Uneven Vulnerability

This chapter shows how incarcerated gay men present prisons as spaces of exposure and seek to disorder the governing logics that enable acts of exposure, which derive from surveillance. Gay men’s experience of incarceration is one of hypervisibility, meaning that their visibility consists of multiple layers and is differentiated because of the perceptions of their bodies and their desires. This enhanced visibility magnifies the general vulnerability associated with detention. The chapter explores edited collections of writing alongside memoirs by gay men in prison to show how same-sex desire is used as a way to refuse queer vulnerability, to undermine notions of Black masculinity as rooted in the concept of the “cool pose,” and to rewrite familiar scripts about male prison rape and HIV/AIDS concerns.

Sex logics: Negotiating the prison rape elimination act (PREA) against its’ administrative, safety, and cultural burdens

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) reforms correctional institutions via administrative mechanisms and represents a major shift in both correctional policy and workplace practice. Using qualitative data within six prisons in one U.S. state, finding suggest that staff view PREA as an administrative, safety, and cultural burden, which creates a misalignment of institutional logics. Rather than seeing themselves as central to eliminating prison sexual misconduct/violence, staff see PREA as interfering with their “real” custody/control work. This misalignment has major implications for the productive implementation and use of PREA and the broader shift to administrative rather than legal processes for institutional reform.

Enslaving Prison Bodies

Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”

An Analysis of Statutes Criminalizing Correctional Officer Sexual Misconduct With Inmates

The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) mandates that U.S. state correctional systems regulate and reduce staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct in state correctional facilities. As data on correctional officer sexual misconduct are limited and its legal definition varies across states, this study utilized statutory analysis to document how staff sexual misconduct is defined and how it is punished across state correctional systems. The most notable finding is that although all 50 states have statutes designed to protect incarcerated persons from being sexually victimized by correctional staff, they are far from uniform.