Psychological Rape

What is rape? My Webster dictionary defines rape as, 1: a carrying away by force. When someone breaks into your home and takes what they want, you feel raped. when someone puts a gun to your head and demands your wallet, you feel raped. And when the guards handcuff me, enter my cell, and take my extra books, I feel raped.

I realize that most people think I have no right to complain, and I'm not complaining, at least not about loosing my books. My only complaint is against my own ignorant feeling of being raped. I shouldn't feel that way, but I do. If I thought it would help I would gladly let them have all my books, and paper, and even personal pictures and pens, everything, if it would prevent me from having to feel so violated the next time they decide to come take something from me. But I've tried this in the past (getting rid of everything they could possibly find an excuse for "confiscating") and no matter what I surrender, the system always manages to find something to take away; it has to, because that's all it knows how to do.

In fact, experienced prisoners have learned that the best defense against these "shake downs" is to keep some sort of nuisance contraband in your cell for them to take when they come to take something. This usually works, because they don't feel like they're doing their job unless they take something. So if you leave them nothing to take they'll take something you don't want them to take. Technically, everything is contraband for one reason or another, which means they can always find something to take, and usually do (some guards, the more mature and experienced guards, don't feel so gung ho about "doing their job", but these types are the exception, not the rule). So, I leave little "gifts" for the guards to take, but sometimes they take things I don't want them to take anyway; things that having meaning to me, like a good book that was hard to come by, even one I was two-thirds of the way through reading (like today).

It was this kind of psychological rape that drove me insane with rage all those years ago the last time I was in prison. Getting violently raped up my ass on numerous occasions by other inmates when I was still just a kid all those years ago ended up seeming like a pleasurable experience by comparison (though it certainly didn't seem pleasurable at the time). The persistant psychological violations that the system calls "rehabilitation" and "corrections" ends up becoming a deep emotional sore that is extremely slow to heal; if it ever gets the chance!

I told my attorneys shortly after my arrest this time (in 2005) that they'd be doing me a huge favor if they just let the system kill me (by death sentence) since the prospect of spending the 30 or so years remaining of my life as a prisoner waiting every day to be violated at the guards which was a nightmare I had no desire to relive all over again. And yet here I am. It's hard for me not to be mad at my attorneys for putting me through this personal hell, but I know they're not to blame; nobody is, not even the guards. But that doesn't make it feel any less like rape.