A NEW VOICE FOR PRISON RAPE AWARENESS?

Shawshank via www.washingtontimes.com

What happens when your young son starts his prison rape term.

From esquire.com:

“A New Mexico judge had a warning for a young man convicted of robbery in her courtroom, Time reports, but it wasn’t your standard shtick about making bad choices. After 20-year-old Isaiah Gay expressed remorse for a string of robberies committed as a teenager, saying he was “young and dumb,” Bernalillo County Judge Christina Argyres had a few choice words for him.

“Do you know what would happen … to a young and dumb person in prison?” Argyres asked, working up her best Lenny Brisco impression. “You would probably be raped every day, for one. And I hate to sound like that, you know, rude, but that’s exactly what would happen to you.””

This doesn’t sound like what Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky said to the 20-year-old Stanford rapist during sentencing.

Maybe the rapist’s father said enough?

A section from the rapist’s father’s letter to Judge Persky on heavy.com:

“His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17th 2015. Brock can do so many positive things as a contributor to society and is totally committed to educating other college age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity. By having people like Brock educate others on college campuses is how society can begin to break the cycle of binge drinking and its unfortunate results. Probation is the best answer for Brock in this situation and allows him to give back to society in a net positive way.”

What this man knows as a father is his son is not a rapist, but he’s going to jail as a rapist. Did anyone ever explain to him that convicted rapists go to jail? That his son is convicted rapist?

The dad is proud of his son. He ought to be frightened for his son. He ought to shut his mouth for his son’s sake.

People in jail read, prisoners and guards. When they read about the 20 year old rapist’s dad saying, “He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17th 2015,” will they explain the difference between consensual sex and rape?

Or will they give it time to sink in on it’s own?

An ex-con, one of the best guys I’ve known, explained it like this when I asked about prison rape:

“The loudest thing I ever heard was the door shutting and I was inside the bars. My life was outside without me. If you want to avoid prison rape, you have to fight.

“Once you’re inside you get tested, just not by the prison rapists. You get tested by their bitches. Say you stand in line to make a phone call. If someone gets in line ahead of you, it’s a test. If you don’t do anything, you fail the test.

“It happened to me. I knew what to expect because guys from my neighborhood who’d been to jail talked about it. You fight until you get pounded unconscious by the other convict, or a guard. The guy took the place in front of me and others stood back. When he turned his face my way I started punching. We went to the ground and I kept punching until a guard told me to stop. I kept punching until the guard knocked me out with his stick.

“The next time it happened, the guy in the cell next to mine took something I had. I didn’t ask for it back, but the next time we were around each other I went after him with everything I had. This time he knocked me out. I was laying on the ground when the guard got there.

“They searched the guy’s cell and found more than what he took from me. They asked who it belonged to. Someone was going in the hole for it. I said the other stuff was mine and went in the hole for it. That was a test, the last test. By the time I got back to my cell, the neighbor had told everyone I took his fall.

“That was the end of my testing. I passed.”

Read the letter from the Stanford rapist’s dad again. This is a kid who will fight to the last breath? A kid who will show hardcore guards and prisoners something they’ve never seen, something that will make them back off?

People in jail read things, like the victim’s letter:

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.

 When the Stanford rapist and his dad meet after jail time, will they hire another powerful attorney, gather more expert witnesses and private investigators, and go after the prison rapists that assaulted him?

Let’s hope they do, and that both of them gain a deeper understanding of why rapists go to jail in the first place.

What do rapist look like after they’ve been wrung out in jail, after they’ve had the wagons circled around them a few times? The look pale, almost yellow, with sunken eyes and dark circles. They shuffle, unable to lift their head and look you in the face. They want to disappear.

Think about that while you read one more section from the Stanford rape victim’s letter:

After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.

Men, consider this: if you rape, you may be raped, you may share the same feelings as your victim when you become the victim. You will be a rape victim.

Plan accordingly and show your next date how good guys behave. Do it for them. Do it for you.

Do it for your dad.