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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Three
prison rape victims at the San Francisco hearing on the problem.
From the left, Cecilia Chung, Hope Hernandez and Chance Martin. |
Panel on Prison Rape
Hears Victims' Chilling Accounts
By CAROLYN MARSHALL,
NYTimes on the Web, August 20, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 19 -- 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.
Kendell Spruce told the commission that he was infected with H.I.V. after having
been raped at knifepoint in 1991 in an Arkansas state prison. Mr. Spruce,
who was convicted of forging a check to buy cocaine, said that in one nine-month
period he was raped by at least 27 inmates. He was 28 years old and
weighed 123 pounds.
"The physical pain was devastating," he said. "But the emotional pain was
even worse."
A spokeswoman for the Arkansas Correction Department told The Associated Press
that the accusations were untrue that that she believed that Mr. Spruce
initiated the activity or was a willing participant. After his five-year
term, Mr. Parsell returned to society as an addict of drugs, to "drown out the
memories and pain."
He continues to hold back tears as he says he still struggles with the emotional
residue of rape, a crime that tarnished his self-esteem and ability to trust.
Chance Martin, 50, an advocate for the homeless here, told the panel that he was
incarcerated for 72 hours in April 1973, when he was arrested as an 18-year-old
at a party where another guest had hashish. The charges were dropped, but
Mr. Martin's three days in jail nearly ruined his life.
"On a purely emotional level," he said after testifying, "I have issues with
self-confidence and trust since that day."
Mr. Martin echoed others' statements when he faulted a deteriorating prison
system and what he described as a society that is indifferent, and at times
disdainful, of people who have been incarcerated.
"Prison rape is a symptom of American society's retreat from rehabilitation
toward a system that relies purely on punishment," he said.
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.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
A victim
of prison rape when he was 17, T. J. Parsell, testifying yesterday
to a Congressional panel. |
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Representative Barbara Lee, a
California Democrat who was an initial co-sponsor of the 2003 law, equated
prison rape with human rights violations. She and other prison rights
advocates have stressed the need for "zero tolerance" and a corrections system
that accommodates different sexual and cultural orientations.
"By doing nothing," Ms. Lee said, "we condone this inhumane and abusive
behavior. Indifference, deliberate or not, violates the Eight Amendment of
the Constitution banning cruel and unusual punishment."
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.
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