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Ex-con 'sold' for gay sex
04/02/2004 17:51 - (SA)
Pretoria - Warders at Pretoria's local prison seemed to have a "bizarre fascination" with gay sex, a former prisoner told the Jali Commission into prison corruption on Wednesday.
Former inmate Louis Karp named the warders he claimed had made his stay in jail a misery one by one. The warders all had to stand up in front of the commission and identify themselves.
Karp spent almost two years in jail while awaiting trial on a car theft charge, only to be released after receiving a suspended sentence.
In that time, he said, a warder had sold him to four gangsters in jail, who sodomised him for a period of two months.
After that ordeal, a fellow prisoner now on trial in a heist case violently raped him. He was also continuously subjected to cruel taunts and innuendo. Taunted
Karp - who likes to be called Louisa and said he thought of himself as a woman - described numerous incidents when he said warders belittled and cruelly taunted him.
He also described incidents when he was accosted, asked to drop his pants, and to "illustrate" how gays "did things". On another occasion one of the warders actually stroked and touched his private parts.
He had also witnessed one of the warders watching a pornographic video with one of the inmates and there was actually a video night where a pornographic video was shown to a group of inmates in one of the bathrooms.
"The barrage of verbal and sexual abuse makes you feel very little, but there's not much you can do because you're in their power.
"I felt instead of saying these things to me, why could they not just stab me with a knife? In my experience the warders had a bizarre fascination with gay sex. 'Become like a baby'
"You're an adult, but when these things happen to you, you become like a baby again and just want your mother to be with you. There were many times when I thought of killing myself," an emotional Karp testified.
Karp, who was in tears when he described being raped by an inmate in his cell, said he was not treated, nor given an HIV test or any medication immediately after the incident. A doctor, who only examined him the next morning, sent him away with pain pills.
He was also forced to return to the same cell and face his rapists and only transferred to a private cell holding sentenced prisoners after he requested a transfer.
Instead of his rapist being sent to solitary confinement, it was Karp who ended up with chains around his legs and being locked up for 23-hours a day.
As far as he knew, nothing was ever done to the rapist and the criminal charges he laid with the police appeared not to have been investigated at all.
"After the rape, an HIV test was not done, nor offered. I did not receive any counselling. The doctor, who examined me told me to drop my pants, examined me and that was the last I heard from him.
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