The gay president
of the Stop Prisoner Rape human rights lobby bares his
soul in a remarkable new memoir recounting his four years in
prison—beginning at age 17.
After holding up
a Fotomat with a toy gun in 1978, T.J. Parsell was
convicted of armed robbery and spent four years in
Michigan’s correctional system. On the first
day spent with the general prisoner population at
Riverside Correctional Facility, Parsell was drugged by
four inmates who then took turns raping him. He was 17 and
just beginning to realize he was gay. After the
assault the other prisoners flipped a coin to see who
would “own” Parsell, whom they threatened to
kill if he reported the incident to authorities.
It would not be
the last time Parsell was sexually violated before his
release at age 21. During that time—detailed in
Parsell’s compelling and intelligent new
memoir, Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s
Prison (Carroll & Graf)—Parsell also,
in order to protect himself from the larger
population, negotiated a long-term sexual relationship with
a stronger inmate he calls “Slide Step.”
He learned the complicated prison hierarchy and
behavioral codes that deemed some homosexual acts
acceptable, some fodder for barter, and others reason for
attempted murder.
Parsell
eventually was transferred to a medium-security prison,
where he took part in publishing an inmate newspaper.
There he found a sympathetic mentor and had his first
fully consensual gay relationship, with a young inmate
he calls Paul—a man he loved deeply but lost touch
with for 20 years after his release. In 2002, Parsell
reached out to Paul in a long, heartfelt
letter—and learned that Paul had spent most of his
adult life behind bars.
In contrast,
Parsell stayed clean and free, eventually becoming a top
executive at a technology firm. He found a life partner and
had a daughter. He’s now president of the human
rights group Stop Prisoner Rape and a consultant to
the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission.
Some might say the threat of prison rape is a good
deterrent to crime, while others might say that if
you commit a crime, that’s one of the consequences.
I do understand that mentality is out there, and
it’s a strong one, and I think it’s
fear-based. I’m worried about crime as well, and
I’m fearful of walking down certain streets.
I think people should be held accountable for what they
do. I certainly made some awful choices. I
deserved to be punished. What I would submit is, I
didn’t deserve what I got. Rape should not have
been part of my punishment.
The sad reality is the majority of people who
find themselves in that position are young,
nonviolent, first-time offenders—kids that made
really dumb choices, where there is a complete lack of
sympathy or a willingness to do anything. We’ve
had a couple presidents of Stop Prisoner Rape who were
antiwar protesters, were thrown in jail for civil
disobedience, and were raped. I had a friend of mine who was
down in Miami, with no criminal record, who was
arrested because he cruised an undercover cop and was
thrown in the Miami jail for the weekend and was
raped.
This is the kind
of thing that can impact anyone.
What has the group Stop Prisoner Rape been able to do
over the past couple of years?
We were instrumental in getting the Prison Rape
Elimination Act of 2003 passed, the first federal
legislation to address the issue. It established a
national commission, which is spending a couple years
studying the problem, holding public hearings, and will next
year issue standards that will impact all federal,
state, and local prisons, jails, and [federal
immigration] detention facilities.
Whether prison
rape can be eliminated is probably too ambitious, but I
think it can be greatly reduced. The more vulnerable
populations can be protected by proper classification.
Changing attitudes is an important part of it. One of
my personal missions is to address homophobia among
corrections officials. Homophobia is one of those underlying
causes that help create this atmosphere of impunity.
The way they treat gay and trans prisoners, it sends a
message to the inmates—the way they fail to respond
to complaints, and fail to take them seriously, and further
this environment that can become quite dangerous.
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