial featuring the soft drink's spokesman pitching the product in prison may be a hit with focus groups, but human rights and prison reform advocates aren't laughing. Representatives from a broad coalition of rights groups say that the ad, which includes jokes about prison rape, amounts to laughing at sexual assault. "The commercial makes light of a very serious human rights issue to sell something as trivial as a soft drink," says Lara Stemple, director of the Los Angeles-based Stop Prison Rape. "People would never joke about rape outside the context of prison." |
On Feb. 10, former guard Michael Lawrence Miller became the seventh employee of the federal prison camp for women at Carswell to be convicted of sexual abuse of a prisoner in the last seven years. A jury in U.S. District Judge John McBryde's court that morning convicted Miller of raping Marilyn Shirley, a prisoner in his custody, in March 2000. The jury of 10 women and two men found him guilty on five counts: aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse of a ward, abusive sexual contact, abusive sexual contact with a ward, and assault. His are the most serious charges to date to be brought against Carswell's sexual predators. According to the U. S. Attorney's office, he is facing a sentence of 11 years to life in prison and a fine as high as $1.25 million. Prison rights advocates such as Boston law professor Wendy Murphy, who teaches about sexual violence at the New England School of Law, hailed the verdict as a giant step forward on behalf of prison rape victims. "Indeed, the law should now send a message [through sentencing] that an attack by someone in a position of power against a defenseless person such as Ms. Shirley … will result in extreme sanctions," she said. Shirley has already won a $4 million civil judgment against Miller. But her push for justice hasn't stopped with him. Her attorneys have also filed a $10 million civil rights lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, on behalf of Shirley and her family, accusing the agency of failing to protect her from sexual violence while she was in custody. |
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TAVARES — The 13-year-old boy never recovered emotionally after he repeatedly was sexually molested for more than a year. Instead, he lashed out. First he stole a bike; another time, he took his parents’ car for a joyride, then fled from police when they tried to stop him. The state took the troubled teen from his Eustis home in February and gave him a chance to get his life back together at a Brevard County youth detention center. But on Thursday, state officials were forced to acknowledge in an emergency hearing that the boy had been raped twice at the center in mid-April. Officials of the state Department of Juvenile Justice left the boy living with one of his accused attackers, who has continued to taunt him and threaten him during the past two weeks, an attorney for his parents said. The boy’s furious parents hired the lawyer to try to force the state to get their son away from the teen he says sodomized him. |
A former state prison guard has been indicted in Grimes County on charges of sexually assaulting an inmate after a prosecutor said DNA evidence linked him to the crime. Prison prosecutor Kelly Weeks said Magnolia resident Michael T. Chaney, 50, was indicted Thursday by a Grimes County grand jury on one count of aggravated sexual assault and improper sexual activity. Chaney, who oversaw laundry operations at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Luther Unit in Navasota, resigned in January from his post of seven years, a prison spokesman said. He is expected to be arraigned on the charges next month. An indictment is not an indication of guilt, only that a grand jury believes there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial. |
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A 300-pound Brooklyn prison guard was charged yesterday with sexually abusing a female inmate at a federal jail. Randy Denjen, 38, a lieutenant at the Metropolitan Detention Center, allegedly forced a 23-year-old inmate to perform oral sex, raped her, and then made her clean his office, according to the criminal complaint filed yesterday in Brooklyn federal court. The incidents took place Nov. 25, when the victim was housed in an isolation cell, the complaint stated, and was reported by the victim after Denjen left. The victim told FBI agent Peter Kohn that she "attempted to dissuade the defendant but he persisted," the complaint said. |
When Charles Turner was first sent to prison in 1963, he did not know that fighting off rapists would be part of his punishment. The convicted burglar learned that lesson while taking a shower one day at the Utah State Prison. "I didn't see them," Turner, who is black, said of his white attackers. "It was three of them. I got raped . . . But what can you do? They saw someone who was young, didn't know what was going on, and took advantage of it . . . . As long as they have prisons, they'll happen." Recent studies by Human Rights Watch and Prison Journal magazine estimate that at least one-fifth of the nation's 2 million inmates have either been raped or forced to perform sex acts during incarceration. If those findings—based on interviews with inmates—are accurate, about 1,100 of Utah's 5,600 prisoners have been sexually assaulted behind bars. |
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In a jail primer pamphlet put out by former Watergate conspirator turned prison minister Chuck Colson, a young, first-time inmate gets a whispered piece of advice from an older prisoner: Accept no favors, never gamble, never accept loans. It's a warning repeated by defense lawyers and others preparing novice convicts for the realities of life behind bars. It's a warning about the kinds of missteps that can lead heterosexual men into sex with other male inmates—and the risk of contracting the AIDS virus. According to inmates and experts alike, most of the sex going on in men's prisons is voluntary. It's forbidden by Ohio law and prison rules but winked at in other regulations—such as the one allowing inmates to request and pay for an HIV test "after consensual sex." But not all sex on the inside is voluntary. |
A 20-year-old man who admitted raping his cellmate seven years ago in a juvenile detention center is charged with raping his cellmate in the Jefferson County jail and is being investigated for allegedly raping another inmate at another facility. Information-sharing slip-ups apparently prevented James Westbrook's past from following him from facility to facility. Westbrook is scheduled to go on trial Monday on 23 counts of sexual assault and one count of extortion for allegedly raping his 19-year-old cellmate at the Jefferson County jail. The assaults occurred from the evening of Jan. 3 to the morning of Jan. 4, according to court documents. The assaults also happened just hours after another inmate told deputies that Westbrook tried to sexually assault him when they were cellmates, court records show. |
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LOS ANGELES — Jurors convicted a sheriff's custody assistant of sexually assaulting a woman inmate at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility downtown in 1999. |
Rehabilitation, as a criminal justice ideal, has gone so far out of style in the United States that many Americans are apparently quite willing to relegate even young offenders to the ranks of the irredeemable. The passage last year of California's Proposition 21, which expanded the number of children who will be tried as adults and sent to adult prisons, was just the latest blow to the traditional distinction between juvenile delinquents and adult criminals. [juvenile] Mesmerized by visions of the rampaging "youthful predator," legislators at both the federal and state levels have enthusiastically promoted these legal changes. Indeed, over the past several years, nearly every state has revised its juvenile justice laws to facilitate prosecuting minors as adults. At present, more juveniles than ever before are incarcerated in adult prisons and jails in the United States. And, given the proven link between youth and vulnerability to prisoner-on-prisoner rape, these juveniles are also at much greater risk of violent sexual assault. |
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On a popular College Station radio commercial, an announcer advertising bail bonds facetiously implies that if one has the misfortune to end up in prison, one might want to consider posting bond instead of suffering the abuse of "Roscoe," a stereotypical love-starved inmate, who would enjoy nothing more than to "befriend" a new, young cell mate. |
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