I have been bent over by the carceral state a thousand times.
I’ve been strip-frisked so many times that my flesh feels like it has been snatched from my humanity. Some of these assaults have stayed stuck in my mind, ghostly images in freeze frames.
In February of 2021, I published an essay with the Marshall Project about some of my experiences being processed into the prison–industrial complex. I finally had had enough. I sought to blow up the entire sexual assault and rape situation within the New York State prison system.
The assaults I described in my Marshall Project article came nowhere close to exhausting the catalog of my experiences; there have been many others. For example, in 1994, at the age of sixteen, I started my first state bid in the New York State adult male prison system. Hundreds of other poor colored prisoners and I were strip-frisked thrice before twilight. At one point a male guard demanded to inspect my rectum during my initial processing. It was one of the more rational rapes I can recall surviving.
“Yo, CO, why you want to see my ass?” I said.
“I got orders from the bosses. It’s my job, it’s my duty,” he stiffly stated.
Bullshit, I thought. But it didn’t matter what I thought: he would perform his duty a hundred more times that day, over and over again, mostly on poor men of color.
I would soon find out that, in prison, this act of sexual violence was completely routine. The New York State prison system systemically and regularly forces prisoners to strip naked and perform lewd sexual acts in the name of security.
Recently, I asked Stephanie Brauch, one of New York’s assistant deputy superintendents for Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) compliance, what her views were concerning the strip frisk. No one should be making anyone strip “absent a clear and immediate threat to security,” she answered. Brauch’s response brought a sense of relief in comparison to what I had been told by First Deputy Superintendent Emily Williams back in 2020, while I was at Fishkill Correctional Facility. “I need to see it,” she said, when I asked her thoughts on strip frisks. In other words, she needed to see prisoners like me bent over in the flesh, with her own eyes, to believe the prison was unsafe.
My personal experience growing up in the carceral state has shaped my sexual self. I was taught hands-on that being a victim to sexual and gender violence diminishes people’s humanity, including my own.
Prison officials claim a penological interests regarding the strip frisk, yet it’s clear the real purpose is twofold: First, it reinforces subjugation and dominance over a vulnerable population—prisoners. Second, it socially reproduces a culture negatively impacted by sexually gendered violence.
The academics are my allies on the gendered violence aspect of the strip frisk. Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, supports my side when he cites theorist Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s insights on the origins of the strip frisk. She writes (as quoted by Burton):
The strip frisk is commonly used in situations of war across cultural and historical contexts. The official rationale for stripping the enemy is to assure that they cannot smuggle contraband in clothing or bodily orifices. Unofficially, however, enforced nudity is a mundane form of sexual violence.
In other words, strip-searching commits sexual violence while failing at its purported aim: it does not protect anyone. It does, however, succeed at its real aim: the guards’ sexual focus on the prisoner’s sexual parts shatters the prisoner’s self-image. And, as Abdur-Rahman goes on to note, this public humiliation “enhances their vulnerability to other forms of abuse.”
In the summer of 1994, when I was sixteen, I was arrested for drug possession and initially incarcerated, pretrial, on Rikers Island in its C-74 building, used to jail adolescents. At the time Rikers was one of the most dangerous jails in the world. In those steel cages, the emergency response teams routinely forced sexual acts upon us. Other adolescents and I were forced to line up down the center of the tier naked, with our fingers raised behind our heads, standing heel to toe. The forced sexual contact between our penises and buttocks was procedural and premeditated. These gauntlets were ordered under the watch of dozens of guards clad in black-and-blue body armor and brandishing long black batons.
“The first one of you little niggers who steps out this line is gonna get fucked up,” spat the smallest one in their ranks. The penological interest was power, plain and simple. Domination, humiliation, and control were just foreplay. The guards stripped me of my clothing and dignity.
Such perversion taught me that whoever’s getting fucked is weak and undeserving of the right to dignity. Like most young men, I couldn’t admit to being a victim of state-sanctioned sexual violence. Sexual violence is gendered, after all—categorized as a feminine experience. I felt sleazy then because I was powerless to protect myself against the guards. Admitting what had happened to me would have crushed my already wounded manhood.
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Much later I learned that New York State had already been using these same techniques for more than three decades; the young people of my generation being sexually assaulted and raped by guards on Rikers Island were only the most recent to experience it. In Tip of the Spear, Burton writes that survivors from the 1970 rebellion at Queens House of Detention at Kew Gardens reported that similar acts of sexual violence had been used against them by guards. “They herded us in like animals and forced us to lie on top of each other, while other guards made cruel and racist remarks like ‘put that dick in him, nigger,’” survivors disclosed.
During my first bid in 1994, I found a way to cope with the deforming effects on my sexuality by taking matters into my own hands. I used pornography, masturbation, and my imagination to double down on any act of power I could actualize. I handled myself to images of women, typically being depicted in a sexually dominated state. I became addicted to the fantasy without the flesh or the person behind it. Eventually, porn-type sex became the only sex I enjoyed; “doggy style” quickly became my favorite position. Doggy-style sex began as my teenage sexual fantasy, then became my go-to to get off, then the sexual position I used in real life as a free person.
The carceral state gives incarcerated people greater access to pornography than it does to real women. New York’s is one of only three state prison systems that does not categorically prohibit prisoners to purchase, receive, and possess pornography. Some of the currently popular porn magazines in my prison are Bad Bitches Only (BBO), Foreplay (formerly called Gyro), and Buttman. All these publications and their like place a special emphasis on doggy-style sex. With little to no other alternative for female companionship, intimacy with paper pornography has become normal sex for me and thousands of other prisoners in the New York State prison system. This seems counterproductive to the carceral state’s claim of serving a rehabilitative function.
The 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found pornography to be, as summarized by Gloria Steinem in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, a “degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female.” Prison allows these patriarchal interlocking systems of oppression to socially reproduce. I’m not anti-pornography, but I am now acutely aware that the women sex workers may not be as willing as they appear on the pages or the screen. Patriarchal porn has poisoned countless generations of free folks and prisoners alike.
In the 1970s, for example, Steinem writes that pornographic film stars such as Linda Lovelace “offered movie-goers the titillating thought that even the girl next door might love to be the object of porn-style sex.” In her 1980 autobiography, Lovelace revealed that she had been abused and coerced into the pornography industry by her ex-husband. The “deepthroating” for which she became so famous turned out to be a survival skill she’d developed.
Likewise, in the joint, I have survived by complying with being sexual assaulted in strip frisks. Like Lovelace, I have been both wounded and desperate. It’s difficult for men, especially the younger ones, to admit to being victims to the strip frisk. It diminishes our manhood further than being born poor and colored: it challenges everything we’ve been socialized to believe about ourselves.
Most men won’t hold a mirror up to their own sexual practices. Here’s what I saw when I finally did: Being forced to undergo the strip frisk as a teenager had a significant impact on my sexuality long after my release in 1996. I relied more on pornography to replace how I should have been normally sexually socialized. This was especially cruel and sick in the carceral state, where the topic of sex and sexual assault were blended together brutally in my young body and mind.
In the summer of 1997, I was nineteen and on the run, hiding from the police. Three nights before my capture, I slept with a girlfriend of mine from the block. “I don’t like it when you do it to me doggy style because I can’t see what you’re doing,” she whispered softly. “I get scared.”
Back then, I was more than a murderer: I was also a dog. I happened to love doggy style—for all the reasons I’ve described above (though I certainly didn’t understand that at the time). In my way of thinking then, if women didn’t like it, that was their problem, not mine. So I ignored her fears. Since I had no ill intentions other than lust, I figured my girlfriend’s fears were baseless. I was wrong.
It wasn’t until nearly a quarter century later, when I was bent over at the waist, having my asshole searched, that I made the connection between my sexual preferences and the violence I had and was experiencing—and began to empathize with how my girlfriend must have felt the last time we had sex. Like her, I felt afraid when I was ordered to “strip naked, bend over, and spread ’em” by a guard with a long black wooden baton at the ready. Upon these realizations, empathy took effect and I was brought to tears. Like she had, I felt exposed and vulnerable, and I knew firsthand how painful that could be and I felt sleazy. I came clean by becoming a feminist.
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie—activists and authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now.—use Monica Crosby’s Intimate Partner Violence and State Violence Power and Control Wheel to outline and compare state violence to intimate partner violence. Crosby’s wheel exposed me, first as a victim of state violence, and then as a practitioner of sexual and gendered violence. Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie’s work taught me that we “can’t end one form of violence without addressing the other, and we cannot properly serve all survivors if we do not acknowledge and address the oppression and violence the most marginalized survivors are experiencing.”
Becoming a feminist didn’t just make me aware that I was sleazy: it gave me a way to resist the carceral state without causing further harm to others. This extended to me a chance to make amends, starting with empathy, compassion, and apology to all the women I’ve ever bent over.
I’m sorry.
This essay was produced and published in partnership with Empowerment Avenue.
Image: Detail of a painting by the essay’s author, Corey Devon Arthur
