CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (CN) - Texas jailers ran a “rape camp” where they “repeatedly raped and humiliated female inmates,” and forced them to masturbate and sodomize male guards, and one another, two women claim in court.

J.A.S. and J.M.N. sued Live Oak County and its former jailers Vincent Aguilar, Israel Charles Jr. and Jaime E. Smith, in Federal Court.

All three guards were arrested in August 2010 and charged with sexual assault, the Beeville Bee-Picayune reported at the time. The newspaper did not identify the victims.

Smith and Aguilar are in Texas state prisons today, according to the complaint, which says defendant Charles is living in Bee County.

Live Oak is a sparsely settled county in south central Texas. Its seat is George West.

“Beginning sometime in 2007 to at least August of 2010 the Live Oak County Sheriff’s office ran a ‘rape camp’ known as the Live Oak County Jail,” the complaint states. “In this facility, numerous jailers, all employed by the Live Oak County Sheriff’s Office, repeatedly raped and humiliated female inmates over an extended period of time. These forced acts of lasciviousness included, but are not limited to, forcing female inmates to repeatedly perform oral sex on male guards, forcing female inmates to repeatedly masturbate the male guards, the male guards masturbating in view of the female inmates, male guards forcing digital penetrative sex acts in the female inmates’, forcing female inmates to engage in sexual sex acts with other female inmates, including but not limited to forcing female inmates to have oral sex with each other, among other things.
     

“In addition to the repeated sexual assaults, numerous female inmates were sexually harassed. Certain male guards would strip the female inmates of their clothing and provide only shaving cream to conceal their genitalia. Certain male guards would sometimes force the female inmates to shower in front of them while instructing them to shave their vaginas. In other instances, while detailing their degenerate sexual fantasies, the jailers would pin the girls against a wall, grope their persons, verbally berate them, digitally rape their vagina and/or anus, then force them to perform oral sex.
     

“In order to facilitate their carnal impulses, these guards would withhold food and water, engage in physical abuse, restrict privileges and verbally and emotionally abuse the women - even threaten to kill them in order to compel their compliance.”
     

J.A.S. says she was arrested on marijuana possession charges in July 2010, and transferred to the Live Oak County Jail after a brief stay at the Jim Wells County Jail.
    

 ”Not long after she was transferred, she was approached by a jailer known to her only as ‘Jesse,’” the complaint states.

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Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole.

[…]

Victims in juvenile facilities, or facilities for women, have an even tougher time: usually it’s the guards, rather than the inmates, who coerce them into sex. The guards tell their victims that no one will believe them, and that complaining will only make things worse. This is sound advice: even on the rare occasions when juvenile complaints are taken seriously and allegations are substantiated, only half of confirmed abusers are referred for prosecution, only a quarter are arrested, and only 3 percent end up getting charged with a crime.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.

Progressives lament the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended. Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds. In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an authoritarian nightmare.

While the attempt to count the number of rapes in America’s prisons is new, the problem is not. Alas, it’s one quite unlikely to go away because the overwhelming majority of Americans are perfectly happy to shift the risk of violent crime off our streets and out of our neighborhoods and into walled communities where people regarded as little more than vicious animals are housed. That they face a good chance of being raped while there is variously seen as fodder for jokes, the wicked getting their just desserts, or collateral damage. It’s virtually inconceivable that political will to do something about the problem will coalesce any time soon.

via Jimmy Gerrond

The Good News About Prison Rape

Jan Lastocy only had a few months of hard time left on her sentence before she was home free. An inmate at Camp Branch women’s work camp in Coldwater, Michigan, Lastocy was serving an 18-month to 10-year prison sentence for attempted embezzlement. Prior to her sentencing, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She and her husband of 18 years were hoping her time in prison would give her the break she needed for her meds to kick in and pull her life back together.

“He thought I would be safer on the inside than I would be on the outside,” Lastocy tells Take Part. “He had no idea the kinds of things that happen in these facilities.”

Jan Lastocy only had a few months of hard time left on her sentence before she was home free. An inmate at Camp Branch women’s work camp in Coldwater, Michigan, Lastocy was serving an 18-month to 10-year prison sentence for attempted embezzlement. Prior to her sentencing, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She and her husband of 18 years were hoping her time in prison would give her the break she needed for her meds to kick in and pull her life back together.

“He thought I would be safer on the inside than I would be on the outside,” Lastocy tells Take Part. “He had no idea the kinds of things that happen in these facilities.”

“Unless you’re in that situation, where someone has total control of you, you can’t understand how hopeless it is. You’re told what to do and when to do it at all times. I didn’t take a chance on not doing what I was told.”

The abuse went on for nearly six months before Lastocy was transferred to a halfway house.

The issue of sexual assault in American prison and jail systems is rarely talked about in any kind of solution-oriented way. It’s often treated as a hyperbolic joke. “We have this stereotypical notion of ‘Bubba’s going to be your best friend. Don’t drop the soap in the shower,’ ” Lastocy says.

But prison rape is no joke—and it happens all the time. A recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that nearly 1 in 10 inmates in America had been sexually assaulted in custody. That’s out of a prison population of 2.3 million. You do the math.

Last week, however, a major step was taken toward ending prison rape for good. After nearly nine years of waiting, the U.S. Department of Justice finally issued a series of steadfast guidelines for preventing sexual abuse in our correctional facilities. The guidelines mandate intensive screening of prison staff—who are believed to perpetrate half of the sexual assaults inside prison walls—the ability to report sexual assault to an outside agency, as well as ensure medical treatment and mental health counseling for victims.

“This is a sea change moment in the decades-long fight against sexual abuse in detention,” Chris Daley, deputy executive director of the prison advocacy group Just Detention International, tells TakePart. “For the first time, we now have uniform policies in place for inmate safety.”

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday issued the first comprehensive federal rules aimed at “zero tolerance” for sexual assaults against inmates in prisons, jails and other houses of detention.

The regulations, issued after years of discussions among officials and prisoner advocacy groups, address a problem that a new government study finds may afflict one out of every 10 prisoners, more than twice as many as suggested by an earlier survey.

Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, and the rules to carry it out are the first to address federal, state and local prisons and jails, including institutions holding juveniles.

The standards are binding on federal prisons, and states that do not comply could lose 5 percent of their federal financing.

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