Every movie I see, the new guy in jail is always gettin pokied the first night. Someone is always getting raped in these movies. So I gotta ask, is that real? How much of this is just Holllywood trying to make prison look intense and how much of this is verifiable truth?
On a side note, if this is in the wrong section, move at once!
Bureau of Justice Sexual Violence in Prison Report
It’s a lot lower than popularly reported, but it does happen.
In my prison, the Warden and staff takes the “Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003” pretty damn seriously.
Speaking as someone who works with the inmates firsthand with a fair degree of privacy and confidentiality (not absolute, I can’t let security be endangered), I’d say that a fair number of actual incidents don’t get reported (I report any I suspect) but a fair number of reported incidents didn’t happen either.
Of course, your thread title asks a rather different question that the body of your OP.
There does seem to be a fair amount of consexual homosexual sex going on in prison between inmates, but it’s more difficult to quantify. “Situational Homosexuality” has been around for years. Of course, some would argue that there’s nearly always some element of coercion here too, and I’m sure they have a point.
There’s an old saying, and I have no idea how quantifiable it is, but it says:
Put two people together alone long enough and eventually they will have sex.
I have read “investigative” reports that say that it is not uncommon for prisoners who claim to be heterosexual to have sex with same sex partners while in prison.
Therefore, the distinction has to be made between homosexual sex in prisons and homosexual rapes in prison.
The version I heard from a (gay) friend was:
Put two gay guys in a room together and eventually they’ll start having sex. Put two lesbians in a room together and eventually they’ll start talking about how much they hate men.
I knew someone who worked as a prison guard for a few years. His experiences were that there wasn’t a whole lot of forced homosexual sex, and it was very strongly discouraged by the warden. Consensual acts weren’t really common either, at least not any more common than the norm for the un-incarcerated population. New guys, who haven’t made contacts and formed social networks, were more vulnerable in general. They get stolen from, have more fights started with them, get intimidated, stuff like that. It was testing, to find out how they’d react.
Even then, there weren’t very many prisoners who’d try to tear him a new one, and the ones who would try were watched more carefully for a while after a new guy was transferred in. My friend said that usually the hazing wasn’t too bad. They’d just have to keep an eye on the new guy for a while and, as long as he actually set and enforced boundaries and didn’t rely on the guards for protection, all but the total assholes would settle into an equilibrium with him and stop messing with him so much.
I went to jail for exactly one day when I was 17 (thus I was put in the juvenile ward). Within a few hours, another guy approached me and told me they were having a three-way in one of the rooms and asked if I wanted to join.
I thanked him, but politely declined. After all, I hardly knew him. But honestly, if I had been there longer I probably would have given it a shot (for the record, those jumpsuits they give you are very comfortable and I was feeling a bit randy). No joke.
The phrase at the law office I worked at (federal defense lawyers) was “gay for the stay.” For what I could gather in my year and a half there, it seemed common enough.