The perversions of prison: on the origins of hypermasculinity and sexual violence in confinement.

• Author: Haney, Craig

"I think we pile on and mistreat weak and defeated prisoners to convince ourselves that we aren't one of them. That can't be me if I'm dominating him, right?" (1)

Prisons and jails are places where social identities are fiercely contested and often radically transformed. Very few inmates emerge complete unscathed by their encounters with this world, and some are damaged for the rest of their lives. Penal institutions force terrible Hobson's choices on people that seem awful at the time they are made and may have even worse--unanticipated and irreversible--consequences later. In male jails and prisons, the most violently contested psychological terrain involves the interrelated issues of power and masculinity. Incarceration is typically experienced for the first time by young men in their late teens or early 20s, most with troubled childhoods, abusive backgrounds, and few successes in life to build on. Many of them are still grappling with basic questions about the adult male identity that they are growing into: Who am I in this world? Can I survive this experience with my "self" intact? Am I "man enough" to make it through? The answers they get back from the surrounding jail and prison environments are deeply unsettling and do nothing to reassure.

The introduction into the rigors of institutional life is wrenching and painful for most inmates; it is arguably designed to be exactly that. Aspects of the process include what sociologists have termed "degradation ceremonies" (2) and "mortification rituals" (3)--the figurative killing of the freeworld identity to make one's institutional self more malleable, more willing and able to conform to the rules and requirements of jail and prison life, and to do so as something less than a fully autonomous person. Although the initial shock eventually subsides, "prisonization"--the shaping of thoughts, feelings, and actions to conform to institutionally imposed mandates and contingencies--proceeds. The process can be so transformative that inmates who adjust "too well" to jail and prison life can be disabled in their struggle to live a successful life anywhere else.

Chronically high recidivism rates mean that the great majority of persons locked up in jails and prisons have been there before. Older, experienced inmates know the routines, the pressures, and the dangers all too well. They have felt or witnessed the consequences of violating one or another of the complex maze of official rules and regulations that are rigidly imposed by staff, and they have seen what happens to persons who fail to meet the equally complicated set of unofficial expectations and demands that are just as harshly administered by the other inmates.

It is against this backdrop that I think Sharon Dolovich's compelling study of the K6G unit in the Los Angeles County Jail is best understood. To be sure, her deep appreciation of life inside jail and prison as an epic struggle over identity and survival is manifest throughout her article. It provides the larger context for the more focused analysis that she engages in and the institutional dynamics she so astutely dissects. Few researchers (and even fewer legal experts) ever truly penetrate the ugly world of an American jail or prison, or enter the subjective experience of persons forced to adapt to it. Professor Dolovich is a rare exception. Indeed, she has emerged as one of the strongest, most sophisticated, and eloquent voices now writing about Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, an area of legal scholarship that has badly needed but sorely lacked such commentators for a long time. (4)

As someone who participated over the last several decades in efforts to make courts aware of the "dark and evil" places that still make up the nation's correctional system, ones that even now remain "completely alien to the free world," (5) I continue to believe that there is far too little light being shined inside these closed institutions. If knowledge is power, then the cause of meaningful prison reform has been weakened by the dearth of illuminating scholarship done by scholars who are committed and conscientious enough to directly observe and deconstruct the cruel realities of day-to-day prison life. That weakness is compounded by the fact that there is far too little outside and effective oversight--the light and heat of correctional reform--being brought to bear on our nation's jails and prisons.

We still live in a bizarre Eighth Amendment world in which inflicting pain (imposing punishment) has become the raison d'etre of imprisonment, where the penal harm movement has provided a justification for cruelty (which is no longer necessarily "unusual"), and past United States Supreme Court decisions have given prison officials an incentive "not to take affirmative steps to identify risks to people in their custody" (6) because doing so exposes them to potential liability. From my perspective, frankly, the problem is not that the courts did just enough to improve prison conditions that they somehow legitimated the penal form, as some have argued; it is rather that they did far too little, and were effectively prevented by Congress from doing more. (7) Moreover, no official body--judicial or otherwise--has stepped up to effectively talk the nation down from the radically punitive heights that politicians and the public reached over the last several decades, ones that gave rise to policies of mass incarceration and led to the abysmal conditions and warehousing mentality that still prevail in so many correctional facilities. Collectively these policies and practices amount to what could be described as a kind of "war on prisoners," waged with the degree of public mobilization, commitment of resources; and aggressive intent ordinarily reserved for foreign enemies. (8) As this war moves well into its fourth decade, it has become prohibitively expensive to conduct and "victory" seems as elusive now as ever. Despite some tantalizing indications that hostilities may be coming to a close, it is still not clear whether or how a comprehensive "ceasefire" will be declared. (9)

Like Professor Dolovich, I, too, "fervently wish things were otherwise" (10) in our nation's jails and prisons. But, after years of documenting and trying to alleviate the profound levels of suffering that exist in these places in the hope of making them fundamentally and comprehensively better, I have arrived at the same position as she--unwilling to wait for that perfect world that affords us the luxury of implementing only truly overarching or completely effective solutions to institutional injustices. Instead, we have learned to grudgingly accept--and sometimes even to thankfully celebrate--what are still too often "imperfect half-measures." (11) Despite this concession, however, I do think that it is possible to both support and help implement practical (albeit imperfect) reforms that are designed to lessen the day-to-day pains of imprisonment and

at the same time to use analysis and action to delegitimate and to challenge the most profound and far-reaching injustices that plague our jails and prisons. This includes, among other things, working against the "prison culture of hypermasculinity." (12) Not only do I think that it is possible to simultaneously undertake these joint missions, but I think Dolovich's own exceptional work, and the K6G unit that is the subject matter of her current article, demonstrate that it is.

To be sure, as Professor Dolovich thoughtfully points out, the K6G unit regrettably employs "official inquiry into the sexual orientation of arrestees in close proximity to others," (13) clearly relies on admissions criteria that are "sorely underinclusive," (14) seems to apply flawed definitions that require "essentializing and oversimplifing the inherently fluid and even mercurial character of same-sex attraction," (15) and in the final analysis implements a state-sanctioned policy of segregation that admittedly "can lead to labeling" that might be "both demoralizing and dangerous." (16) Notwithstanding all of that, like Professor Dolovich I believe that the choice to protect at least some vulnerable inmates from the traumatic victimization that certainly would befall them is a straightforward and well-justified one to make. So I applaud Professor Dolovich for having produced scholarship that not only confronts many vexing penological issues but also, in its reasoned and persuasive defense of K6G, advances the critically important cause of practical jail and prison reform.

THE DESPERATE AND DEHUMANIZED CONTEXT OF PRISON SEXUAL VIOLENCE

In fact, Professor Dolovich does such an outstanding job in explaining the subjectivity of the gay and trans women who live in K6G, and how and why this special unit is worth the sustained attention and defense that she gives it--carefully and convincingly "making the case for the program's success" (17)--that I have very little to add. She tells a powerful story about a valuable and innovative program whose presence and longevity inside the nation's largest (and one of its most troubled) jails makes it all the more remarkable. Professor Dolovich's observations and analysis are meticulous and insightful. Although she praises the K6G unit for its significant achievement--continuing to function as such an exceptional program despite the truly problematic and dysfunctional environment in which it is housed--Dolovich also acknowledges the program's persistent and seemingly insurmountable limitations. She takes both sides into account before giving K6G her considered blessing. As I say, there is little that I can contribute to her compelling assessment.

Instead, I want to undertake the politically incorrect and unpalatable task of attempting to explain the behavior of the men who engage in the awful acts that precipitated K6G's creation and justify its continued existence--the rapists and predators who roam mainline jails and prisons and...