The case of Ronnell Wilson, the convicted cop killer who impregnated a female corrections officer, may be complicated, but it is not a one-off: A female guard at a maximum security prison in the Hudson Valley is also pregnant with the child of an inmate. Tyshinia Love Brewster, like Nancy Gonzalez before her, has been charged with rape because an incarcerated person cannot legally give consent. She is six months pregnant.
The psychology behind such stories is both bleak and foreign, but a fellow female corrections officer attempted to explain it to the New York Daily News this week. “What she did was wrong,” former guard Keishada Leftwich said of her one-time colleague Gonzalez, “but I don’t think she would have compromised herself except we were verbally and emotionally battered by superiors and staff and inmates every day.”
“It makes your life hell,” she said. “It tormented me. It tormented Nancy. I suffered in silence. Nancy suffered in silence. … It breaks you down as a human being and I can understand how she had a meltdown. … There’s so much pressure to give in to the abuse.”
