One day in the visiting room of New York State's Albion Correctional Facility, LaTrisa Hyman heard her friend and fellow inmate shriek, "He proposed to me! He proposed to me!" Looking across the room, she saw her friend's elated new fiancé, still on one knee, saying, "She said yes!" The bride-to-be was beaming. She had told Hyman, during previous walks in the recreation yard, that she was in love, but Hyman didn't expect her engagement. Hyman and the other inmates jumped up from their tables to rush over to the couple and congratulate them but sank back into their seats when the correctional officers guarding the room began yelling at them.
City Limits Magazine
May-June 2011:
Behind Bars: Female Inmates, Male Guards, Sex Crimes in New York's Prisons
Documentary
Behind Bars: A City Limits Investigation
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Kelly Virella
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"Sit down!" they yelled.
Thirty minutes later, when visiting time ended and the inmates queued up to return to their housing units, the newly engaged inmate showed Hyman the ring, a gold band with a sparkling, roughly half-carat diamond in the center and smaller stones along the sides. The bride-to-be explained that her intended was retiring from his job in one week, would most likely be able to avoid discipline for having what prison officials considered an inappropriate relationship with her and was already entitled to his pension either way. The bride-to-be also told Hyman they'd never had sex, an act that would have been a crime.
Jeanette P. also got a ring from a correctional officer while doing time in a New York State prison, and they did have sex—regularly for about two years. She and the officer, Peter Z., fell in love at Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison on the West Side of Manhattan. Other inmates knew they were having a romantic relationship. One saw him leaving her room with his shirt untucked and scolded him, "Fix your clothes, boy!" But by the end, Jeanette alleges, he was hitting her, and she was afraid to report him to prison officials out of fear he would harm her more.
Sexual encounters between inmates and officers can also begin violently, with officers forcing inmates who have never loved them or wanted to have sex with them to submit. That's what a former inmate alleges happened to her at Albion Correctional Facility in 2007, and in August federal judge David G. Larimer agreed. (City Limits is referring only to inmates and officers who have been named in previous media accounts). On two occasions, once in May and once in June 2007, the then officer, Donald L. asked her to report to a school building to clean it. When she arrived each time, Donald tried to rape her, the judge found. One time, Donald succeeded, ripping her clothes and bruising her, the judge said. Citing her substantial emotional and psychological suffering—including anxiety, flashbacks, hopelessness and trouble resuming a healthy sexual relationship with her husband—the judge in August ordered Donald, who never showed up in court, to pay the inmate $500,000 in damages. In an earlier criminal trial, Donald pleaded guilty to third-degree rape, not forcible rape.
Last month, officials from the New York State Department of Correctional Services, or DOCS, were summoned to Washington to testify before a federal panel. The subject: inmate allegations of sexual abuse by prison guards. When surveyed anonymously in 2008 and 2009, 11 participating U.S. correctional facilities posted the highest rates of inmate alleged staff sexual abuse. Three are New York prisons.
