Can gay inmates be protected? Roderick Johnson says he was sold as a sex slave in a Texas prison, but a jury found prison officials had done nothing wrong. Can anyone protect gay inmates from rape and abuse?

When Roderick Keith Johnson was sent to a state prison in Texas for burglary and drug possession in 2000, it was the beginning of an 18-month nightmare that he says included being repeatedly raped and falling under the control of a powerful prison gang that sold him as a sex slave to other inmates.

Johnson--nicknamed "Coco" by his prison pimp--didn't suffer in silence. He filed several complaints with officials at the James Allred state prison in Iowa Park and on seven separate occasions appeared before the prison's classification committee to request that he be transferred out of a unit where he says he was told by guards to "fight or fuck."

"Most homosexuals are placed into safekeeping where they are more protected from other inmates who would make them vulnerable," Johnson, 37, tells The Advocate. "I was one of the people who slipped through the cracks."

It wasn't until the American Civil Liberties Union became involved that Johnson was moved to another prison and the assaults stopped. The ACLU filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on his behalf against six correctional officers for failing to protect Johnson during his incarceration, yet the system again failed Johnson. On October 18 a Wichita Falls jury voted 10-2 not to hold prison officials accountable. Some jurors said they didn't believe it was as bad as Johnson said it was.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in July that 1,533 incidents of inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse were reported to corrections officers in 2004. Nearly 40% of those reports came from Texas. (The bureau's report is required annually as a result of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first-ever federal legislation addressing prison rape.) The most common outcome of those abuse reports? Within prison systems most cases are thrown out due to a lack of evidence, the bureau reports.

As the Johnson case demonstrates, the difficulty in securing punishment for prison rape and the guards and officials who ignore it does not end at the prison walls. The Texas prison system's inspector general who investigated Johnson's accusations determined that they were unfounded. In 2004 a Wichita Falls grand jury chose not to indict the inmates accused of attacking Johnson. And the ACLU's civil case ended in October's defeat.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that the ACLU and other advocates against prison rape believe the high profile of Johnson's fight--and the dramatic trial--shed light on an epidemic within the Texas system and in other U.S. prisons.

Johnson's attorneys called five prisoner witnesses to the stand, including eyewitnesses and people allegedly involved in the pimping. Johnson himself spent more than nine hours on the stand. It was draining, he says, but nothing compared with prison.

"I had totally become withdrawn. I was numb," he says. "After something happens for so long, you just become numb, and you aren't functioning. You just shut yourself down. You try and forget about it and say, "This isn't happening; this is a bad dream.'"

T.J. Parsell understands. The 45-year-old is a gay prison rape survivor who has gone on to serve on the board of directors of the national human rights organization Stop Prisoner Rape. "It was pretty rough," Parsell recalls of his incarceration. His four-year term in a Michigan state prison for adult offenders commenced in 1978 when he was just 17. "On my first day in general population, an inmate spiked my drink with a heavy sedative [and] lured me down to a dorm where I was gang-raped," he says. "They flipped a coin to see which one I would belong to. It wouldn't have mattered if I was gay or not. I was young and I was skinny."

Parsell, who had been convicted of robbing a camera store with a toy gun, believes homophobia is at the heart of both rape and coercion to take on a protective sexual partner while in prison.

"Inmates view gays as fundamentally lacking in manhood, so gays are considered open game," he says. "If you go in as gay, you are going to have to hook up or [face] lockup into protective custody, if that's an option at the place where you are at. Inside, you have to make compromises to survive. The person who has the most control over your quality of life is your man. If that man is powerful enough, he can protect you."

Conclusive data on prison rape can be difficult to track, partially because of a reluctance by victims to report the assaults. "Why would we expect men in prison to report rape? They are totally stigmatized," says Helen Eigenberg, a former case manager and correctional officer who has conducted one of the few studies that examines the attitudes of corrections officers on rape and other issues.

Eigenberg, chair of criminal justice and legal assistant studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, published a well-known study of Texas corrections officers' attitudes toward prison rape in 1989, and she has continued to present her findings around the country. The study found that 46% of officers believed that some inmates deserve to be raped, 34% believed rape victims are weak, and 15% believed that rape victims are gay. Similar victim blaming was found in a 1996 study of corrections officers in Nebraska.

"Until you destigmatize things, people aren't going to report," Eigenberg says. "This is a complex issue not amenable to a quick fix."

Public pressure is needed in order to force the prisons to better police themselves, says Kathy Hall-Martinez, interim executive director of Los Angeles-based Stop Prisoner Rape. "Americans by and large condemned what happened at Abu Ghraib," she says. "[But] this is what happens in our state systems and federal systems every day. We need to focus on getting our own house in order. It seems to be an attitude of 'These are prisoners: Why should I be concerned about what happened to them behind bars?' "

As one of the few cases to reach any kind of courtroom, the Johnson case showed that not only is it difficult to get prison officials to believe victims, it's also tough to get juries to believe them.

"The jury believed he was raped; that was clear," says Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU's National Prison Project and Johnson's lead counsel. "But the concept that prison officials should be liable did not get through to their consciousness. You have a guy who is gay, a prisoner with a [history of] drug addiction. You put it all together and it was a high-risk case, a very difficult case. But we're all glad we did it."

Hernandez is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News.