He asks the attache why his three partners look nauseated and upset, and is informed that the other three Afghan attaches believe all the soldiers at the camp are "boy kiss boy" (homosexual) after seeing the soldiers engaging in choreographed song and dance while filming a homoerotic parody video. He tosses a bottle of water to an Afghan attache named Farzad. Before Litchfield īennett is revealed to have been a corporal in the United States Army prior to working at Litchfield. He has a prosthetic left leg.įor a list of episodes featuring Bennett's flashbacks, see here. However, at home, he is seen wearing more casual attire, such as when he came to Cesar's house to inform him of his and Daya's engagement. John Bennett has short dark-brown hair and is mostly seen in his CO uniform in the episodes. When faced with extreme responsibilities, John is shown to flee and hide instead of stepping up and doing what is right, as evident in his actions regarding Daya and their child. He carries himself as straight-laced, almost like a Boy Scout, but at times has a military bearing.
However, this moral code did not prevent him starting a relationship with a prisoner (who lawfully cannot consent) or being willing to abuse his power, such as when he threatens Daya's prison family in order to keep the secret that he's the biological father of Daya's daughter. Unlike some of the guards, he seems to have a moral code and will stand up for inmates being treated poorly.
This story was produced in collaboration with The Atlantic.John Bennett is one of the kinder guards within the prison. Standing in a line with several dozen other men, John stripped off his navy blue scrubs, squatted, and coughed to prove he wasn’t hiding anything. Once inside, he could try grimacing to look tough, as he had in his early mugshots, though he couldn’t hide his skinny frame or his high-pitched voice. Over the next few days, while bringing trays of food around the blocks for his new kitchen job, John would learn that he had been placed in one of the nicer units (another he saw “looked like a basement, with the lights busted out”). But he also noticed that he was one of the youngest prisoners on the block.
His first cellmate was an older man, black like John, who was serving a life sentence, and he didn’t say much. Something about him seemed a little off, and that night, John says he awoke and saw this man sitting at a desk, wide awake, and staring right at him. John requested and received a new cell assignment. His second cellmate was also a lifer, and friendly enough, but after a few days the man asked to be paired with another lifer, so John was moved again. It was around this time that the letters started sliding under his cell door.
“You need a white man to show you how to act.When the opportunity comes I want to sneak in your house and hit that.” Another letter said he had a “fan club.” John would get a lot of letters from other prisoners over the next few months, and while they were not always explicit, some certainly were. John didn’t take these letters seriously he threw many of them away. He settled into GED classes and shifts serving breakfast and lunch. From the prison library he pulled volumes ranging from the poems of Langston Hughes (“They’re so simple, but they explain so much”) to thriller paperbacks by Dean Koontz and James Patterson. His new cellmate, whom we’ll call David, had already served a little more than a year out of a minimum of eight for robbery. He was in his early 20s, over six feet with a tuft on his chin and a thin mustache. They talked about their families and the crimes that had gotten them locked up.īut then David said something that struck John as strange. He asked him if he would ever get involved sexually with a man. John knew himself to be heterosexual he had lost his virginity to a girl the year before. “I just kind of laughed it off,” he recalled.Īnd then it happened. One night after the last count before bed, John says, his cellmate suddenly attacked him, pulling down both of their pants and wrestling him onto the bottom bunk.
John tried to resist, but he was less than 140 pounds, and next to David’s bulk of more than 200 he stood little chance as this powerful man forced his way in, slowly and painfully and in silence, without a condom or lubricant. John would later estimate that it lasted seven minutes. When David was finished, he told him to keep quiet. John obeyed though still a fish, he had been down long enough to know that snitches suffer fates worse than rape. I n 2003, while John was still in elementary school, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, now usually known as PREA. It was intended to make experiences like his far less likely. But like many ambitious pieces of legislation, its promise has proved difficult to realize.