Case report: The predatory facultative homosexual of prisons

Abstract

Although a well-recognized phenomenon within prison cultures, the predatory homosexual has received very little attention in the scientific literature. One reason for this is the extraordinary difficulty in obtaining frank first-person accounts. We report the case of an individual who was prepared to co-operate with our research endeavour as part of a treatment program addressing his criminal behaviour. We have been able to verify the truth of some, but by no means all, of his assertions. Our findings confirm the existence of a group of predatory and coercive inmates who describe their homosexual behaviour as a consequence of the lack of opportunity for ‘normal’ heterosexual activity. The medical importance of this case, and others like it, lies in the opportunity for this pattern of behaviour to affect the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to young, promiscuous, heterosexual males who face subsequent release