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Tom Cahill: I credit the war on drugs with the tremendous increase in prisoner rape. Most prison rape victims are in for minor nonviolent offenses. The victim profile is a young adult heterosexual male, maybe small or with a slight frame, confined for the first time for a minor victimless crime such as possession of a little too much marijuana -- and too poor to buy his freedom. I never heard of an affluent prisoner being raped, but then you never hear about them being executed either.

As for drugs, we should decriminalize all of them immediately. This epidemic of prison rape is just one more way the war on drugs is causing much more harm than the drugs themselves. These men and boys who are raped in prison will usually return to the community far more violent and antisocial than before they were raped. Some of them will perpetuate the vicious cycle by becoming rapists themselves in a misguided attempt to "regain their manhood" in the same manner in which they believe it was "lost."

If pot were decriminalized and people could grow it, maybe it would decrease the hard drug use. Some folks like to talk about the gateway theory, but I say if there is a gate, it swings both ways. I've seen many people using hard drugs, especially alcohol, improve their lives by using pot instead. And they want to throw you in prison for it? I think there should be restitution for all people arrested for pot, or at least users and small dealers and growers. The criminal justice system in this country is truly criminal.

It's my firm belief that this war on drugs has nothing to do with public health; instead it is about social control. The Nixonian version helped to neutralize the New Left, and ever since the drug war has been used to control "the dangerous classes" -- blacks, hispanics, the poor, young countercultures and dissident tendencies.

And I have to look at the CIA's record and wonder. They're always involved, aren't they? In Marseilles with the mob in the '50s, in Southeast Asia with the opium hill tribes in the '60s, with those Contras and their cocaine in the '80s, huge increases in opium production in Afghanistan while they helped fight the Russians. This is a government that wants to stop drug use?

WOL: How did you get involved in an issue like this?

Cahill: It happened to me. I was involved in anti-war activism in San Antonio during the Vietnam War. It was 1968, and San Antonio, with all its military bases and retirees, was not a friendly place for dissidents. Worse yet, I was a member of Veterans for Peace; a lot of people considered us traitors. I was jailed for civil disobedience.

The jailers put me in a 24-bed cell with 30 guys, mainly black and hispanic, with three white guys, two cowering in the back. The third white guy was retarded and maybe criminally insane. He was the leader of the guys who raped me. The jailers told them I was a short eyes -- a child molester -- and that if they took care of me they would get extra rations of jello.

This went on for 24-hours, until one of my Hispanic activist friends, an ex-con with friends in the jail, heard through the grapevine that I was being "turned out." He got word back into the cellblock vouching for me, and the rapes stopped on a dime. The leader of the blacks forced a black kid to give me his bunk after that. Made him sleep on the floor.

I found out later that that overcrowded cellblock had been created only hours earlier, taking prisoners from other cellblocks that weren't even full. I was in there a week before being transferred and while I wasn't jail savvy, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Snitches don't last long. I didn't cry out for the guards. I told a visiting attorney my wounds and bruises were only an initiation; I told a priest the same thing.

Ten years later, I got a call from a journalist in San Antonio -- I had moved to northern California -- who said he had FBI files of number of us activists. He read to me a portion of a memo that referred to me and my sister, a Catholic nun also active in the anti-war movement. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the files, and after two years and the help of Sen. Alan Cranston, I got them, 350 pages worth. These were COINTELPRO files, from the FBI's counter-subversive program.

Two of the memos indicate the FBI may have set me up because of my anti-war activities. One memo from the San Antonio FBI office to Washington was suggesting ways to neutralize me a month before the rape. Another memo from San Antonio to DC, this one a month after the rape, took credit for driving my sister and me out of San Antonio.

I was only raped for 24 hours. I consider myself a minor victim. I didn't fit the profile; I was older, I was married, more comfortable with my sexual identity. But it has wreaked havoc with my life. I went through a divorce, went through a decade of homelessness, I lost my portrait studio business. It has taken all these years to heal. I see a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, an acupuncturist. I take Paxil. I've devoted much of my time to healing, which is why I'm still alive.

But for many guys the humiliation is too much and they commit suicide. Or they become beasts. Martyrs or monsters. But I've worked through the humiliation; it's not mine, it belongs to society, and especially to the lawmakers that allow this to continue. I've cost the taxpayers $150,000 since 1987, when the Veterans Administration diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm permanently disabled and probably the only male in the country getting a pension for rape trauma syndrome, because there wasn't any other trauma.

WOL: Why is this crime ignored or joked about instead of eliminated?

Cahill: The simple reason is that the victims as well as prison officials have been complicit with their rapists. There is tremendous fear and humiliation. Researchers find that few women report rapes; the percentage is even lower among men, especially in prison where the life expectancy of a snitch can be measured in minutes. And many prisoners being so young, 18 or 20 or 22, they are also confused sexually, they think "Maybe I'm gay." While gays are often raped, I have never heard of a gay rapist behind bars, and being raped doesn't make you gay. Rape in general is less an act of sex than of violence and humiliation.

Prison rapists were often raped or sexually abused earlier in life. This is a cycle of violence. It used to be called homosexual rape, but we felt that was really a misnomer that only fueled homophobia. Rapists in prison are overwhelmingly heterosexual. I'm sure every one of my rapists was straight. For all these years, the guards could say that sex behind bars was consensual. That's the opposite of the truth.

WOL: Surely you're not blaming the victim here?

Cahill: Not at all. I blame the US criminal justice system and that includes all those who make and interpret and enforce the laws. I blame them for scapegoating prisoners who are mostly poor. I blame them for using crime as a smokescreen for their much greater crimes. The worst mass murderer is not as bad as some of these politicians who support corporations who pollute and manufacture arms. They're worse than Manson.

And the American public. I think Americans care more about their bank accounts than each other, and they allow themselves to be easily led astray. In recent years, I stopped trying to appeal to the conscience of American voters and taxpayers on the grounds of justice or human rights or civil rights. Now I've started trying to show them how prison rape is costing them big bucks. I have an economist and statistician trying to put a price tag on it. How much it costs in increased violence, recidivism, increasing successful lawsuits, as well as health care.

For years, we've been appealing to senators to investigate prison rape or prohibit prison rape, but they just shined us on. There are several sitting senators who know, who have known for years, that this is going on. Teddy Kennedy was on a prison abuse select committee in the '70s. He knows. Arlen Specter was the Philadelphia DA who prosecuted that city's jailhouse rape scandal in the late '60s. And I've been after Barbara Boxer since the mid-'80s. I'm really upset with Kennedy, Boxer, and Specter because of this.

WOL: The Human Rights Watch report accuses prison administrations of callous indifference to prison rape, but does it go beyond indifference?

Cahill: Oh, yes, it can serve the purposes of the state in many ways. Our martyr, Steven Donaldson, was the first one to use the term "rape as a management tool." First, the threat of prison rape is used by detectives to coerce suspects into plea bargaining. In prison itself, rape is used as extra punishment for jailhouse lawyers and troublemakers such as Eddie Dillard at the Corcoran unit. Then it is used to divide prisoners along racial lines.

A good example is John William King, one of the three men who dragged Alvin Byrd, a black man, to his death in Texas. A few years before that, Williams was in the Beto unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. He was described by friends and neighbors as a Texas good ol' boy, not hating blacks. The Aryan Brotherhood wanted to recruit him, but he resisted, so the Brotherhood got a sympathetic white guard to place him in a cellblock full of Bloods, where he was raped. King came out a monster, which is all too common. He joined the Brotherhood, he got the tattoos. Now he's on Death Row.

It is also used to destroy potential leaders among prisoners and to neutralize left-wing dissidents like Donaldson and me. Donaldson was also a Veteran for Peace. I've never heard of it being used as a tool against rightist prisoners, because the guards are rightists. You don't get too many left-wing prison guards. And it is used as entertainment by the guards; they set up rapes because they were bored, just like they set up fights. Then administrators have the gall to go to the legislatures and say, "We need more appropriations, more guards, more guns, more cameras to stop prison rape."

WOL: Is rape inevitable in a prison setting?

Cahill: Prison rape can be easily and inexpensively curbed. I invite you to look at what Sheriff Hennessey has done in San Francisco. For more than 20 years, he has had a protocol -- the San Francisco protocol -- designed specifically to reduce inmate rape. And it works. Rape in the San Francisco jail is a rare occurrence. He has designed the jail to increase visibility. He has trained the staff to be more vigilant, he separates the obviously nonviolent from the obvious predators. Male or female nurses interview each prisoner to see if they can handle themselves or if they're vulnerable and then assign them accordingly.

I've seen it myself -- from the inside. I've been a guest there a few times over the years for my civil disobedience. We plan to give Sheriff Hennessey our Steven Donaldson Award for outstanding achievement in this area. These sheriffs and jail administrators and wardens must have annual an convention where they compare notes. More need to follow his lead. More need to be pressured to do so. It's what's right.