Today’s JOURNALISM FAIL award goes to the reliably dreadful New York Post, for its sleazy, poorly sourced, and sex-crime condoning article: “Unlocking Passion on Rikers Island,” which is about female prison guards who have sex with male inmates. If the headline’s not bad enough, the lede is: It’s one way to meet men.
But just because this has a headline and a lede, don’t confuse it with actual news. The article isn’t based on any investigative journalism, just the word of one corrections-officer-turned-novelist looking to gin up some publicity. But the article’s framed in the most salacious way possible:
The female guards working at Rikers Island are sex-starved and promiscuous with the prisoners they are there to keep in line, says a former guard.
“They would do it on the midnight shift when there were not many people around,” according to Yolanda Dickinson, who worked at Rikers from 1997 to 2004 and recently penned a novel called “Taboo,” based on the jail’s out-of-control sex scene.
…With 3,890 female officers guarding some 12,000 men, outlaw love blossoms. “It’s a soap opera,” Dickinson says.
You can always rely on the New York Post to squeeze some panty-sniffing and slut-shaming out of a story about women and sex, even if that story involves not so much sex as sex crimes—this is, after all, the paper whose initial coverage of Lara Logan’s sexual assault gratuitously mentioned her sexiness and repeated gossip about an affair she had with her now-husband when he was still married. Still, this article manages to slut-shame women for committing sex crimes against men, even as it glorifies those sex crimes as “romance”. That’s really a rare achievement in ass-backwardness, even for the Post.
And let’s be clear—what’s described in this article are sex crimes. Oh, sure, they’re not likely to be reported as such, either in this paper or by law enforcement. After all, we live in a society where men’s reputations rest on their virile sex drives—and there are few places more hyper-masculine than a prison. The thinking goes that men would never object to sex because all men want to fuck everyone all the time, so if those guards want to fuck them, hey, everyone’s happy! The Post plays right into all those chauvinist stereotypes by framing female corrections officers as desperate sluts looking for hot, hot action with male inmates who welcome the attention. What’s more, this report is based on one person’s extremely biased viewpoint, which the Post reporting as news.
The article glides right past the fact that the sex with inmates that Dickinson is describing is illegal. Because that would get in the way of the steamy tales of sexxxy jailhouse romance! Oh, they do say casually in the article that “undue familiarity” is illegal. But the law does not view sex between guards and inmates as mere “undue familiarity”—it views it as criminal. I confirmed this with friend of Harpyness, Anonymous Prosecutor, who for years prosecuted sex crimes in New York, including several involving male corrections officers and female inmates.
What she’s describing is rape, right? I mean, any sexual relationship between a guard and an inmate is by definition non-consensual.
That’s right. New York law prohibits any sexual activity between a corrections officer and an inmate, regardless of gender. A sex crime occurs when the sexual act takes place without one person’s consent. Lack of consent can be because force was used, because the person is too young to consent, because the person is too intoxicated to consent, or because the person is an inmate and thus legally incapable of consent.
If one of these men were to object to being forced or even just pressured into sex with a female guard, how would his story be received? Would it be prosecuted?
Sex with a corrections officer is illegal whether or not there was “force”. A good prosecutor’s office would prosecute the case if it was proveable in court, but these cases are very difficult.
Why is that?Primarily because the victim is an inmate and therefore always an accused or, in many cases, convicted criminal. Without DNA evidence, accusations of sexual assault end up primarily or solely relying on the word of someone with a very tarnished background. Juries are very reluctant to convict a corrections officer based on the word of a convict.
Why are women guarding men at Rikers anyway? I don’t know if it would eliminate sexual assault entirely to have the inmates and guards be the same gender, but it seems like it would reduce it.
There has been a movement to make corrections officers the same gender as inmates, primarily to prevent males correction officers from overseeing female inmates. This is the subject of much debate and litigation in New York and elsewhere. By the way, corrections officers hate being called guards.
It’s spectacularly irresponsible for the New York Post to get its jollies describing sex between inmates and guards corrections officers as “passion” and “romance” and “one way to meet men.” But I realize the Post has never given a rat’s ass about the quality or tone of their coverage—in that sense, they’re in lockstep with their NewsCorp sibling, Fox News.
And I thought I had the worst job ever to meet men.
Okay, lemme speak for a second as a former inmate…
I agree that what is happening here is clearly a sex crime. I don’t say that because the law defines it as such (tho I’m glad it does). It’s because I dare say any inmate propositioned by a guard rarely has the opportunity to decline (and a propositioned guard always has the duty to say no). The inherent power differential makes it a sex crime.
When I was in jail, the guards feel into basically three groups: those that sorta felt bad for you and mostly left you alone; those who were completely indifferent to you and left you alone; and the ones who used the power as an excuse to fuck with you. It was solely a matter of luck who you get stuck with on any given day.
I think single-gender systems may help SOME. But i also believe that they won’t curb the root cause of abuse, which is the centralization of power in very few hands and little recourse for the abused. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a great example of same-gender abuses that were about, above all, power. I’m a big fan of low-intervention prison models and dormatories (which I experienced), where the inmates are generally left alone in less-restrictive settings. This won’t work for especially violent inmates or a lot of others, but I think it’s a start.
Dunno if Ms. Becky wants comments on the journalism here or the actual issue. I did time in the (southern) county jail here for DUI and it seemed to me some of the officers and inmates KNEW each other, so if there were relationships present, ‘romance’ might be possible. On the subject itself, there were nice officers and one who would walk thru the large holding cell and step on you.. literally step on you on the floor (it was overcrowded).
@Joe: I think what you’re describing happens quite a bit, especially since correction officers (and police as well) often come from the same neighborhoods, cultures and social circles as prisoners. Thing is, when you’re the corrections officer, “romance” is still a serious abuse of your power. Think about it…if a male inmate is in that situation and DOES NOT want to get involved romantically or sexually, what’s he going to do? He’s vulnerable because the guard can retaliate against him and he has no power to protect himself. That’s why the law defines all inmates as not having the ability to consent. The corrections officers know that when they take the job, so they know having sex with inmates is a crime.
This is truly irresponsible, but unfortunately not surprising; many newspapers (and other media) will pick titillation over news any day – it sells.
“Prison sex” is a porn classic. The “female guard / male inmate” is just too good to let go. The slut shaming, the nasty attitude to female sexuality, and the overall tone follows. As is often the case, the newspaper is doing soft porn, because readers prefer that to news.
I think there’s also the overtone here, as there is with the stories about women who send love letters to men in prison and so forth, that these women have something wrong with them because they’re interested in these men, which adds to the prurient nature of the reporting. Of course, in this case, the women *do* have something wrong with them, but it’s not that they have the capacity to find men in prison sexually attractive, it’s that they have no sense of ethics or empathy for the people whose wellbeing they’re supposed to be protecting.
I think there’s also the overtone here, as there is with the stories about women who send love letters to men in prison and so forth, that these women have something wrong with them because they’re interested in these men, which adds to the prurient nature of the reporting.
I agree. And I think it’s dangerous.
It positions inmates as permanently-evil people. That’s not to say that there aren’t some truly dangerous people in prison, who it would be a good idea to stay far away from. There are. But there are also people in prison who are innocent, who have changed, who have suffered under the prison system, etc.
And not only does this bad vs. good dichotomy paint all inmates as evil (and, thus, a woman’s attraction to an inmate as unnatural or messed up), but it also tends to paint non-inmates as good. It implies, by proxy, that people outside of a jail are “safe” or “normal,” etc. And that’s very problematic.