Prison Rape Bill Advances

A cellmate raped LaResse Harvey in prison; when she tried to tell authorities, no one believed her. She relived that episode for the first time publicly in emotional testimony before state legislators — to help New Haven’s Pat Dillon find a way to assist others in a similar predicament.

Harvey, the policy director of a Connecticut’s A Better Way Foundation, was one of several people to testify in favor of a bill being put forward by state Rep. Dillon.

The legislation, House Bill No. 6642, is designed to help prevent sexual assault in state prisons by requiring the state to institute policies recommended by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Those provisions include ​“zero tolerance of sexual abuse,” changes in training of prison staff, screening of inmates, and collection of data.

The bill Thursday received the favorable recommendation of the Judiciary Committee and is on its way to a vote by the full state House of Representatives. The plan has the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and the state Department of Correction.

“It’s a statement that sexual assault in prison is preventable,” Dillon said of her bill. Despite the popular conception of rape as an ​“inevitable feature of prison life,” it is not, and it can be prevented, she said.

Dillon said she originally got involved in the issue of prison sexual assault several years ago when she became aware of a spike in HIV among ​“women of color.” Looking into a theory that the HIV was spreading from sexual assault in prisoners who were then released in New Haven, Dillon found that the Office of Claims Commissioner doesn’t keep records on the number of inmates with claims they were raped in state prison. 

A staffer from the Office of Claims Commissioner said that while records of individual inmate complaints are kept, they are not separated out or classified by type of complaint.

Dillon said she then found help from the work of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a bipartisan group set up by President George W. Bush in 2003. She said the commission made the right move by treating prison rape as a public health matter rather than as a criminal matter, which means a focus on prevention rather than simply prosecution.

Dillon said two kinds of inmates are more likely to be victims of sexual assault: non-violent offenders and physically smaller people. That means that a lot of sexual assaults can be prevented by simple prison management techniques, Dillon said. ​“You don’t take a 120-pound non-violent offender and put them in a cell with a 200-pound sex offender.”

Sexual assault in prisons can have lasting ripple effects, including trauma issues, diseases, and the chance that some victims are more likely to become aggressors themselves, Dillon said.

She said the bill is placed in opposition to a popular conception that prison rape is not only a unchangeable fact of life for inmates, but that it is somehow part of the punishment for crimes committed. Prison rape is not acceptable and far from unavoidable, Dillon said. In fact, it should be even easier to stop rape in a controlled environment like a prison than it is elsewhere, she said. ​“If we can prevent sexual assault at all, a lock-up is where we can do it.”

“This bill makes a clear statement that rape is a crime, not a punishment,” said David McGuire, a staff attorney with the Connecticut American Civil Liberties Union, at an April 4 public hearing on the bill.

He said that the Bureau of Justice Statistics found in 2007 that 60,500 prisoners had been sexually abused in the last year nationwide and that 12 percent of incarcerated juveniles had experience sexual abuse. Both of these statistics are likely lower than the actual numbers, since prison sexual assault is ​“definitely” under-reported, McGuire told the committee.

Later in the evening’s testimony, legislators heard from Harvey.

“When I was incarcerated from 1993 to 1999 … I was raped by a woman and I had no one to report to,” she said. ​“And when I did try to report it, staff did not believe me, because again, people see it as one inmate’s word against another … And it took months for me to actually get to support and it was from a psychiatrist who was new to the facility.”

Harvey said she was the roommate of the woman who assaulted her for eight months, ​“so, quote/unquote, her bitch in prison.”

Harvey said the legislation is also important to prevent instances of female inmates becoming pregnant while in prison. She said when she was in prison, ​“there were also several women who were in segregation who did not have any contact with anyone else except for guards who would come around nine months later and end up pregnant, and there is no conjugal visits in segregation.”

On Monday, Harvey said her testimony at the Capitol was the first time she had spoken about her rape, outside of prison. She said when she tried to report the incidents in prison, the authorities believed her cellmate, not her.

After that, ​“I just went into survival mode,” she said. She just focused on getting through each day. ​“Sexual abuse has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power and control. You just learn how to survive.”

After eight months of regular abuse, Harvey finally found the strength to ask again for help, from a new counselor, she said. She found inspiration from a poem by Maya Angelou, one that she still relies on to this day, she said.

The counselor was able to get her out of the cell she shared with the woman who was assaulting her, Harvey said.

Harvey, who’s 39, spent five and half years in prison on a manslaughter charge. ​“I got jumped on my 21st birthday. I stabbed a young lady and she passed away.” She was released in 1999.

Harvey said she spoke at the hearing because it’s time that the public understands what prison is like. ​“As much as legislators believe it’s all TV and basketball and three hots and a cot, that is not prison life.”

“I just hope that more people will come forward and help pass this legislation,” she said. ​“That is my hope. You don’t know how many people you might be healing, including yourself.”

Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction, said the state’s prisons already have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault. The federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 put a number of anti-rape regulations in place in state prisons, he said.

Garnett nonetheless welcomed Dillon’s bill as a means to recognize the problem and underscore the federal law with state legislation. ​“We are grateful to Representative Dillon that she is going to support, from a state perspective, what we are required to do from a federal perspective,” Garnett said.