Stephen Donaldson (activist) - Stop Prisoner Rape

Stop Prisoner Rape

Through Bo Lozoff, Donaldson met Tom Cahill, whose correspondence with Lozoff also appeared in We're All Doing Time. Cahill was "an Air Force veteran turned peace activist when was jailed for civil disobedience in San Antonio, Texas in 1968. For the first twenty-four hours, was beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured", allegedly as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) due to Cahill's anti-Vietnam War activity.

Around 1983, Cahill resurrected the defunct organization "People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons" (POSRIP), which had been founded in 1980 by Russell Smith. In 2004, Cahill recollected:

When Donny and I connected in 1985, he agreed to be president and I became director. Even though at the time I lived under a leaky camper shell on the back of an old, beat-up pick-up truck on the streets of San Francisco, I was a little more stable than he was. So we used my post office box and telephone message service. With Donny in New York and me on the "Left" Coast, we were voices in the wilderness trying to spotlight a serious, massive crime in progress.

Donaldson became president of Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc. (SPR), which he and Cahill incorporated in the mid-1990s from POSRIP. The organization (since 2008 known as Just Detention International) helps prisoners deal with the psychological and physical trauma of rape, and works to prevent rape from happening. Donaldson was perhaps the first activist against male rape in the United States to gain significant media attention. Writing on behalf of SPR, he appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, as well as in other major media. He testified on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in its case ACLU et al. v. Reno, which went to the US Supreme Court.