It's not easy being pink

South Carolina inmates don't feel pretty in pink, just persecuted.

And one of them is suing the Department of Corrections over the statement this fashion makes about him.

Since January 2005, South Carolina prisons have forced inmates to wear pink jumpsuits for three months after they are caught publicly performing any sex act, whether alone or with someone else.

Sherone Nealous, an inmate at Evans Correctional Institution in Marlboro County, was allegedly caught in the act last year and forced to wear the fuchsia jumper, a modern — and no less shameful — version of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

In response, Nealous has sued the department, the prison and Corrections Director Jon Ozmint. In court filings, Nealous professes his innocence and says that making him wear a pink jumpsuit in prison puts his life in danger.

"The color pink in an all-male environment no doubt causes derision and verbal and physical attacks on a person's manhood," wrote Nealous, who has been serving time on various assault and battery charges since 1999. "Placing inmates in pink jumpsuits leaves them open to threats of sexual assault, intimidation, extortion and ridicule."

Prison officials say they needed to mark prisoners who engage in sexual misconduct as a warning to staff, and contend pink wasn't chosen for its humiliation value — it was just the only color available. Most inmates wear tan, death row inmates wear dark green, the guards wear blue.

"We do not believe the Constitution grants an inmate the right to publicly gratify himself and assault female staff in the uniform color of his choice," Ozmint said Monday. "We are bound and determined to protect our female staff from perverts who commit this sort of act, and we believe it is our duty to do anything possible to convince these perverts to reform their behavior."

In court documents, corrections officials note that a dozen nurses in Florida prisons won nearly $1 million from the state when a jury decided prison officials had not done enough to protect them from sexual misconduct.

The New York office of Human Rights Watch calls the practice "humiliation" and says such practices have no place in prisons.

"Well-managed prison systems do not rely on archaic shaming methods to punish inmates for misbehaving," says Jamie Fellner, director of the U.S. program of Human Rights Watch. "Officials nationwide recognize that using distinctive clothes to identify inmates according to the rules they have broken — particularly where sexual conduct is involved — puts the inmate at risk of verbal and even physical attacks."

But corrections officials stand by their policy and say sexual misconduct appears to be on the wane in South Carolina prisons.

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.