Prisons: Catalogue of Savagery

At first, the men who composed the report on Philadelphia’s prisons tried to put their findings in “sociological, medical and legal terminology less offensive than the raw, ugly and chilling language used by the witnesses and victims themselves.” This approach, the writers said, was abandoned. “The incidents are raw, ugly and chilling. Any attempt to prettify so outrageous a situation would be hypocrisy.”

Despite that warning, few readers of the document that was made public last week are likely to be prepared for the results of the three-month investigation by the Philadelphia police and the district attorney’s office. Reading like a scene from last year’s off-Broadway prison expose, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, it is a depressing catalogue of homosexual assaults in the city’s prisons and the sheriff’s vans. Virtually no young man of slight build who enters prison is safe from attack, the investigators found. Most are overwhelmed and raped by gangs of tougher convicts within a day or two of their arrival. Their bodies defiled, their manhood degraded and their will broken, the victims are sent back to society “ashamed, confused and filled with hatred.” The system “imposes a cruel, gruesome punishment, which is not and could not be included in the sentence of the court.”

Alexander Barbieri, common pleas court judge in Philadelphia, ordered the investigation last July after a young defendant told him that he had been repeatedly raped by prisoners while on his way to court in the sheriff’s windowless steel van. More than 3,000 inmates were interviewed at the city’s three penal institutions—the Philadelphia Detention Center, the House of Corrections and Holmesburg Prison. By conservative estimates, says the report, 2,000 assaults took place in the past two years. And once a man has been attacked, he is marked as a target for homosexual advances. A few reluctantly enter “housekeeping” arrangements with the strongest attackers, who in turn protect them from other inmates.

Not sexual gratification, but “conquest and degradation of the victim,” contends the report, “is the primary goal of the sexual aggressor.” The attacks seem to be expressions of the same anger that caused the prisoners’ original crimes. In general, the attackers tend to be the huskier, more violent criminals who are unable otherwise to achieve masculine pride. They do not think of themselves as homosexuals, believing that they are manly as long as they are the partner who “is aggressive and penetrates.” The aggression also has racial overtones. Though Negroes constitute 80% of the prison population, more than half of the attacks by them were against whites.

Where are the guards? Typically, the report finds, each cell block has only one guard who, from his station, “can see into none of the open cells and only 30% of the total area of the dormitory.” Since cell doors are often unlocked and prisoners are allowed to roam from one cell to another, the violence occurs in secluded rear cells, where the victim’s cries are muted.

To alleviate the problem, the report proposes locking cell doors so that prisoners can gather only in the corridor, hiring 243 more guards, and removing solid partitions that prevent surveillance. It also urges segregation of potential aggressors after psychological tests, an increase in vocational training, athletics and handicrafts to give the prisoners less idle time. And for married prisoners who are awaiting trial, it proposes a practice that so far has been accepted by only one or two American prisons: conjugal visits by wives.