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Roderick Johnson
(1968 - living) U.S.A.

Roderick Johnson

Inmate

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When Roderick Johnson was transferred to the James V. Allred Unit of the Texas prison system four years ago, nothing prepared him for what was lying in wait at the maximum security facility. Like every new arrival, he went before a Unit Classification Committee, which would determine his placement within the prison. Since he was an openly gay man, he asked to be placed in the separate "safekeeping" unit for vulnerable individuals.

The committee chair's response to Johnson's request? "We don't protect punks on this farm," he said, and assigned him to the general population. Within days, Johnson was raped by another inmate. "After that he was like, the person that owned me," says Johnson. "He demanded sex when he wanted. I cleaned his cell, cooked his food. I was his personal sex toy, I guess you could say."

Johnson was in the midst of recounting a story he's had to tell many times during the past two years, ever since he brought a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for violating his rights under the Eighth Amendment (which guards against cruel and unusual punishment) and Fourteenth Amendment (which guarantees equal protection under the law). Out of prison since December of last year, Johnson recently spent several hours talking about his case with me in Austin; he chronicled 18 months of rape, sexual enslavement, physical and mental abuse - and, he alleges, indifference by the prison authorities that he cited in more than a dozen written grievances and hearings held while he was still behind bars.

As I listen to Johnson's story, I'm struck by the way his demeanor changes. As we start our conversation at an Austin hotel, he laughs easily and often, and he speaks with the energy of a man on the go with important things to accomplish. From time to time, as he describes horrors that most of us know about only from the likes of episodes of Oz, his voice weakens and slows down. When I ask how he's coping emotionally and psychologically, he laughs and says, "Well, I'm heavily sedated." He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression; he's in counseling, and he takes antidepressants and other medication for relief from the nightmares that used to disrupt his sleep.

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," Dostoyevsky wrote in The House of the Dead. In that case, it can hardly come as a surprise that our prison system reflects the violence of our larger society. But perhaps more revealing is the prison system's unrelenting male-on-male sexual violence - an observation that might be less than shocking since reports of torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came to light. Even if Roderick Johnson were not an openly gay man, his lawsuit - and the ongoing problem of rape and sexual coercion in prison - would tell us a great deal not only about our society but also about homophobia. "Homophobia drives sexual assault in prison," says Terry Kupers, MD, a psychiatrist and a leading expert on sexual violence in prison.

"Prison violence reflects the kind of everyday violence that men have become accustomed to in larger society," he writes in the introduction to Prison Masculinities, a book he coedited with Don Sabo and Willie London. "In fact, for men on the outside, prison - with its exaggerated forms of violence and insensitivity - provides a spectacle that serves to normalize the seemingly less-perverse forms of violence that are part of daily life on the outside."

Roderick JohnsonThe dimensions of prison rape are unknown, but they're potentially staggering. There are around 2.1 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than in any other country and the highest rate in the world. How many of these men are victims of sexual assault? Cindy Struckman-Johnson, a professor of psychology at the University of South Dakota who has studied sexual assault in 10 medium or maximum security facilities for men, concludes that "21% to 23% of the men have at least one incident of a pressured or forced sexual incident while incarcerated." In its 2001 report "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons," Human Rights Watch estimated that 140,000 American male inmates have been anally raped.

Most experts on prison rape believe that the numbers we do have are probably all underestimates. Prisoners fear retaliation if they report another inmate; humiliation and shame are equally powerful inhibitors that stop many victims from reporting rape. In addition, says Kupers, "an awful lot of sex that is considered consensual is coerced. The prisoner knows that if he can't defend himself, he may be attacked and raped, so he hooks up with someone who's tougher for protection, and agrees to sexual acts he wouldn't otherwise agree to."

But even when a prisoner overcomes all these obstacles - both internal and external - and reports the crime, prison authorities often fail to take effective action. As prisons become more crowded, there are frequently not enough corrections officers to provide adequate security. In many cases, day-to-day prison life is under the control of inmate gangs, and officers allow the gangs a relatively free hand - even letting them commit rape and acts of sexual enslavement - so long as some sort of order is maintained. "Some in authority use rape or the threat of rape as a management tool in running their institutions," writes Alan Elsner in Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons. "Rape can also be used to punish troublemakers or pay back prisoners who have threatened a guard."

Johnson was released in 2003. He moved back to his hometown, Marshall, in East Texas. He does volunteer work, helping former prisoners get on their feet after release.

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