T. J. Parsell was a lanky pimple-faced adolescent bent on mischief. So when he found a toy gun one evening in 1978 while wandering home from a high school party, he thought nothing of pointing it at a store clerk and grumbling, "Your money or your life."
He got $50 for what he now calls "a stupid impulsive prank." The incident landed the 17-year-old Parsell in an adult jail, where on his first night, an older inmate spiked his drink with Thorazine and sexually abused and raped him.
"While my friends prepared for our high school prom, I was being gang raped," Mr. Parsell testified on Friday to a Congressional commission investigating prison sexual abuse and rape.
Mr. Parsell, now 45, and a successful software executive who lives on Long Island, was one of six victims of prison rape to relate disturbing accounts with a bipartisan panel of The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission here.
"What they took from me went beyond sex," Mr. Parsell said. "They'd stolen my manhood, my identity and part of my soul."
The panel, which also heard from state and federal legislators, law enforcement and prison officials and mental health experts, has been investigating the prevalence, cause and possible solutions to a problem that many experts say has escalated as the prison system is collapsing. Overcrowding, staff shortages and budget cuts have contributed to an often taboo topic.
"As a society, we have an obligation to protect the people we lock up, even though they have harmed society," the commission chairman, Judge Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said. "Some people say inmates get what they deserve. But they don't think about the overall impact on society."
The body, created by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, was appointed by President Bush in June 2004, focusing on questions like inmates' physical and mental problems after being released and economic burdens.
Judge Walton, speaking before the meeting here, the second in a national series, conceded in an interview that the government did not know the magnitude of prison rape.
"We don't really know the prevalence right now," he said. "But I've been in the criminal justice system for 20 years and I have always believed the anecdotal evidence."
On July 31, the Justice Department released its first statistical report on prison rape and inmate sexual abuse, a report also required under the 2003 act. It estimated that there were at least 8,210 reported incidents of sexual abuse and rape a year within a prison population that exceeds 2.1 million.
According to the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, prison assaults rose 26 percent from 2000 to 2004. [...] The secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Roderick Q. Hickman, told the panel that California was trying to quantify the problem. But he said outdated prison designs, inadequate electronic surveillance systems and an antiquated computer database had stalled progress. The information technology "system in California is completely inadequate," Mr. Hickman said. "We need a system that can report and handle the cultural classifications of the population." he added.
Mr. Hickman, appointed last month, said he was working to streamline and centralize procedures to investigate accusations of sexual abuse that were previously handled by individual prisons. To address guard intransigence, the department has established training programs intended to break what Mr. Hickman called "the code of silence" among guards, behavior that has helped conceal prison rapes. [...] In the afternoon, the panel heard criminologists, law enforcement officials and leaders of transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual groups about the need for better inmate classification. "We don't want a first-time offender charged with drunken driving to be housed next to a guy who has committed multiple armed robberies, and who has been in and out of the system for years," said Bart Lanni, the sheriff's deputy for Los Angeles County.
Mr. Lanni said misplaced inmates ran an increased risk of being a target of sexual abuse. "Predators looking to rape someone tend to pick people without close ties or a gang affiliation," Dr. Terry A. Kupers, a psychiatrist and an expert on prison rape, said.
All the victims testifying on Friday said that they might have escaped their rapes if the authorities had placed them with inmates of similar age, race, sexual orientation and the same categories of crime.
Well ... if nothing else, California and other states are going to have an interesting time trying to fulfill these requirements. After all, one of the things that the inmates and guards are saying is that extremely stiff, stratified segregation will be one of the best ways to prevent prison rape, and the Supreme Court, last session, dictated that racial segregation, specifically, could not be used in California prisons without sufficient justification. It remains to be seen, of course, whether or not the court will consider the prevention of rape and disease to be sufficient justification.
Posted by iain at August 22, 2005 12:57 AM
