Excellent
article exposes the brutality of prison life for many gay and trans
prisoners, while humanizing the remarkable spirit of survivors of prison
violence. We're having a very hard time here in Arizona getting these
prisoners protection, too.
Here's a page of resources for prison rape survivors in Arizona, if you or someone you know needs support.
Prison Legal News is the single best subscription deal for prisoners - $30 a year keeps them informed about their rights.
Prison Legal News
P.O. Box 1151
Lake Worth, FL 33460
------from Prison Legal News---------
Prison Sexual Abuse Survivor Speaks Out
by Alan Prendergast
(article was originally published at Denver Westword News on February 3, 2011)
In
January 2010, Scott Howard, a 39-year-old federal prisoner, made his
way briskly into a hearing room in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice
Building in Washington, D.C. He was neatly dressed in blazer, slacks and
tie, and quite nervous about what he was about to do. He was determined
to not think about it too much, to just get it over with – like so much
else that he’d been through over the past few years.
The room
was teeming with Department of Justice attorneys, law enforcement agents
and corrections officials. Not exactly Howard’s kind of crowd; he’d
tried to tell his story to such people before, only to be labeled a liar
and a whiner. But the participants also included members of Congress,
medical professionals, prison activists, counselors and sexual-assault
survivors.
They’d all come to take part in a “listening session”
on the wishfully titled Prison Rape Elimination Act. Passed in 2003,
PREA created a national commission to study the causes and costs of
sexual assault behind bars and to come up with federal policies to
attack the problem. Seven years and several blown deadlines later,
backers are still waiting for United States Attorney General Eric Holder
to adopt new standards incorporating the commission’s findings.
Howard
had been invited to join the discussion because of his experiences
behind bars – in particular, the three nightmarish years he’d spent in
Colorado state prisons, doing time for fraud. It would be the first time
he’d ever discussed his ordeal publicly.
When his name was
called he went to the microphone, trying to keep his hands steady as he
studied the pages in front of him. “Thank you for allowing me to
participate,” he began.
He explained that, although living in a
halfway house, he was still in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of
Prisons: “Before I was taken into BOP custody, however, I served time in
the Colorado Department of Corrections, and it was there that I was
repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by members of a large,
notorious gang.”
The gang was the 211 Crew, a white supremacist
group found in many Colorado prisons. 211 leaders pressured him for
money and demanded that he help them in an ambitious $300,000 fraud
scheme; their threats soon turned into physical attacks, then sexual
assaults. He was forced to perform oral sex on gang members and anally
raped.
“I spent well over a year trying to get protection by
writing to officials,” he said. “My efforts to report were mostly
fruitless – and often put me at greater risk. Because I am openly gay,
officials blamed me for the attacks. They said as a homosexual I should
expect to be targeted by one gang or another.”
Howard didn’t tell
the whole squalid story. He didn’t mention the evidence of staff
involvement with the gang that made his efforts to seek protection even
dicier. He didn’t go into how, once he finally started “naming names,”
as prison investigators demanded, they accused him of crying rape to
cover up his own criminal activities. He barely referred to his last day
as a Colorado prisoner, when, he says, he was put in a cell with one of
the gang leaders and sexually assaulted again. Despite being a bare
summary, the statement was still graphic – and powerful. At times his
voice choked up, but Howard kept reading.
When it was over, he
sat in the gallery and listened to other testimony by experts and
survivors. Then the DOJ officials began asking questions, and some of
the questions were directed at Howard. He was astonished. They’d
actually paid attention. They’d even taken notes.
“That was very
important,” he says now. “Having people listening to me and asking
questions – it made me feel like I was being taken seriously at last.”
A
lot of people are taking Howard seriously these days. Since his talk in
Washington a year ago, he’s emerged as a highly visible “survivor
speaker” for Just Detention International, a nonprofit active in the
campaign to stop sexual abuse in prison, and a caustic critic of
Colorado’s DOC and its treatment of rape victims. Last summer he settled
a civil rights lawsuit against several DOC officials for $165,000.
The
settlement came as Howard’s attorneys were seeking a hearing to
investigate how and why the Colorado Attorney General’s Office had
failed for years to produce a critical document in the case – a 2005
entry in Howard’s prisoner file that corroborated his claims of seeking
help and being ignored. The document, which only surfaced after a
private law firm got involved in the defense of a second Howard lawsuit,
also casts doubt on the veracity of several sworn affidavits filed by
case managers and supervisors claiming that Howard never told them that
he was being threatened and extorted.
Winning his case was a
major victory for Howard. Finding the proof that he wasn’t lying was
even greater vindication, though. Behind bars, all kinds of crimes are
committed in secret, and prisoners soon learn to keep quiet about them.
Exposing the most heinous violations can be almost impossible when staff
attitudes about rape and homosexuality are as convoluted as those of
the predators – and Howard says that’s what made the Colorado prison
system particularly dangerous for him.
“In Colorado, corrections
officers labeled openly gay people as troublemakers,” he says. “You
can’t believe them, they get in relationships and then claim rape – and
so on. The message goes out to the inmate population that these are
people to victimize because they already have a bad reputation among
staff, and nobody’s going to believe them.”
• • •
Almost
from the moment he hit the yard at the Fremont Correctional Facility in
late 2004, Scott Howard knew he was in trouble. The medium-security
prison was run differently from anything he’d seen before. And too many
people he didn’t know already knew who he was and what he’d done.
Fremont
wasn’t Howard’s first rodeo. He arrived there in the middle of a
ten-year tour of state and federal prisons, the result of a fraud spree
in Colorado, Wisconsin, Tennessee and elsewhere. His criminal history
also involved jail stays in Florida and Texas, where he reportedly tried
to post as bond collateral the car he was accused of stealing.
Howard
grew up in a small town in Tennessee, where his sexual orientation was a
poor fit with the prevailing Baptist culture. He left home, acquired a
taste for gambling and the high life, and was busted in Florida in 1991,
at age 21, after he stole a friend’s credit card and used it to hire a
limo. He soon graduated to computer hacking and more sophisticated forms
of identity theft.
In the late 1990s, Howard discovered major
security flaws in the payroll systems of large corporations, which often
relied on outside agencies to issue paychecks to temporary staff. He
used a Trojan program to steal data from corporate websites, then
submitted payroll requests to staffing agencies, either in his own name
or someone else’s. It was a surprisingly simple and lucrative scam, as
long as he moved quickly to the next pigeon before the fraud could be
detected.
“It was a traveling crime,” Howard says. “It took me to
thirty cities in a year. I was in my twenties, and it was fun back
then. It was also very stupid and very high-risk.”
The scam
unraveled in Wisconsin in 1999. A woman at a temp agency noted that
Howard’s zip code didn’t match the address he submitted with a check
request. When he came to pick up his money, he was arrested. A check for
$40,000, issued by the Hershey Corporation, was found in his pocket.
Sentenced
to eight years, Howard soon came up with an even more audacious plan to
collect cash while behind bars. He filed a bogus tax return, claiming a
$17,155 refund – and the Internal Revenue Service actually paid it. The
next year he asked for $1.2 million, complete with forged letters on
charity letterheads acknowledging enormous contributions.
This
time the IRS took a closer look. Howard soon had federal time piled on
top of his state sentence. But first he had another stint in Colorado,
stemming from a payroll fraud in Denver that had been uncovered after
his Wisconsin arrest. That’s what brought him to the yard at Fremont –
and a sense of impending doom.
As a gay man who’d already spent
substantial time behind bars, Howard thought he knew how to keep out of
trouble. He’d seen plenty of intimidation and gang-related fights at
other lockups, but nothing like the atmosphere at Fremont. Prisoners
sporting black eyes in the lunch line were a common sight. Members of
the 211 Crew commanded their own set of tables in the dining hall, known
as the Four Corners, and charged weaker white prisoners tribute for the
privilege of living in one of “their” units.
The 211s were
particularly vocal about their hatred of homosexuals and sex offenders.
Howard observed several openly gay and transsexual prisoners at Fremont.
They were not in a good place. “All of these people were paying rent
and being beaten,” he says. “If you were smaller, or suspected of being
gay, or a pretty-boy type – anything of that sort got back to them.”
Gangs
are a fact of life in prison. But Howard had never seen one that
operated so openly, with so little official interference. “You had good
officers and even overzealous officers, but most of them were older and
very nonchalant about what was going on,” he says. “They told me, ‘This
is prison. This is not a playground. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t
have come here.’”
Officially, the 211 Crew is far from a
pervasive presence in Colorado’s prisons, with roughly 300 “confirmed”
members in a population of more than 20,000. Howard insists the actual
numbers are much higher, and the gang clearly had a particular interest
in him. Within a few days, three members approached him, beaming
friendship, and asked about “all that cash” he’d scammed from big
companies and the government. They seemed extremely well-informed about
his attempt at a big tax refund, which had made headlines. Despite
Howard’s denials that he’d been any kind of financial genius, he was
soon fielding daily questions about tax fraud.
The conversations
quickly got less genial. Howard made little attempt to disguise who he
was in prison – in one court filing, his attorneys describe him as
“obviously gay” – and the gang members soon had their suspicions
confirmed. They frequently intercepted other prisoners’ mail, on the
lookout for money order receipts or other helpful intel, and one of the
items they came across was a gay magazine a friend had sent Howard.
John
Anderson, a veteran 211 shot-caller known on the yard as Ghost,
informed Howard that homosexuals had to pay rent. That meant buying
canteen items for 211 members and sending money orders to addresses
Ghost provided. “In the beginning, it was twenty dollars here or there,”
Howard says. “Then it got more intense.”
In Howard’s second
month at Fremont, Ghost demanded that he send out a $500 money order.
Howard demurred; where was he going to get that kind of money? Ghost
punched him in the stomach and the face and told him he had two weeks.
A
few days later, Ghost was back in his face, demanding twenty bucks in
canteen items to pay a debt the shot-caller owed to a rival gang member.
Howard insisted he had no money.
“Find it,” Ghost snapped.
The
next day, when Howard failed to make the required purchases, Ghost told
him they were going to go see Allen Hernandez, alias “LBow,” the man
Ghost owed. Once they were in LBow’s cell, Ghost informed him that
Howard was going to settle the debt with a blow job. While Ghost stood
lookout, Hernandez forced Howard to his knees and told him to open his
“faggot mouth.”
Howard asked to be let go. Hernandez laughed. “You gotta beg me for it, bitch.”
The
assault lasted a few minutes, Howard says. LBow ejaculated, pulled up
his boxers and sweatpants, and told Howard to “get your bitch ass out of
my cell.”
On the way back to his own unit, Ghost hissed at Howard, “Don’t you say a fucking word to anyone, or I’ll fuck you up.”
Howard went to his cell. He showered. He cried. He felt sick and deathly afraid.
He
couldn’t escape the 211 Crew, but for the next few days they were oddly
friendly to him. They approached him on the yard and at meals. Ghost
introduced him to other 211 “brothers,” who asked him more questions
about his tax scam.
Just weeks earlier, prosecutors in Denver had
issued indictments against 24 members of the gang, on charges ranging
from a 2001 prison murder to drug-related street crimes.
One of
those named in the indictment was the group’s leader, Benjamin Davis,
who’d launched the gang at the Arkansas Valley prison in the early 1990s
after a racial beating. (The name “211” supposedly refers to the
robbery section of the California penal code).
Davis was now stuck
in the state supermax and facing more time, so the Fremont contingent
was working on a plan to raise cash and get him “a fucking great
attorney,” Howard learned. They wanted to file bogus tax returns, using
the personal data of various sex offenders, minorities and other lowlife
prisoners that couldn’t be traced back to them.
Howard told them
he didn’t think it would work. A fucking great attorney would cost a
lot more money than the $17,000 he’d collected in Wisconsin. The gang
members listened soberly, nodded and walked away.
But Ghost
didn’t care for Howard’s tone. He told him so a few days later, pulling
him aside after breakfast to let him know he’d been disrespectful to his
brothers. He demanded that Howard settle another debt with canteen
items, this time for fifty dollars. Howard said he didn’t have it.
No
problem, Ghost told him. Howard would settle the debt the same way he
had with LBow. Frantic, Howard said he didn’t feel well. Ghost pulled a
shank out of his pocket and made it clear that it was Howard’s choice
whether it ended up in his ribs or not.
“You’re going to suck that dude’s dick to pay this off for me,” he said quietly, “and for being a smartass to my brother.”
Howard went to the cell of a prisoner named Griego and did as he was told.
In
mid-February 2005, Howard made up an excuse to see his case manager,
Jerry Morris. Terrified of being labeled a snitch and what Ghost might
do to him, he didn’t say anything to Morris about the assaults.
“Outside
this guy’s office are twenty or thirty inmates waiting to see him,”
Howard recalls. “There’s no way to close the door, so everybody can hear
what you’re saying.”
Morris would later insist that Howard
didn’t advise him of any threats or problems that day. Howard claims
that he asked for protection from 211 without going into any specifics,
but Morris told him that “homosexuals usually have problems with one
gang or another.” Howard could do his best to “get along,” or he could
be a “whiner” and end up confined indefinitely in administrative
segregation.
Howard didn’t know what to do. He was afraid to tell
even his parents, since phone calls were monitored. He decided to
notify one friend on the outside about the extortion and urge her to
write a letter to the warden, asking that he be moved to another prison.
A few days later he was summoned to a meeting with another case
manager, Dave Mason, who asked about the letter and if he was being
threatened by 211.
Howard broke down and admitted it. He began to
talk about the assaults, he says, when Mason interrupted him. “That’s
all I want to know,” the case manager said, and made a phone call to a
supervisor to relay the information.
Four days later, Howard was
abruptly transferred. He went from Fremont to the Sterling Correctional
Facility, a sprawling complex housing 2,500 prisoners. Although
technically a high-security prison, surrounded by an electrified “kill”
fence, Sterling has a range of security levels for offenders classified
from minimum to “close.”
Howard had no problems at Sterling the
first two months he was there. He was placed in a highly monitored unit,
with limited movement and cameras and emergency call buttons in the
cells. But when he was moved to a lower-security wing in late April, he
discovered that he’d gone from one 211 stronghold to another.
Official
DOC reports indicate that there were fewer than 25 members of the 211
Crew at Sterling at the time, all of them housed in either high-security
units or administrative segregation. Howard says the actual figure was
closer to a hundred, an assertion supported by internal documents and
even some staff testimony. Many of them could be found in Sterling’s
less secure areas, readily identifiable by their shaved heads and
copious tattoos of swastikas, shamrocks and even “211” and “CREW.”
The
group was running large football and baseball pools, collecting as bets
the tokens prisoners used to buy sodas. They had allies in the computer
lab, including the notorious Simon Sue, who at seventeen had
masterminded a triple homicide in the tiny settlement of Guffey.
Although not a gang member himself, the diminutive Sue helped the gang
produce authentic-looking property sheets, Howard says, to explain away
the extra radios, clothing and other extorted goods in their cells.
Howard
was recognized the first day he hit the yard. Two 211 members
approached him. One, who’d been at Fremont, greeted him with a wolfish
smile.
“Ghost has friends here,” he said.
• • •
Based
on surveys of prisoners in jails and state and federal prisons, the
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that at least 88,500 adults
endured some form of sexual abuse while incarcerated in the American
corrections system last year. The surveys provide just snapshots of the
prisoner population on a given day. A recently-released Department of
Justice report places the total number of incidents in 2008 at 200,000.
The
number of reported sexual assaults in prison is, of course, lower than
the survey totals. Much, much lower. Extrapolating from the BJS figures,
Colorado’s prison system would be expected to have between 600 and 800
sex abuse victims a year. Yet in a Prison Rape Elimination Act cost
impact study, the DOC claims only twelve confirmed incidents of sexual
assault in 2008 and five in 2009. That works out to about 25 to 50
reports a year, since fewer than 20 percent of allegations of sexual
violence are ever substantiated by investigators.
Corrections
officials protest that meeting the PREA standards could cost hundreds of
millions of dollars; but reformers say that lack of aggressive
enforcement in prison assault cases costs society in other ways, from
the spread of sexually communicable diseases to lawsuits. According to a
DOJ report, a 1 percent reduction in the annual rate of prison sexual
abuse could lead to a “monetary benefit” to society of between $157
million and $239 million.
Rape and coercion have long been
regarded as an inevitable part of prison life, particularly among the
most targeted populations – prisoners who are young and slight of
stature, effeminate or gay, the mentally ill and first-timers. Yet the
national commission established by PREA found that a number of fixable
problems, from poor staff training and inadequate screening of
vulnerable prisoners to overcrowding and an almost complete lack of
prosecution of perpetrators, could and should be addressed to reduce the
rate of assault.
Howard’s journey through Colorado’s prisons
points to another problem the commission report scarcely mentions: the
utter indifference of many staffers. Howard met with several case
managers and supervisors at Sterling and filed grievances over his
placement there.
The officials have divergent stories about what
happened in those meetings and how explicit Howard was about his plight.
But their tendency to downplay his complaints and insist that he “name
names” helps to explain why the system’s number of reported assaults is
so low.
The day the 211 member recognized him on the yard, Howard
went to case manager David Backer to seek a transfer to another unit.
According to Backer’s own paperwork, Howard told him “he had a high
profile case and that the 211 gang attempted to extort money from him in
the past.... He claimed he did not feel in danger or threatened by
anyone at the time of our interview.
“He was also informed if he
did have problems he would be asked to go on tape as to who was
threatening him.... He stated he would never do this and would pay them
off first. He then left my office.”
Howard says Backer ignored
his claims of being extorted and prostituted at Fremont; the case
manager told him he should have “kept a low profile.” Howard filed a
grievance, which led to another meeting with Backer and two supervisors,
Joseph Halligan and John Clarkson. Accounts of what transpired at that
meeting vary greatly; in a later deposition, Halligan conceded several
times that Howard said he felt “threatened,” then reversed himself and
insisted that Howard did not express any concern about threats at that
time.
In a written response denying the grievance, Clarkson
acknowledged that Backer had been mistaken about requiring a taped
statement. But Howard would have to identify who was bothering him
before any action could be taken.
“We do have to have names,”
Clarkson wrote. “We cannot keep you away from all 211 members. We do not
place inmates in administrative segregation to protect them from other
inmates, so that is not an option, either.”
But naming names,
Howard insisted, would only expose him to more trouble. As the impasse
continued and Howard filed more appeals, he was once again hit up by
gang members for canteen items and pressured to raise money for the 211
leader’s legal fund through tax scams. As a kind of test run, he filed a
bogus income tax return under his own name and received a refund check
for a few thousand dollars. The money went to 211 members and outside
affiliates.
In August 2005 Howard finally was moved to another
unit at Sterling – but not for his own safety. The official reason was
that his security classification had changed, based on his convictions
in other states. But Backer also told him he’d “filed way too many
grievances,” Howard says.
“He is a very needy inmate and is a strain on a case manager after awhile,” Clarkson wrote in one log entry.
Howard
admits that he was, in fact, trying to overload his handlers with
grievances in order to get transferred. “If you file enough, they want
to get rid of you,” he says.
But the plan backfired. In his new
unit, Howard was shaken down by a 211 shot-caller named Simon Shimbel,
who informed him he would once again be paying rent: $25 a week.
Respectful
at first, Shimbel’s attitude toward Howard soon turned ugly. He showed
him a letter he’d received from Ghost, essentially giving the Sterling
chapter the okay to do what it liked with Howard. “Make him cover debts
with his ass,” Ghost wrote.
According to Howard, Shimbel took the
directive to heart. He dragged Howard into the unit bathroom’s back
stall, punched him in the stomach and ordered him to sit on the toilet
with his feet up, so no one could see him from outside. He then forced
him to perform oral sex until Shimbel ejaculated.
Howard told no
one. After going several rounds with administrators over naming names,
he didn’t expect any help from staff. He’d signed extradition papers
that would take him out of Sterling for at least a few weeks to deal
with court matters in Tennessee, and he was hoping to just hang on until
the orders arrived. That 211 shot-callers could simultaneously proclaim
their hatred of “fags” while engaging in sexual acts with said fags no
longer baffled him. Logic was not the gang’s strong point. Intimidation
was.
A week or so after the bathroom blow job, Howard says,
Shimbel and another 211 member escorted him to a cell after the 10 p.m.
head count, supposedly so that he could help a “homie” write a letter
and get a discount on his rent. Howard had a pretty good idea what was
about to happen but didn’t see any way out.
The homie turned out
to be Phuong Dang, a member of a Vietnamese gang. Dang began by
demanding oral sex, Howard says. After a few minutes he stopped, pulled
up his pants, and stepped out of the cell for a moment, asking the 211
lookouts for lotion. He found some, returned, and ordered Howard to bend
over a desk and spread his legs. He sodomized him for several minutes,
then withdrew.
“Not bad pussy,” he said, and left the cell.
Told by Shimbel to get cleaned up, Howard retreated to the bathroom. He sat on a toilet and wept.
His
orders for Tennessee arrived three days later. The respite gave him two
months to try to figure out what to do. But the gang was busy in his
absence, too. When he returned to Sterling, several 211 members
surrounded him and showed him a single piece of paper. They figured it
would persuade him to get busy raising the big cash needed for the
defense fund.
There were two notable things about the document,
an intake form from Howard’s own file. It had to have come from a staff
computer, which meant the Crew had a DOC employee working with them,
either for pay or unwittingly. And it contained the names and address of
Howard’s parents, listed as emergency contacts. Someone was waiting on
the outside, one of the group explained, to see if Howard was going to
do what was expected of him.
Howard understood. “My family had
never done anything to anybody,” he says. “To know they could reach out
and touch my parents – that was a big move on their part.”
Over
the next few weeks Howard collected personal data the group had stolen
or extorted from sex offenders and other patsies. He even got the names
and vitals of death row prisoners in Tennessee. He filled out fraudulent
W-2 forms until he had a vast array of them, enough to raise $275,000
in tax refunds, to be funneled to a phony tax-preparation company that
Howard had created, and ultimately to the 211 Crew. The packet was
sitting on his desk, ready to be mailed to an outside confederate, but
Howard kept stalling for more time.
On January 3, 2006, two
officers conducted a surprise search of Howard’s cell. They found the
bundle of tax return forms, listing 35 prisoners – some of them not even
in Colorado. Howard says he didn’t tip off the staff himself, but he
wishes the raid had been more discreet.
“They sent the gang
coordinators,” he says. “The minute the 211 guys saw that, they pushed
me in a corner and asked, ‘Who the fuck have you been talking to?’”
Howard,
who has a history of heart trouble, suffered a panic attack that night –
the first in a series of convulsive, paralyzing episodes that made him
feel like “a mouse in a corner.”
Exhibiting high blood pressure and
tachycardia, he was taken to the hospital for observation and remained
there for several days.
During that time, Howard decided to name
names and try to get out of Sterling. He met with IRS agents, staff
brass and an investigator from the DOC Inspector General’s office.
He
told them the tax scam was supposed to raise money to hire Harvey
Steinberg, the prominent Denver criminal attorney, to defend Benjamin
Davis. He told them about the extortion. And eventually he told them
about the sexual assaults, naming Shimbel and Dang and Hernandez and
Griego.
The last bit of information spilled out first in a
conversation with a female IRS agent, who asked him what was “really”
going on. “I started crying,” he recalls. “I told her, ‘I’ve been raped.
I’ve been beaten. You people have no clue what’s going on here.’”
Larry
Graham, the investigator from the Inspector General’s office, was
highly skeptical of Howard’s claims. He thought it was suspicious that
Howard made detailed sexual assault allegations only after the
incriminating tax-fraud materials were found in his cell.
Graham
first learned of the claims from a draft of the lawsuit Howard soon
filed, acting as his own attorney, in a desperate effort to get a judge
to order his removal from Sterling.
There was no DNA evidence, no
contemporaneous outcry, nothing but “ice-cold” accusations that the
accused prisoners could easily deny, if anyone bothered to ask them.
In
Graham’s view, Howard was a smart con artist trying to game the system.
Or, as he put it in one e-mail to another DOC official, “Mr. Howard is
an admitted homosexual whose other talent is tax fraud ... he made an
unprovable report of past sexual assaults by 211’s here [at Sterling]
and at Fremont. I’m still working on that, but doubt if it will go far.”
In
another e-mail, Graham all but dismissed Howard’s story as a ploy for
leniency: “Mr. Howard seems to think he can just say the mean old 211
guys made him do it and walk away.”
Yet Howard did have proof of gang involvement in the tax scheme and other businesses.
He
helped investigators locate a computer disk that contained evidence of
falsified property sheets, payments to the gang by other prisoners and
other incriminating data. He turned over an intake sheet on another
prisoner that could only have come from a staff computer. But his
allegations of staff involvement were deemed “bogus” just the same.
“Even
after naming all the names, they just sent me back to my cell,” Howard
says now. “I told a captain these people were going to kill me if I
didn’t come up with $300,000 by March. Her response was, ‘Let’s see what
happens in March.’”
Reluctantly, it seems, administrators made
note of Howard’s “custody issues,” listing a couple dozen prisoners he
should not be housed with, and shipped him off to the Arkansas Valley
Correctional Facility. He stayed there for several months, filing a
blizzard of grievances and complaining about sightings of gang members
who might retaliate against him. One grievance challenged DOC’s
unwritten rule of making cell assignments by race; Howard figured he
would be better off with a Hispanic or African-American cellie than a
white one who might be in touch with the 211 Crew.
But word of
his snitching at Sterling eventually drifted into Arkansas Valley, and
Howard was transferred again. This time he was sent to one of the most
violent prisons in the state.
“I was sent to Limon, God knows why,” he says. “It was already all over the compound that 211 was going to kill me.”
In
a corridor at Limon, Howard locked eyes with Allen Hernandez, alias
LBow – one of the names on the list of prisoners from Fremont and
Sterling who weren’t supposed to be in contact with him. Howard fell to
the floor and vomited. He lasted two weeks at Limon before he was
shipped out again.
He was at Buena Vista only a few days when a
211 member from Sterling who’d been directly involved in the threats
against Howard was moved into the same unit. That night he was subjected
to a torrent of screams and taunts from neighboring cells. “They were
calling me a snitch and a whore and a fag,” he says. “They were making
arrangements to sell me to the black dudes on the tier. The officer
station is right there. They could hear it, but they didn’t react at
all.”
The experience triggered another panic attack, a trip to
the emergency room – and another grievance. “A mistake was made in
moving the offender you mention to BCVF after you were already here,” a
supervisor responded. “This I can verify was a very unusual situation
and should not have happened.”
But unusual situations continued
to dog Howard, right up to his last day as a guest of the State of
Colorado. On September 18, 2007, while waiting to be picked up by
federal marshals and start serving his federal sentence for tax fraud,
Howard was escorted past several vacant cells at the Denver Reception
and Diagnostic Center to a holding cell containing one other prisoner:
Simon Shimbel.
“I can’t go in there,” Howard said, stopping dead at the door. “He’s a custody issue.”
The
female sergeant escorting Howard ignored him and beckoned to the
control center to open the door. Howard begged her to check the
computer, which would show that he could not be housed with Shimbel.
The
sergeant refused and told him to get in the cell. “You ain’t on parole
yet, you know,” she said. Disobeying her order could delay his release
from DOC indefinitely.
He went in. The door slammed behind him.
Shimbel immediately got in his face. “I got ad-segged for that,” he
said, referring to the stretch in solitary that Howard’s statements to
investigators had cost him.
Howard curled up on top of the
toilet, keeping his eyes down, while Shimbel berated him for being a
snitch. Shimbel knocked him on the floor.
“The only reason I don’t choke you the fuck out is I’m leaving,” he seethed.
Shimbel checked the window to make sure no one was watching. Then he unzipped his pants. “Do what you do,” he said.
Howard
says Shimbel struck him on the back of the head until he started
performing oral sex. After a couple of minutes he knocked Howard to the
floor again and ejaculated into the toilet. “Can’t give you any of
this,” he muttered. “You’ll go to the pigs.”
Howard jumped up and
hit the cell’s emergency button. When a voice came on the intercom
asking him what the trouble was, he shouted that he needed his dress-out
clothes. The door opened. The marshals were already coming down the
corridor.
Howard and Shimbel were transported to the marshals’
office in the same car. He didn’t get a chance to report the alleged
assault until Shimbel was gone – bound for Australia, to serve time for a
prison escape there. Shifted temporarily to the Jefferson County jail,
Howard spoke to several officers and medical personnel before someone
took a report.
A jail sergeant called corrections officers at DOC to check Howard’s account of being sexually assaulted while in their custody.
“The guy’s a drama queen,” he was told. “Don’t worry about it.”
• • •
Howard’s
lawsuit was thrown out by U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, then
reinstated by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that
there was evidence that prison officials at Sterling knew Howard “faced
an ongoing risk from a prison gang with a substantial presence” and
failed to take reasonable steps to protect him.
After that ruling
came down, Howard managed to get the civil rights law firm of Killmer,
Lane & Newman, whose client list ranges from Ward Churchill and
Richard Heene to several death row prisoners, to represent him. The case
soon became a costly, heels-dug-in wrangle over who had bigger
credibility problems: convicted fraud Scott Howard or see-no-evil,
cover-your-ass corrections officials.
It was the state’s position
that Howard had never told case managers at Fremont and Sterling about
ongoing gang threats, extortion or sexual assaults – not until after he
was caught red-handed with the tax data in 2006. His transfer from
Fremont to Sterling had not been for security reasons, but because he
was accepted into a “life learning program” at Sterling. His complaints
about his placement at Sterling were not because of 211 threats, but
because he wanted to get back to his “paramour” in another unit.
The
official version took some bizarre turns. One officer maintained that
211 members at Sterling had such an aversion to homosexuality that one
of their members was stabbed over a forbidden tryst; thus it was
unlikely that gang members would sexually assault Howard or pimp him out
to other gangs. Case manager Backer maintained that complaining about
custody issues – for example, saying that gang members are trying to
kill you – is somehow different from snitching. Backer had “never seen
an inmate get retaliated against” for seeking protection, so why didn’t
Howard speak up?
Case manager Halligan insisted that extortion
was no big deal, either. “In my experience, threats of extortion and
extortion itself rarely leads to violence in DOC,” he stated in one
affidavit. “Nearly all such activity is resolved by the inmates
themselves.”
After months of discovery and depositions, Howard’s
lawyers found numerous holes in the official story, but nothing that
proved Howard’s version. “That was a weakness in our case,” attorney
David Lane says. “We had no corroboration of any kind that he’d ever
made a report. But then lo and behold, there was a memo from his case
manager that the attorney general’s office never gave to us. And it was
the smoking-gun document of the entire case.”
Howard had filed a
second lawsuit after his encounter with Shimbel on his last day in the
DOC. A private law firm defended that case, and it produced many of the
same documents the Colorado Attorney General’s Office had handed over in
the original case – with one glaring exception. A transfer form signed
by Fremont case manager Dave Mason had surfaced in the second wave. The
form states that one of the reasons Howard was being moved from Fremont
to Sterling was because “other offenders” were pressuring him for money.
Handwritten and circled on the form is a number: 211.
Weeks
before that document was found, Mason had filed an affidavit in the case
denying that Howard had ever told him about any threats or extortion.
Other officers filed similar affidavits, insisting that nothing in
Howard’s file or their discussions with him pointed to a gang problem.
Yet the form backed up Howard’s account of his meeting with Mason and
the reasons for his subsequent move to Sterling.
Howard remembers
seeing the form for the first time last spring and realizing he was on
the brink of vindication. “That was the healing point for me,” he says
now, “to find this document that shows I wasn’t lying.”
Lane was
more furious than elated. In thirty years of practicing law, he insists,
he’s never seen a more serious violation of discovery rules. “In the
entire world of documents, there was only one that we did not get – and
it was the one that blew their case out of the water,” he says. “I
believe the attorney general’s office intentionally hid this document.
But no one’s been held accountable for this.”
In a court filing,
the AG’s office maintained that the omission was “inadvertent,” the
result of a copying glitch by a paralegal, who omitted several other
less relevant pages when copying Howard’s DOC file. “If Mr. Lane
believes there was an ethical violation, he has an obligation to file a
grievance,” says AG spokesman Mike Saccone. “If he’s still carping about
this and hasn’t done that, I think that speaks volumes.”
Lane
did push for an evidentiary hearing in the matter, but within a few
weeks the parties quietly settled the case for $165,000. “I was
disappointed in the amount,” Lane says, “but Scott wanted to move on
with his life.”
Moving on has been difficult for Howard. While
the lawsuit was under way, he was inundated with materials reminding him
of the details of his assaults. He still suffers from post-traumatic
stress. He has bad reactions to encounters with white guys with shaved
heads, and for a time avoided contact with white people whenever he
could.
“Some days are good, some days are bad,” he says. “Part of
my healing process was to forgive people. Am I mad at staff? Do I think
they could have prevented it? Absolutely. There were times when I was
so upset, I didn’t know if I could go on with it. But I either had to
let them get away with it or continue the fight.”
DOC officials
didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Howard settlement or any
policy changes it may have inspired. In 2007, 211 Crew founder Benjamin
Davis, despite his insistence that he’d distanced himself from the gang,
was convicted by a Denver jury on charges of racketeering, assault and
conspiracy and had an additional 96 years tacked onto his sentence. But
the 211 Crew and other gangs continue to be active in Colorado prisons –
even if many of their activities are, as the man says, “resolved by the
inmates themselves.”
Howard now works as a production manager
for a company in the Midwest. He’s been invited to speak at an upcoming
gathering of the American Correctional Association as well as a national
convention of sexual assault response teams. After years of being
afraid to speak out, his name and photo and battles are showing up in
Just Detention International fundraising appeals and on the New York
Review of Books blog.
“This has turned into my fight,” he says. “I
know a person at Fremont who’s going through the same thing right now
and is being ignored. I really didn’t seek this, but I can be a voice
for those who aren’t being heard.”
