Gay prison men
Cooma 'gay prison' podcasters call for government apology for entrapment, persecution of lgbtq+ men
It is a shameful secret buried in history — how from 1957 to the 1970s, Cooma jail in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains operated as a "gay prison", possibly the only facility of its kind in the world.
Key points:
- A number of brand-new leads have opened up since the release of The Greatest Menace, detailing Cooma's dedicated "gay prison"
- This week a former inmate spoke about his experience there for the first time
- NSW's Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes is due to hand down its report in June
The intention was to isolate men convicted of homosexual offences as part of a covert government experiment to develop techniques to "cure" homosexuality.
The 8-episode podcast The Greatest Menace was released in February last year, unearthing details of the reopening of the Cooma facility as a dedicated gay prison, the use of police entrapment, and the launch of a state inquiry into the causes and treatments of homosexuality which used inmates as research subjects.
In a follow-up episode released this week, a for
Former prisoners share their experiences of sex in prison
The Commission on Sex in Prison’s final inform , published today (Tuesday 17 March), features accounts from former prisoners speaking for the first day about their experiences of sex behind bars.
Sex in prison: Experiences of former prisoners is the fifth and closing briefing paper published by the Commission, which was established by the Howard League for Penal Reform and includes eminent academics, former prison governors and health experts.
Recommendations from the Commission’s two-year inquiry will be presented today (Tuesday 17 March) at a conference in London.
The Commission sought permission to interview current prisoners about their experiences of sex in prison, but this approach was blocked by the Ministry of Justice.
However, Dr Alisa Stevens, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Southampton, was able to interview 26 former prisoners during the summer of 2014 – 24 men and two women.
Her report concludes that a national survey of both the serving prison population and former prisoners, fully supported by but independent of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), is “urgently required” to
Gay and bisexual men and men who have had unwanted sex outside prison are the groups most at risk of sexual coercion in Australian prisons. Men in prison for the first time and men who had spent more than a total of five years in prison were also more likely to report sexual coercion, although the overall rate of men experiencing sexual coercion was fewer than one in forty.
These are the findings of a study by the Kirby Institute which used a large random sample of men in Novel South Wales and Queensland prisons, using computer‐assisted telephone interviewing (a technique which overcomes reporting issues in collecting sexual violence data). Fourteen percent, or about one in every of seven male prisoners in those states, were included in the sample.
Lead composer on the publication of the study, Paul Simpson, says that very minute research has focused on men or prisoners as victims of sexual violence.
“We asked participants about sexual coercion, defined as entity forced or frightened into doing something sexually that was unwanted while in prison,” said Dr Simpson,a research fellow of the Justice Health Research Program at the Kirby. “Of the two thousand men who participate
‘Being Gay in Prison Is Ten Times Harder’: Inmates Tell of Abuse, Use of Solitary
Gabriel Guzman has dark brown eyes, but it’s difficult to discern when you talk to him. That’s because Guzman, a former Illinois prison inmate, has a difficult time maintaining eye contact, one of the many lasting effects of having spent long periods in solitary confinement. Guzman was released last March after ten years in prison, about three and a half of those in solitary.
Guzman, 31, was sent to prison for having sexual relations with a trivial beginning when he was 17 years old. A Latino same-sex attracted man, Guzman says in an interview that he was often sent to solitary confinement for defending himself and other Gay inmates against other inmates and prison staff.
“In prison, it’s hard,” Guzman says in a soft voice. “But existence gay in prison makes it ten times harder.”
Eight percent of incarcerated adults recognize as something other than heterosexual, according to a recent announce on LGBT prisoners. This is nearly twice the percentage of adults in the general U.S. population who identify as homosexual woman, gay, or bisexual.
For many of these people, exploitation because of