Posted on 08/20/2005 11:18:38 AM PDT by neverdem
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes. Very sad. I give up.
Great idea. You wanna pay for it? Someone's going to have to.
Therein lies the rub. Everybody wants something. Everybody has a pet project. But nobody's willing to kick in the bucks to make it happen.
And between you and me, I'm taxed enough as it is.
Here's your lesson for the day:
LAWS DO NOT CREATE CRIME.
Its a deterrance to most people, but then maybe you are an exception. :-)
Do time for the crime...pay the debt to society..but gang rapes in prison? reform is needed
Son of Sam David Berkowitz recently said he's happier now in prison than he ever was on the outside too.
Anyone can go to prison, the innocent or the guilty. The justice system is way screwed up. Why should the weak or the small or just the member of the wrong ethnic group have to have an extra sentence added on?
So your argument is that he could deserve to be raped in jail for offenses nobody knows he committed.
Mega-stupid to the max.
"Looks like the bleeding-heart section of FR is out in force today. Prisoners get what they deserve, maybe they'll think twice about committing crimes."
Well then, let's at least have the balls to sentence these prisoners to "rape". Let us tell the world and all our neighbors exactly what we support, in the way of punishment for crime.
Lurker
I really doubt that getting raped in prison by bubba and his thugs is a big deterrant against breaking the law. Afterall the ones doing the raping are the true criminals and they outnumber the ones getting raped. So who's deterring who? From what I hear the prison population is only getting larger.
At my age, I'm not worried about it. If I was locked up, no one would want a 50 year old.....and if they tried, I'd feed 'em their balls.
Still.........it's a despicable thing. No one should be subjected to this.
I agree with you but no one deserves rape as a punishment."
Kind of late to bring that up now.
It's unthinkable to not only condemn these men to a wrongful jail term, but also getting their anus repeatedly stretched by some ugly, smelly, psychopathic monster. Of course, as I started my post by saying, it's a government program gone wrong, primarily because of prosecutors looking to their conviction record with an eye on higher office.
While I would never want to see meth or cocaine made legal, I fail to see what putting the casual user in prison does. Get them off the drugs with some program, don't stick them in prison. Dealers are a different story.
" Great idea. You wanna pay for it? Someone's going to have to."
If someone is sentenced to prison, they are sentenced to a distinct sentence. Rape is not part of the sentence.
If prison rape is endemic, then it is an inherent part of the sentence.
A 90 day sentence could turn into a death sentence in minutes.
Please argue how that is justice served?
"LAWS DO NOT CREATE CRIME."
Sure they do.
Gun laws create crime where a law abiding citizen seeks to exercise their constitutional rights.
The Bush signed Campaqign Finance Reform creates crime when a citizen wants to exercise his first amendment rights.
Prohibition creates crime by creating a huge financial incentive, and the corruption created by the smuggling far outweighs the harm caused by the substances banned. So do the erosion of civil liberties caused by laws used to purse said smuggling.
So I ask you ONCE AGAIN: who's going to pay for it?
That kind of isolation is hell on a person
Oh, boo-hoo. Between you and me, I'd rather be in solitary than get banged up the bung by Bubba. How about you?
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