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T A B L E++T A L K What do you do when you're forced to choose between child and career? Weigh in on the challenges working parent face in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Breathing lessons Shunning and shaming Your call is important to us. Not. I want you so bad Drama Queen BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATUREARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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prison is a hell of sexual terror. These are boom years for penal America. In 1970, federal and state prisons held less than 200,000 inmates. By 1997, that number had increased more than fivefold, to 1,159,000. Local jails held 637,000 more prisoners. In all, 5.5 million people were either on probation, in jail or on parole at the end of 1996 -- almost 3 percent of all adult residents in the country. Among industrialized nations, only Russia, a society experiencing massive economic and political convulsions, has a higher incarceration rate. Much of our country's skyrocketing increase in incarceration is because of the war on drugs. In 1983, only one in 10 inmates was in jail for a drug offense; in just six years, incredibly, that figure had risen to one in four. In 1996, 23 percent of state prison inmates and 60 percent of federal prison inmates were drug offenders. The swollen prison population is also disproportionately African-American (51 percent of federal and state inmates) and Hispanic (15 percent). Almost one-third of all black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are under the control of a correctional institution. Nor is our national mania for locking people up, with its devastating impact on the justice system (where tales of hopelessly overcrowded court calendars and burned-out judges no longer even raise an eyebrow) and minority communities, achieving its purpose of slashing crime rates. According to the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., incarceration increased 92 percent between 1985 and 1995, but overall crime rates remained unchanged. And despite the widely publicized drop in murder rates in recent years, the violent crime rate was still 14 percent higher in '96 than it was in '85. In short, America has a prison crisis. And if the health of a society is measured not just by its shining achievements but by its darkest secrets, the crisis extends beyond the prison walls. Today Salon launches a series on American's prison crisis with a report on the endemic sexual abuse of female prisoners by male guards within the U.S. correctional system, which houses 138,000 women. Future reports will include an in-depth look at a Pennsylvania death row, a report on the rise of high-tech prisons and an examination of the causes of America's prison explosion. -- The editors - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY NINA SIEGAL | Robin Lucas was asleep on a rickety bunk on Sept. 22, 1995, when she heard the steel door click and saw the silhouettes of three large men entering her cell. Before she could make out their faces, they had forced her arms back and handcuffed her from behind. Then they were upon her. They beat, savagely raped and then sodomized her for hours. When they got up to leave, one of the men stopped, retraced his steps and urinated on Lucas' brutalized body. Lucas had self-surrendered at the Federal Correctional Institution for women at Dublin, Calif., on Feb. 24, 1994, prepared to serve a 30-month sentence for conspiracy to commit bank fraud. That morning, she had gotten up, taken her last bath, put on blue jeans and desert boots -- a friend advised her to wear sturdy shoes -- and entered her kitchen, where family members were arguing about what to make for her last breakfast. She felt a pang of joy as her relatives assembled around her, and she told them not to worry, everything was going to be OK. "My whole attitude was positive," says Lucas. "I looked at this as a time for me to grow, to better myself, to learn all I could learn while I was there, to get physically fit and to come home and put that behind me and move on. That's how I looked at it -- an extended version of summer camp." In many ways, it was like summer camp. Lucas spent the first 17 months in lightweight federal lockups, first at FCI Dublin, then at Geiger in Spokane, Wash., and then back to Dublin to the minimum-security facility next to the FCI, known as Camp Parks. She worked as a landscaper, electrician and clerk in the prison commissary, drove trucks and forklifts and cut hair in the prison salon. Although she was earning 12 cents to 29 cents an hour, substantially less than the $40 hourly wage she'd been making at the hair salon she owned before her conviction, it was OK with Lucas. "I was just doing my time," she says. Prison officials treated her like a model inmate, allowing her to work unsupervised outside the prison during the day. But in August 1995, at Camp Parks, Lucas got into a fight with another inmate, and because the camp didn't have its own lock-down, she was sent across the street to the men's Federal Detention Center and placed in a special housing unit, familiar to all inmates as "the hole." She was locked in her cell 23 hours a day; her neighbors on either side were male inmates awaiting trial or sentencing for violent crimes, such as domestic violence, sexual assault and murder. It was there, in the 18th month of her sentence, that Lucas' nightmare began. The atmosphere in the men's detention center was vastly different from that in the women's camps. Few, if any, female officers were assigned to the unit, and all aspects of Lucas' private life, including showering, using the toilet and changing her clothes, were exposed to the male guards and other prisoners. Male inmates were allowed to roam the corridors and harass Lucas and the few other women detained at the center, propositioning her with offers of contraband such as alcohol and drugs in exchange for sex. Lucas refused, and tried to pass the hours reading books and planning her life after prison. On her third night in the hole a guard opened her cell door and let a man inside. The setup was immediately clear, and as the man moved toward her, Lucas put up a fight. He smashed her head against a wall, cutting open her forehead, and, afraid of the blood, he fled. There was no way of telling time in the hole, and Lucas didn't know how many days or weeks passed before the second attack. This time, a man climbed into her bed. Luckily, she was able to fend him off too. She made a complaint to the facility's captain, who asked her to write an affidavit fingering the men involved. She requested an immediate transfer, but nothing happened. No one moved her out of the hole, no one took the key from the guard, no one protected her. Instead, someone leaked her statement to her assailants. Then came the Sept. 22 attack. Throughout it the three men threatened her life, called her a "snitch" and told her to "keep her mouth shut." N E X T_ P A G E: A climate of sexual terror - - - - - - - - -
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