The Human Rights Watch report prompted Congress to initiate hearings and a study of its own, which confirmed the report’s findings. Congressional staff conservatively estimated that at least 13 percent of inmates then incarcerated had been sexually assaulted in prison and therefore concluded that nearly 200,000 inmates then behind bars had been or would be victims of prison rape. The total number of inmates sexually assaulted in the previous twenty years likely exceeded 1 million, and many of them, as the first-person testimonies showed, were single victims raped repeatedly. Some were murdered as well. The investigation resulted in the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed in 2003. But despite the aggressiveness and determination denoted in its title, the new law resulted mostly in the gathering of more statistics, not in the establishment of measures to end the horror.
Human Rights Watch concluded that there’s a definite racial component to prison rape. Blacks in particular considered this kind of aggression to be normal in a prison setting, and many seemed to look upon raping whites as a form of reparations. But researchers also found that blacks raped blacks, Hispanics raped Hispanics, and both groups, along with aggressive whites, raped white prisoners. Hispanics didn’t rape blacks, and blacks didn’t rape Hispanics because neither group would stand for it. In contrast, whites, often outnumbered and not as proficient at forming gangs, were less likely to establish group resistance. In fact, two inmate categories stood out as most likely to be victimized—whites and the weak.
According to the report,
A few of the victims who provided information to us were convicted of serious, violent crimes such as murder, but a striking proportion of them were nonviolent felons, many of them convicted of crimes such as burglary, drug offenses, passing bad checks, car theft, etc. Of the minority of victims who were aware of the criminal history of the perpetrator of abuse, many reported serious and violent crimes. This general pattern is consistent, of course, with the idea that perpetrators of rape tend to be more violent people than victims, both inside and outside of prison.
Unfortunately, the extensive documentation of this ghastly, pervasive problem has not inspired America to reconsider its policies, particularly its policy regarding imprisoning minor offenders, who are so often the victims of prison rape. Society should take action on this issue, even if it’s only for selfish reasons. Neither the damaged victims nor their assailants will likely become model citizens upon their release. But the problem persists, and in fact rape is built into the criminal justice system, an essential part of the sentence, a de facto element that keeps violent offenders from turning on the guards. The ruling credo is “Give the animals what they want,” as long as the victims are other inmates.
17
The Insanity of Mental Health Practices
BACK IN 1955 THERE WAS ONE PSYCHIATRIC BED FOR EVERY THREE HUNDRED Americans. But by 2010 most of those beds had disappeared, and the ratio was one for every three thousand.1 Some of this immense decline in residential treatment can be attributed to advances in psychiatric care, particularly the formulation of a whole new galaxy of medications. But wholesale deinstitutionalization of mental patients had little to do with good medical practice. The patients weren’t cured. We just stopped looking after them. The most acute cases remained in institutions, but the rest, if they had no families to care for them, were left out on the curb like abandoned furniture. Many spent the rest of their lives bouncing from homelessness on the street to homelessness in jail. At least two generations of mentally ill people have lived this way.
Two groups with different perspectives converged to make this happen. Human-rights reformers believed it was unethical to keep noncriminals confined against their will. Most of these patients, they said, could be cared for in their communities as outpatients. Meanwhile, conservatives looking to cut government spending decided they didn’t want to pay for any more patient care than they had to. These two perspectives met in the Community Mental Health Act of 1963.2 Among its many provisions, the act mandated that state hospitals liberalize release criteria. Released patients were supposed to be placed in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and enrolled in community mental health centers for treatment and follow-up. But, for the most part, new local clinics never came into being, and those that did exist didn’t receive nearly enough funding. Patients, many of them schizophrenic, wandered off onto the streets without medication.
Meanwhile, available SRO spaces dwindled as property owners found more profitable uses for their real estate. The relatively limited population of homeless people at the time was suddenly joined by hundreds of thousands of mental patients, substance abusers, and unemployed people who’d run out of options. They all competed for sidewalk space and soup-kitchen meals. Skid row populations seemed to double every year or so. Entire families were now out on the street. More and more people lived in vehicles. Aging motels took in those who couldn’t pass credit checks or scare up enough cash for a security deposit for an apartment. These beaten-down rooms were often a last stop before the sidewalk. The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that 20–25 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness.3
“Too often, a person with a severe mental illness is not treated until an encounter with law enforcement or the criminal justice system,” says the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that promotes effective treatment for severe mental illness. Police officers can grow weary of dealing with the mentally ill. In July 2011, for example, six officers at a bus station in Fullerton, California, beat and tased Kelly Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic, into a coma as witnesses looked on in horror. Moments before the assault, Officer Manuel Ramos had sat Thomas on a curb and ordered him to stick his legs straight out and place his hands on his knees. Thomas, confused, had trouble complying. Ramos put on latex gloves and told Thomas, “Now see my fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up.” The beating went on for ten minutes, a blue orgy of violence against a victim who, witnesses said, didn’t fight back.4
Why did five other officers follow Ramos’s lead? Because cops on the street have an unwritten rule: once it starts, you join in. An officer who hangs back invites suspicion and acrimony from his coworkers. One day when that officer needs help, he might not get it. Former LAPD detective Mike Rothmiller described how joining in the fight became a kind of Pavlovian response. And the decision to attack or not to attack was always in the hands of the most vicious cop on the scene.5