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 ...
I hope our society finally is getting serious about this problem. It sickens me how often prison rape is looked on as an acceptable form of punishment or a joke.
In my facility if a prisoner wants a condom we give it to him. No questions asked, after all they have a "Right to Privacy".(Can you believe it!)
Stupid liberals and their stupid policies.
I am not defending prison rape. Rape is wrong. If I were the warden, I would take it seriously, and seek to prevent it. However, as a member of society who is not a prison warden, I am not interested in hearing the complaints of people who wouldn't be in the situation to begin with, had they not chosen to break the law. I manage to stay out of prison. It's easy. You obey the law. There is nothing hard about that.
You don't speed? OH, we only obey the laws we want to obey....I see.../s off
Speeding is not an offense that puts you in prison. Possessing or selling drugs is such an offense. You're comparing apples to asteroids.
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