Eight incarcerated men stood before a number of women and prisoners to make amends for unethical behavior. They spoke at the second “Sister I’m Sorry” conference, hosted by Tony “Pup” Walldrip, at the Garden Chapel on August 11.
The conference began with the screening of a “Sister I’m Sorry” event hosted by Margaret Avery, filmed and directed by Frank Underwood Jr.
Panel speakers were Bun Chanthon, Clay Harris, Larry “Doc” Histon, Andress Yancy, Darryl Hill, Darrell “Obediah” Flowers, Lonnie Morris, and Travis Lambert.
Flowers, 47, serving a 12-to-life sentence, was given four minutes to speak about what he was sorry for.
“I come from a drug-addicted mother who is a prostitute. She had me at 15 years old, and used to lie to me a lot. It made me angry, and at 14 years old I beat her up,” he said as he shed tears.
“I was angry. I took that anger into my relationships where I looked for validation, but was controlling, manipulating, cheating, and when my girlfriend was tired of me she wanted to leave,” he said. “I didn’t want to let her leave me. I stabbed her…she cried ‘Help me Jesus, help me Jesus, help me Jesus,’ and I told her ‘Jesus can’t help you now,’ but by the grace of God she survived.”
“For being controlling, manipulative and a cheater, Sister, I’m sorry,” Flowers said.
Darryl Hill, another lifer, said “I loved the streets more than I loved my family.”
“While I never touched my family, I killed people in front of them. I beat people in front of my mother-in-law, my wife,” he said as he took a deep breath. “I hurt them that way.”
“My wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer while I was still home. She had five years to live, and while I was lying down with my wife in bed she would say, ‘You’re going to get life or get killed in the streets.’ My response would be, ‘Well, you got five more years with me so you better enjoy them while you got them.’”
Her prediction came true, and he was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man.
“For not being there to give my wife her pain medication, abandoning my family, and for every sister who had a man like me, ‘Sister, I’m sorry,’” Hill said.
Darlene Burke said she was moved by the fact that incarcerated men were holding a conference to apologize for mistreating women. Burke is the founder of Ten Toes In, a mentorship and domestic violence program, and she flew from Los Angeles to attend.
“Typically, it is the women who support the men in prison and we are never acknowledged, often ostracized, told we have low self-esteem and are stupid because we choose to love y’all,” Burke said. “And I just want you men to know, when a woman invests in a man she’s looking for a man in return.”
She accepted the men’s apologies for women who couldn’t attend and said, “Thank you.”
Female correctional officers win lawsuit for hostile work environment
Corrections Officers guarding the East Gate
Female correctional officers have won a $20 million settlement of a lawsuit claiming sexual harassment and a hostile work environment in federal prisons.
The settlement also includes 20 pages of procedural changes to improve employee safety, including improved training about sexual harassment, better monitoring for processing incident reports, and removing front pockets from inmate clothing to eliminate hidden masturbating.
The settlement resulted after a judge ruled in 2016 in favor of the lawsuit filed by a collective of women working at the nation’s largest male federal prison in Coleman, Fla.
The settlement was one of the largest class-action settlements leveled to date for pervasive sexual harassment, The Washington Post reported Jan. 27.
“These women walked into a high-security prison every day, knowing that they were going to be harassed by inmates and told by male colleagues and supervisors that they shouldn’t be there,” said Heidi Burakiewicz, lead attorney for the case.
The lawsuit alleged that more than 500 female correctional officers, teachers, nurses and office services employees were subjected to a hostile work environment, sex discrimination, and deliberate indifference.
The lead plaintiff was Correctional Officer Taronica White. She said from the first day she started working at the new maximum-security prison, she routinely got catcalls as she walked across the exercise yard post and inmates exposed their private parts to her during count time.
White said she reported the incidents to her superiors. Nevertheless, little to nothing was done to stop the behavior.
The Post reported that another plaintiff said one night she was exposed to 25 to 30 inmates masturbating. “It felt like a free for all … I was afraid for my safety.”
25 percent of millennial-age American men think asking a woman who is not a romantic partner to go for a drink is harassment, according to a recent survey by The Economist/YouGov reports The New York Times 1-17-18.
More than a third of millennial say that if a man compliments a woman’s looks it is harassment, according to a recent survey by The Economist/YouGov reports The New York Times 1-17-18.
Sexual misconduct by the inmates remains a serious problem in a male prison, said Unit Manager Tammy Padgett.
Improvements are being made “but we still have growth to do,” said Shirley Moore Smeal, president of the Association of Women Executives in Corrections. “Some people would still rather not have women working in corrections at all.”
“Women are drawn to these jobs for the same reason anyone would be, they are stable government jobs with low entry requirements,” said Dana Britton, director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.
Prisons provide attractive jobs in pastoral, economically depressed areas. Nevertheless, women’s increasing presence in men’s prisons has often sparked conflict with the men who have traditionally held those jobs.
The Post article says that men’s prisons did not start hiring women until the 1970s, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Today women account for 30 percent of correctional department workers; this includes community-based facilities, juvenile facilities, and jails.
A similar lawsuit involving the District of Columbia Department of Corrections was settled in 1999. Lawsuits have also been filed in New Mexico, Denver and Cook County, Ill.
http://sanquentinnews.com/former-prisoner-files-sexual-harassment-suit/