Happens all the time. A cretin will be caught, and found guilty, for anti-gay violence and message boards will be filled with calls of prison time where rape is punishment.

Usually the wish is for the culprit to be another jail-mate’s “prison bitch.” These calls for rape as retribution are usually penned by men (hard to imagine women jumping on the bandwagon). Maybe the anonymity of the internets allows us the privilege to type mess we would never say in public. Could be “prison as fantasy” is so ubiquitous in gay male porn that it seeps into our consciousness. I do not know the reason, but hoping a odious human being is raped is a sick wish.

Yes it’s the cheap movie joke, or manufactured fantasy, but sexual assault in prison is no laughing matter. Sort of strange that needs to be said, but I’m tired of reading comments that could have been penned by a standard frat-boy yokel . Considering the number of people in detention centers in the United States (2,310,984 according to Justice Department numbers), it should surprise few that sexual attacks  in prisons are a problem.

Before you tell me it only happens to those who deserve it, remember assaults are reported by people who spend only a night in jail for minor offenses.

“This is something that could happen to a kid who has no priors and who happens to make a mistake,”said Brenda V. Smith, an American University law professor.

No one is asking we turn our care and support from our victims of violence, and there is no contradiction in wanting people punished for grave misdeeds and left safe from attack. However, if  you yell someone needs to be raped for doing grievous wrong, the difference between you and those who stalk is minor at best.

U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf said Tuesday that Michelle Kosilek has not shown she will suffer “serious harm” without further electrolysis treatments. The judge says he may revisit the decision.

Kosilek was born as Robert and is serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife, Cheryl, in 1990.

Wolf ruled in 2002 that Kosilek was entitled to treatment for gender-identity disorder, but stopped short of ordering taxpayer-funded surgery. Kosilek sued again in 2005. State prison officials oppose the request.

They were sentenced in January to eight years in prison on charges of “indecent and unnatural acts” and “forming associations of criminals.”

All nine were involved in HIV-prevention work, their lawyer said.

The arrests came just weeks after Senegal hosted an international AIDS conference that included gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender participants.

Senegal, a primarily Muslim nation in West Africa, is one of 38 countries on the continent that criminalize homosexual acts. South Africa prompted continent-wide controversy in 2006 when it became the first African country to legalize gay marriage.

At the trial of the nine, the prosecution argued that the AIDS organization they were associated with was a front recruiting men into homosexuality.

Police officers burst into the private residence of an HIV outreach worker where the nine were allegedly holding a meeting. Police confiscated condoms and lubricants – tools used for HIV-prevention work.

The police allegedly forced several of the men to disclose family members’ phone numbers and threatened to inform their families. Sources told Human Rights Watch that the men were beaten in detention.

In appealing the sentence – the harshest ever to be handed down in Senegal for a homosexuality conviction – the men’s attorney argued that accusations against them were based on anonymous tip-offs.

The court was told that the men were engaged in a meeting -  not sex, as the prosecution had claimed during the trial.

The prosecution did not contest the defense’s arguments.

In overturning the ruling, the court ordered the immediate release of the men.

On February 20th, the District of Columbia joined a very short list of  states that allow transgender inmates in their corrections systems to be housed with other inmates of their gender identity.

And by “very short,” I mean there is one other such state: New York.

Given the not-entirely-progressive-on these-issues tilt of the current District administration, this Department of Corrections shift seemed like a great step. According to a letter acquired by the Washington City Paper, Attorey General Peter Nickles described the regulation change like this:

“These provisions, along with other aspects of the policy, will help to ensure that the rights of transgender prisoners are respected and that their unique needs are accommodated, to the extent practicable, while they are incarcerated.”

Pursuant to this policy, the District Will [sic] be one of only a few jurisdictions in the nation to permit transgender inmates to be housed according to their gender identity in appropriate cases, and to allow transgender inmates to initiate hormone therapy while in custody.”

Sounds great, right? Trans prisoners will be able to be housed according to their gender identity, and will even be given the opportunity to start hormone therapy will incarcerated, right?

Not entirely. While Nickles paints a pretty picture about the policy, it’s full of holes that render the new policy inconsistent at best and somewhat useless at worst.

The first questionable aspect of the plan is that it states that inmates “may” be housed based on gender identity, if it’s “appropriate.” Who decides what’s appropriate? The newly formed “Transgender Committee,” comprised of a medical practitioner, a mental health clinician, a correctional supervisor, a case manager, and a Department of Corrections volunteer that’s part of the trans community or knowledgeable about trans issues. The City Paper suggests that majority will rule from the Committee, but then points to a further complication.

The Committee’s decision can be overturned, it turns out, by the prison Warden. All he needs to do is submit his reasoning in writing to the Director of the DOC.

That loophole is exacerbated when you take into consideration that the new policy could be described as “all or nothing.” A Transgender woman who is housed with cisgender women will also be given a woman’s uniform, be permitted to keep her hair long, and start or continue hormone treatment. But if either the Transdgender Commission or the prison warden houses the trans woman with male inmates, she won’t have access to any of those rights.

To make it worse, no trans inmates can expect to be addressed by their first names or genered pronouns. The regulation states that to avoid confusion, all trans inmates will be called “Inmate Last Name” by all prison staff. First of all, pronouns aren’t that confusing to keep straight. But second of all, does the regulation really need to stipulate a way of treating one group of inmates differently than the others? If the point of the policy change is, as explained, to respect gender identity as required under the DC Human Rights Act, isn’t treating transgender prisoners different from cisgender prisoners discriminatory?

Perhaps I’m being oversensitive. Perhaps this really is a progressive policy. Or perhaps the Department of Corrections is trying to win a PR fight while making no real concessions. If the behavior of the DOC Director is any indication, it’s clearly the latter. During negotiations, The City Paper reports, he consistenly (perhaps purposefully) referred to the trans women underconsideration as “men.”

The openly gay former Culture Club singer was sentenced under his real name, George O’Dowd.

His attorney, Adrian Waterman, had argued for a suspended sentence. Waterman said that O’Dowd, 47, and 29-year-old Audun Carlsen were behaving like “drug-crazed idiots” but when the singer was sober,  he was “a kind and generous man” and that “there is no shortage of people to help him through his recovery.”

Judge David Radford disagreed. “This is a case where custody is the more likely option,” he said, passing sentence on Friday.

During the trial, the court was told that O’Dowd met Carlsen on a gay internet site and agreed to meet at the singer’s home where Carlsen was to pose for a naked photo shoot.

The two men later exchanged emails, and at one point O’Dowd accused Carlsen of hacking into his computer and stealing the photos. Nevertheless, O’Dowd invited Carlsen to another photo shoot at his home.

It was a plot to exact revenge, the prosecution said, for what O’Dowd believed was theft of the original pictures.

After O’Dowd had taken several photos of Carlsen, the performer invited the younger man into his bedroom.

When Carlsen entered the room, he realized a second man had joined O’Dowd.

O’Dowd has refused to name the other man, prosecutor Heather Norton said.

Carlsen was forced to the floor. “Mr. O’Dowd produced a set of handcuffs. They placed one end on Mr Carlsen’s right wrist and the other end was placed through a hook that was screwed to a fixture near the bed,” Norton told the court during last month’s trial.

She said that Carlsen, “was frightened, shaking and crying. His fear increased when Mr O’Dowd returned into the room carrying with him a box.”

The box, said Norton, contained chains and leather straps.

Carlsen managed to free himself by pulling a hook the handcuffs were attached to from the wall.  He escaped through a window clad in only his underwear and called police from a local news vendor’s stand.

O’Dowd did not testify on his own behalf, but the court. In a transcript of a police interrogation O’Dowd admitted he handcuffed Carlsen but denied punching or assaulting the hustler.

The performer’s attorney suggested that bruises Carlsen had could have been due to the fact that he was HIV positive.

It was the latest brush O’Dowd has had with the law.

In 2006, a judge in New York City sentenced him to five days of community service after being convicted of filing a false police report.

The singer had called police in October 2005 with a bogus report of a burglary by a male prostitute at his lower Manhattan apartment. When police went to investigate they found cocaine inside.

He was originally charged with drug offenses but under an agreement with prosecutors he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges and worked off his sentence picking garbage.

Tania Veilleux, 43, has been detained at the federal penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines since mid-December when she was sentenced to 40 months in prison for sexually assaulting a young girl over a four-year period.

Veilleux had previously been held at the Tanguay prison for women in Montreal while awaiting sentencing, but other female inmates weren’t comfortable with her presence there.

Veilleux was formerly known as Sylvain Veilleux, but the Registrar of Civil Status of Quebec has accepted her as a female. However, federal officials have classified her as a male.

A court-appointed lawyer who assisted Veilleux at her trial says tensions boiled over at the women’s facility because while Veilleux is legally a woman, she still has male sexual organs.

At least one of female detainee didn’t appreciate sharing space with Veilleux, said lawyer Andre Boissonneault. “Legally she is a woman but she hasn’t had her operation, so she’s partly a man,” Boissonneault said.

“That caused some problems.”

Boissonneault said provincial jail officials went to great lengths to accommodate Veilleux, including keeping other inmates behind bars while she bathed and changed.

“Then she was sentenced to 40-months in prison and instead of sending her to a prison for women, they sent her to a prison for men,” Boissonneault said.

The Correctional Service of Canada was unavailable to comment on the case.

But a long-time Quebec advocate for the transgendered said it isn’t a good idea to leave Veilleux in an all-male facility.

“I don’t know how Tania will hold up in these types of facilities,” said Micheline Montreuil, a transgendered Quebec lawyer, teacher and politician who ran federally for the New Democratic Party in 2007.

“Putting her in isolation to keep her safe is probably the best – but I don’t know if that is a long-term solution.”

Montreuil said that while she herself would feel physically capable of handling herself among males, she doesn’t know how Veilleux will adjust.

Montreuil, who has visited clients in the prison where Veilleux is currently incarcerated just north of Montreal, says it is a rough institution that caters specifically to men.

“I don’t know how she’s going to react but knowing how inmates are, she could face harassment and could even be assaulted,” said Montreuil.

“So is it a good idea to put her in a male prison? No, unless of course she’s in isolation.”

Boissonneault said Veilleux has not returned his calls, but hopes to touch base with her in the coming days.

Adel Hussein was sentenced Nov. 24 to six months in jail by a court in Irbil, capital of the Kurdish-ruled region of northern Iraq, according to the Committee To Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.

Hussein also was ordered to pay a fine of about $106, the organizations said. He is being held at Mahata prison in Irbil, about 220 miles north of Baghdad.

“We are astonished to learn that a press case has been tried under the criminal code. What was the point of adopting — and then liberalizing — a press code in the Kurdistan region if people who contribute to the news media are still be tried under more repressive laws,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

The case centers on an April 2007 article Hussein wrote for the independent weekly Hawlati that detailed the physical effects of gay sex, the organizations said.

The sentence handed down by the Kurdish court was based on an outdated 1969 Iraqi penal code, said Luqman Malazadah, Hussein’s lawyer. Malazadah told CPJ he has appealed the court decision.

A new law that took effect in October does not recognize a violation of “public custom,” also known as public decency, as an offense, CPJ said.

Under the new law, a representative of the region’s Journalist Syndicate must attend a journalist’s trial, but Fatih told CPJ no representative attended Hussein’s trial.

Irbil’s public prosecutor also has filed a lawsuit against Hussein, the magazine’s former chief editor Adnan Osman, and the publisher, Tareq Fateh, according to Reporters Without Borders.

(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) A 43-year-old suburban Philadelphia man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for the murder of a 23-year-old intern he had attempted to rape.

William Smithson could have been sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of Jason Kyle Shephard two years ago. 

In addition to finding Smithson guilty of murder, the jury also convicted him of attempted rape, kidnapping and drug charges.

Shephard’s body was found Smithson’s home in September 2006. The 23-year-old from Cavalier, North Dakota was studying sports marketing at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota and had taken a semester off to intern at Daktronics, a scoreboard manufacturer.

Smithson was a supervisor for a Daktronics office in Pennsylvania when Shephard visited the office in the summer of 2006.

During Smithson’s trial, the jury was told that on the night of his murder, Shephard had called several friends from his hotel room before Smithson picked him up and brought him to his house.

Prosecutor Thomas Lawrie said Smithson slipped the date-rape drug GHB into a drink and gave it to Shephard. He then began undressing the young man.

Lawrie said that Shephard was partially conscious and put up a fight. Smithson then punched Shephard in the face and strangled him. Smithson then hid the body in the basement and attempted to conceal the murder.

Smithson, testifying in his own defense, said that he had trouble coming to terms with his sexuality and as a result had developed a drug habit. He also admitted that he had hosted drug-induced sex parties that involved Washington lobbyists and New York doctors.

He told the jury that during the parties he frequently injected and snorted crystal meth.

In his closing arguments, Lawrie called Smithson’s home a “domicile of degradation.”

During the penalty phase of trial, Shephard’s father said the young man had been studying to be a teacher and was an avid runner.

“He was the core of our family,” said Kyle Shephard.

Smithson’s attorney pleaded for the jury not to impose the death penalty. “Let him live,” urged Mary Beth Welch.

In returning with a life sentence the jury, indicated that despite the severity of the crime, Smithson was emotional instable because of his drug addiction and did not have a criminal record prior to the murder.

Smithson will be formally sentenced in January.

The new regulations are the result of legalized same-sex marriage in the state.

But in cases where both spouses are incarcerated they will not be allowed to share a cell a spokesperson for the department told Capitol Weekly, a publication on California politics.

Under the new rules gay and lesbian inmates will have the same rights as straight prisoners.

It is not known if any gay prisoner has sought to marry a partner. But department of corrections spokesperson Seth Unger told Capitol Weekly that preventing same-sex marriages likely would not stand up in court. He also said that conservative groups who might challenge the new regulation would likely lose.

Unger also defended the decision not to allow two same-sex inmates to marry and then share a cell saying the same practice holds for opposite-sex couples.

While opposite-sex inmates are housed in separate facilities, there are different circumstances involving prisoners of the same-sex he said, pointing to the potential for inmates with money or other assets to find themselves coerced into marriages with more powerful inmates, who then might try to lay claim to half of their net worth.

“We have never permitted inmates to marry other inmates in the past,” Unger told Capitol Weekly. “We do believe it would pose safety and security concerns at our prisons.”

The California Supreme Court in May struck down the state ban on same-sex marriage.

Social conservatives are attempting to pass a constitutional amendment that would nullify the court ruling.  The issue will go to voters in November.

Recent polls suggest the election could be close. A Field Poll taken last month found that 51 percent of likely voters said they would vote against Proposition 8, while 42 percent said they would vote for it.