Through Foreign Eyes
by Dr. Pierre Duterte of France
Is It a Joke or Hypocrisy?
W hen the Department of Corrections of California denied a prisoner living
in one of its "resorts" the right to receive a monthly subscription
to Penthouse magazine because the "magazine contributes to a hostile
working environment for female staff" and is "deemed provocative,"
my first reaction was to ask myself: Is this a joke? I couldn't see any
other possibility. Female guards don't work in facilities called "convents"!
I could have understood this decision if it involved any kind of hard porn
magazine or book. But most students can buy, and of course see, pictures
of these women. Penthouse can be bought from any place selling magazines.
People outside have a right to buy these magazines. Why not the same men
behind the walls? Don't guards ever see this type of literature?
And even if I could accept that some people can be shocked, insulted, to
see a naked woman, there is another question that can be asked: What can
a female guard expect working in a prison housing male convicts? To see
men knitting? To hear them singing Christmas carols? Can they expect that
men kept inside walls, inside concrete and steel, without any female company,
could have totally forgotten that they are men?
Is Penthouse really more "provocative" than what we (as well as
the female guards when they are not working) are able to watch in the movies?
Even on TV, aren't there now many films with women or men walking around
naked, showing every part of their anatomy, or describing sexual activities
in a more or less realistic way? Have the female guards working for CDC
torn out page 59 of the September 9, 1996, issue of Time magazine because
there were photos showing the former bodyguard (actually still her husband)
of Princess Stephanie from Monaco in a "provocative situation"?
Is it possible for female guards to be offended with Penthouse pictures
yet to think that strip-searching male prisoners doesn't create a "hostile
environment"? I think that such a practice is really provocative for
the prisoner!
I don't think a female guard can understand that for men who live in a male
environment for years, the mere possibility of looking at photos showing
naked women can be too much!
Heterosexual activities are forbidden in prison; homosexual activities "don't
exist"; and of course a sexual relationship involving prisoners and
staff is something "totally unimaginable" but seeing photos is
not allowed! So why not propose a law to castrate every prisoner incarcerated
for more than a few months, or to have them handcuffed behind their back
all the time to prevent them from having any provocative attitudes?
As the only choice the prison gives these men is to have the Penthouse issues
"destroyed or returned to outside designee at inmate's expense,"
I don't think this was a joke after all. So I must say that the only explanation
is pure hypocrisy!
Sex and AIDS in Prison
I n 1994 there were officially 22,713 HIV- positive prisoners (2.3% of the
total U.S. prison population). Twenty-one percent of the HIV-positive in
state prisons have AIDS; and 35% in the Federal prisons. The overall rate
of confirmed AIDS among the prison population was more than 7 times the
rate in the general population (Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, March
1996). In the New York jurisdiction, 12.4% of the prison population is HIV
positive! Of all deaths of prisoners, 35.1% can be related to AIDS.
All this is frightening. The very fact of forbidding prisoners to receive
or even to buy condoms shows that the administration ignores that even if
they are on death row, or in the general prison population, incarcerated
men and women (more than 1,500,000) are human beings with a sexual life.
Neither the AIDS virus nor STD (sexually transmitted diseases) stop at the
entrance gates of the prisons. Men and women having these diseases don't
leave them in the locker room with their civilian clothes! AIDS is becoming
the first cause of death in prison in the USA; is it reasonable to ignore
this fact? Is it reasonable to act as if there were no sex behind bars?
Obviously, masturbation is not the only sexual practice in prison, even
if it is no doubt the easiest and the least dangerous with respect to disease.
Rapes occur in prison, probably more often than reaches the ears of the
administration, probably more than in the "free world:" Silence
about such assault is a rule! But silence is not effective protection. Homosexual
practice exists. There is no use to deny it; it is a way for some convicts
to calm their sexual urges. Some prisons admit that it occurs because when
two prisoners are caught having a homosexual relationship, the prisoners
are "locked down" and a letter is sent to the family to let them
know. Isolation cells aren't a good way either to prevent the spread of
the virus!
It may be harder to admit that heterosexual acts occur in prison. I think
that many prisons have their "love affairs" between guards and
prisoners; every month they are related in newspapers and guards are fired.
But-and this is probably the only possibility of protection-condoms come
in from the outside.
I don't think that preventing prisoners from having sexual relationships
with their wives or husbands or with their girl friends, is human or realistic.
It just serves to aggravate the frustration, the violence. Lack of freedom
is in itself quite a harsh penalty; why add sexual abstinence to this? By
making the sentence harsher, fantasies are worsened. To have as the only
sexual substitute the possibility of being strip-searched by some guards
of the opposite sex is to ignore that there are two human beings "face
to face" or back to face. This is degrading for both of them and opens
wide the opportunities for rudeness and disrespect for both "partners."
Sex is a part of normal physiological life, and no bars, no concrete walls,
will ever be able to calm that! No porn magazine will ever substitute for
the smoothness of a skin! I don't ask for the transformation of correctional
facilities into state brothels. I just think a little dose of realism, a
drop of humanity, a dash of good sense, a bit of understanding, could produce
a cocktail that would make life in prison a little less hard for everyone.
There could scarcely be a sadder sight than what I saw on death row: husband
and wife kissing each other on the lips with a bullet-proof glass pane between
them!
In the silence of the endless noise, and the loneliness of a cell, even
with two or three "cellmates," the only possible sexuality is
shameful. This has nothing to do with humanity. If legalized sex activities
are not considered acceptable, at least let the prisoners buy or receive
condoms so that STD and AIDS don't spread behind walls, even if no one wants
to know about the fact!
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