How Painful is Prison Sex?
Where Peanut Butter Drips in the Infirmary
What are the logistics of buttsex behind bars? Justice-impacted Americans typically conceal this aspect of their confinement in their post-release reflections.1 Inside prison walls, men labeled as ‘rape victims’ by outsiders often lie to investigators about what really happens. But through medical studies, found objects, and a bit of sociology, we can track how system-involved individuals breed like Br’er Rabbit.
Thinking about this issue clearly requires a taboo on words like ‘rape’ and ‘gay.’ Life is too different in sex-segregated spaces like barracks, monasteries, and Antarctic research bases. Still, these terms can be appropriate for Returning Citizens. The carceral sexual ecology rewires identities, leading some ex-cons to continue bisexual behavior after release.2 So what’s hot in the prison water that bends straight noodles?
It is certainly not the Foucault that dropout jockers are reading in the prison libraries. Prison operates as a real-life Lord of the Flies, where informal yet rigid hierarchies emerge instinctively. New inmates quickly assess their position in the racialized pecking order. Young, effeminate and nonblack inmates choose the life of a ‘prison wife,’ doing laundry and other errands for their husbands in exchange for protection.3
Prison reveals the ancient compact between survival and submission. Since Neolithic times, the most enduring bloodlines descend from those who mastered the art of bending without breaking. In concrete cells as in ancient fields, men who kneel to provide oral obeisance leave more progeny than upright martyrs who ‘die with dignity.’ God and Warden are co-architects in this beauty of human domestication.
Of prison daddies and booty bandits
Inmates build whole kin networks behind bars. Older men claim not just sexual ‘wives’ but also non-sexual ‘sons’ they mentor and tax. Rookies absorb the code of conduct through tall tales about archetypes like Boxing Betty or Lick ’em Lenny. Packed with sexual detail for shock value, these stories teach lessons about survival: Keep emotional distance, avoid debts or petty theft, and project steady confidence.4
A prison daddy’s first lesson is financial. He shows a son how to keep the books: no untracked loans, no borrowing, no free coffee. If a rookie forgets, debts convert to flesh; on some yards, one unpaid honey-bun turns the debtor into a ‘canteen ho.’ Smooth-talking booty bandits may use ‘game’ to trick inmates into sex without debts, and gorilla pimps simply take what they want. In this case, sons need gangs for shelter.
U.S. prison gangs sort by race. Ancestral identity markers determine whose flag you stand under: Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, or Black Guerrilla Family. Any banner blunts interracial assaults, but cannot stop your own crew from pimping you in-house. Non-lifers think twice, since committing murder can be the price of entry into, or exit from, a gang. And the gaps between racial banners go further than this.5
Some gangs, like the Crips or MS-13, keep a live pipeline between curb and cellblock. Crooked guards and paroled soldiers shuttle cash, phones, and dope both ways. Family day doubles as a board meeting, and wives tuck USB sticks into weaves. White-power crews lack free-world cousins to stock lockers, so they squeeze their own even harder: first in commissary, then in flesh. But enough about race, let’s talk about sex!
Peanut butter is thicker than water
A U.S. prison cell is no love hotel. Guards cycle harsh fluorescents across forty-eight square feet of concrete, so sinners slip into shadow. The vinyl sheet they hang for privacy glues to damp skin. Ladder rungs become handholds. No room for missionary, so rear entry into a face-down body is one of the few workable angles. Bent over the stainless toilet-sink combo, a punk’s U-shaped seat bruise tells the story he won’t.6
An important logistical constraint in prison sodomy is lack of lubrication. Because many encounters are questionably consensual, torn skin and fissures risk becoming forensic evidence, and choking meant to muffle screams can lead to suffocation. Consequently, inmate improvisers turn to the commissary or the kitchen. Pomade, peanut butter, and diluted lotion are a few attested hacks in infirmaries and courts.7
The commissary provides the same fundamental security challenge as when Hamas converts water pipes into rockets. Human rights advocates push for increased food and hygiene product variety to improve convicts’ quality of life,8 yet these same items are repurposed by booty bandits. If we redirect our empathy from perpetrators to victims, however, surveillance can help to prevent misuse of commissary items.
Software like Access Securepak enforces product restrictions, spending limits, and order frequency while monitoring inmate transactions. Guardian RFID creates digital audit trails that identify suspicious patterns. NFC technology, more resistant to falsification than barcodes, can track items after acquisition. The U.S. has ample tech to balance humanitarian needs with security concerns; what’s missing is the will.
It takes a cellblock to press a turn-out
Prison order is rigid, hierarchical, and social. Gangs write constitutions and gorilla hawks are premeditated with their pimping. Rights advocates bury these facts, pushing ‘privacy’ measures like Texas’s experiment of replacing steel bar cell fronts with solid doors. This ‘dignity’-promoting measure made predation easier, reducing the need for lookouts or synchronized coughs and flushes from friends to disguise attacks.9
In the battle between wolf and weak-minded, cave man and wife, sweat master and sucker, it’s the wolf who holds institutional support. When Pookie corners Tyler near the pull-up bars, claiming ownership, Tyler must rely on his wits. Get oral pain gel from the commissary and apply it strategically. Practice with a toothbrush down the throat, breathing calmly through the nose. Try to secure a tampon before it’s too late.
Prison sex can be raw yet mutually enjoyable, but when systems mix Diddies with Sams Bankman-Fried, they create incoherent environments where the weak suffer terribly under state watch. What’s our prison rationale, anyway? Among deterrence, public safety (incapacitation), and rehabilitation, the evidence as of 2024 supports only incapacitation: each prisoner-year prevents one violent crime and six property crimes.
Contra ‘New Jim Crow’ demagogues, 63% of state prisoners are in for violent crimes, and 87% of U.S. prisoners are in state prisons. Nonviolent offenders are the minority. When Donald Trump jokes about journalists being “married to a certain prisoner who’s extremely strong, tough, and mean,” now you know what this ‘marriage’ means. A rainbow coalition that bullies the weak, forcibly integrating the races, skin on skin.
Stephen Donaldson, a ‘prison rape’ and LGBTQ activist also known as Donny the Punk, wrote that ex-cons “draw veils over areas which might reflect unfavorably on the writer in presenting himself to the general public,” and only open up in conversations with people who shared the experience. Donny’s 1993 study, “A Million Jockers, Punks, and Queens,” helped standardize certain terms (like “jocker” for pitcher) that have wide regional variation.
Hensley et al., 2003. “The Evolving Nature of Prison Argot and Sexual Hierarchies” distinguishes between African American “aggressive wolves” and White “nonaggressive wolves.” The latter group also enters prison with a heterosexual identity, but do not take sexual partners by force, instead pairing up with predisposed and willing passives (“fish”). More than half of this group, also called “teddy bears,” leave prison with a bisexual identity.
For interesting interview quotes, see Trammell, Rebecca (2011). “Symbolic Violence and Prison Wives: Gender Roles and Protective Pairing in Men’s Prisons.” (Prison Journal, vol. 91, no.3). For example, you will see why I chose to taboo words like ‘rape’ and ‘gay’:
“Look, it’s not like rape. In prison, these guys get off the bus in women’s underwear and stuff. They dress up like women. They do this so someone will take care of them.”
“I knew of a guy who was straight, he got cut pretty badly. From then on out, he gave head for protection. He wasn’t gay, I talked to the guy, this wasn’t about that.”
Fleisher, Mark S. & Krienert, Jessie (2006). “The Culture of Prison Sexual Violence” (NIJ Report). This research study was based on 564 inmate interviews, and I especially recommend reading “Appendix A: Lexicon of the Culture of Prison Sex.” Excerpt about Boxing Betty:
“We used to have this one legend that this guy called Boxing Betty, a homo well-known. He used to box when they had the boxing program. He liked taking it both ways, and if he seen someone he liked that he wanted sex with, he’d beat them up and force them to fuck him in the ass.”
Fleisher, Mark S. & Decker, Scott H. (2001). “An Overview of the Challenge of Prison Gangs,” (Corrections Management Quarterly 5(1)). Chicanos formed the first nationwide prison gangs in the 1950s. “Black Panther George Jackson united black groups such as the Black Liberation Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Weatherman Underground Organization to form one large organization, the Black Guerilla Family, which emerged in San Quentin in 1966.” The Aryan Brotherhood formed next year in that same California prison, in direct response. “Aryans felt that black inmates were taking advantage of white inmates, especially sexually, thus promoting the need to form and/or join the Brotherhood.”
Wolff, N., & Shi, J. (2009). “Contextualization of physical and sexual assault in male prisons: Incidents and their aftermath.” (Journal of Correctional Health Care, 15(1)) The most common site for inmate-on-inmate sexual incidents is the “victim’s” own cell (46.5%), followed by miscellaneous common areas such as libraries or corridors (19.2%), the shower (12.1%), the yard or recreation area (11.1%), and another inmate’s cell (8.1%). Reports from the dining hall (2%) or work site (1%) are exceptionally rare.
Lea, Charles Herbert, III, et al. (2018) “An Examination of Consensual Sex in a Men's Jail.” (International Journal of Prison Health, vol. 14, no. 1) has some qualitative interviews. A relevant quote is “participants reported buying lotion or Vaseline from the correctional store to prevent the tearing of tissues during unprotected anal sex.” Also see this civil rights lawsuit regarding the 2012 killing of the 5’10”, 135-140 pound blond named Ricky Martin in Florida. Inmates testified under oath that “peanut butter squeezes” were used as lubricant, when a 6’4”, 210-260 black male inmate named Shawn Rogers yelled “the cracker’s pussy is good,” announcing that he was assaulting Martin for Trayvon and Martin Luther King.
For an example of journalist-NGO advocacy, see “Rising commissary prices in Florida prisons lead to boycotts, outcry,” a 2023 article from the Tampa Bay Times, which cites Florida Cares, a prisoner advocacy group. For a national example, see “The Big Business of Bad Prison Food,” an advocacy article by The Marshall Project (TMP). Named after Thurgood Marshall, TMP uses racial ‘disparity’ arguments to fight tough-on-crime policies.
Austin, James, et al. (2006). “Sexual Violence in the Texas Prison System” (National Institute of Justice Final Report 215774). Drawing on 1,938 official allegations from 2002-2005, the authors find that nearly 60% of confirmed sexual assaults (per investigation) have a white victim. 68% of assailants were black, followed by 19% for Hispanic and 12% for white.
Very informative. As per usual, bleeding heart progressives do more harm than good; it seems like they exclusively do this.
I was just wondering this