I just read in another thread that it was a “myth” that child molesters are on the bottom of the “pecking order” in prison and that they get their asses thrashed by other prisoners on a regular basis as punishment for what they have done.
So is this a myth? I would suspect that perhaps the child molesters DO get picked on in prison, but maybe not “because” of what they did, as some kind of justice meted out by the other inmates, but simply because they would mostly be weak middle-aged or older men, and that people realize that you don’t have to be a hard-ass to molest children (whereas someone who was in prison for first-degree-murder would have a dangerous reputation already.)
One of the key Priest/Molesters in the Boston sex scandal, priest John Geoghan, was murdered in prison solely because he was a child molester.. He was already in protective custody in prison because of the nature of his crimes and the killer had to plot ways around it. I would say that if someone is that determined to get a crack at one molester and the molester was in protective custody in the first place, it can’t be unheard of.
I grew up in Kingston, Ontario, with six prisons, including two reeeeeally bad ones, and half the people around, including my Dad, worked inside prisons at one point or another. He taught life skills courses.
The notion of any sort of honor code inside prisons is bullshit. The only thing that matters in a prison is survival. If a child molester is a weakling, he makes an excellent target for killing, which raises the murderer’s standing. But if the molester is strong, he might become a big mucky-muck among the inmates.
Most prisoners gain power over other inmates by forming groups. One of the few scenes I ever saw in the TV series Oz that was realistic was when the head of the unit was putting pressure on the mafia leader who was refusing to do something. In the next scene, the mafia leader was playing cards with his henchmen. Then the PA system announced the henchmen’s names one by one and they were ordered to pack up because they were being transferred off the unit. The mafia leader sat alone at the table looking around the unit and realizing how illusionary his power had been. All of the prisoners, including him, could see how vulnerable he had become in a matter of minutes.
But getting back to my point, child molesters usually don’t belong to gangs. Unlike many of the other prisoners, they didn’t work with other criminals on the street so they don’t have connections. They also usually come from a different background than many other prisoners. And because of their low status nobody wants to associate with them.
And child molesters certainly do have low status. I think in large part it’s because many prisoners were themselves the victims of child abuse, so they hate child abusers.
There are certainly prisoners out there that specifically aim to make life miserable for child molesters or kill child molesters on the inside. I don’t think there is any way to statistically demonstrate what proportion of prisoners are like that.
The prisons here have units specifically for child molesters, they call them chomo yards. IIRC, they do everything separately from the other prisoners and there’s not much interaction. Also, there’s a big difference in the atmosphere of a maximum-security prison and a minimum, and in state prisons vs county jails.
My friend spent a year in prison for burglary. He told me the inmates were separated into several different wards, each with a colored arm band. (His band was white = potentially violent.) The Protective Custody section (orange) was for prisoners who might be at risk of violence from other inmates, including pedophiles, snitches, and hot-looking 18 year olds too weak to defend themselves from convicts seeking a bitch.
He said that some inmate from the violent ward would deliberately get themselves thrown into protective custody (mainly by “snitching” on another inmate) just so they could beat up on the child molesters.
He also said that many of the guards knew of that tactic, and took steps to prevent it.
He also said that some of the guards knew, but didn’t care.
That said, I suspect actual murder of imprisoned child molesters is rare. Otherwise we’d hear about it more often, especially with notorious cases like the infamous McMartin defendants (who turned out to be not guilty, of course.) Think about it – if your bunkmate is a child molester, and you kill him the first night, you lose the satisfaction of beating the shit out of him every night for the next twenty years!
I’m obviously generalizing. But I would assume that someone who was in prison for assault, robbery, or murder would very likely be both younger and stronger than the average child molester (who would most likely be someone with access to children and therefore have a family or at least be old enough for children, at some point, to have trusted him.)
My dad was chief dental surgeon at Alcatraz. His patients included Al Capone, Machine gun Kelly, Barker Bros…As a child he told me that these hardened criminals felt it was okay to rob banks and the like but a child molester or a rapist was considered the lowest form of human being…And as a result these molesters and rapists were in great danger if allowed to mix with the regular prison population.
Maybe it varies from prison to prison. I know several convicted felons who have done time in texas penitentiarys and they ALL say that child molestors are are pretty well toast if the other inmates find out. Same for rapists.
I interviewed some prisoners as part of a course when at university. My specific assignment involved asking them about how they felt about what they had done, whether they regretted what they’d done, whether they felt that they deserved to be punished, that sort of thing. I was very pointedly told by those that introduced me to them that I should not ask what they had done, but I was told that all the guys I was speaking to were serious offenders.
They referred to child molesters as “rock spiders” (so called because, as they were keen to tell me, child molesters were the lowest of the low).
They regularly made comments such as that they hadn’t done anything really bad, unlike rock spiders, and that they hadn’t really hurt anyone, unlike rock spiders, and that they were basically OK guys, unlike rock spiders etc etc.
It’s too long ago now to remember specifics, but I know that I came away with a clear impression that they pointedly wore their hatred and disdain for rock spiders on their sleeve. I presume they did so as a way of demonstrating to me and to them that they were moral (or at least more moral than someone else who was worse, which they seemed to feel amounted to the same thing) and as a way of protecting their egos from the admission (to me or to themselves) that they were on the lowest rung of humanity.
My ex-wife had dealings with a woman whose daughter was accidently killed by a molester in his attempts to keep her quite. When he went to prison the mother received a letter from a bikie gang asking if she wanted to have him killed even though he was being kept in isolation. The letter said that if she wanted it done she only had to take some simple action (a newspaper ad or phone call perhaps) and it would be “taken care of”.
A good friend of mine served 13 years for coke dealing, illegal manufacture of silencers, and illegal manufacture of submachine guns. He also served some extra time for escape.
According to him, the “molesters get their asses kicked” thing is largely an urban legend. Ditto on prison rape. He said that the only way one inmate knows what another inmate is serving time for is if that inmate tells him. Ergo, a molester need only claim he is there for some other crime.
Interesting, not sure of the validity of those cites, but when I read your comment it got me thinking. And by those three accounts, I would assume no one age is the majority.
Doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a guard with a grudge or a particularly harsh disposition, or even father with a sense of vigilante justice, to simply leak of mention what a inmate was convicted of. The “if you don’t say anything no one will know” angle seems like reach.
That said, I have no anecdotes of my own to contribute so I suppose it’s possible.
Looking at those cites it doesn’t really specify what a “child molester” is defined as. Part of me wonders if simple statutory rape cases are included, a 20 year old and his 16 year old girlfriend for example, which would skew the stats to the low end of the scale.
