Here's a topic for you: prison rape

1 of 32 of us lives in prison, which beats any society in human history (Europe imprisons seven times fewer of its people as a percentage of its population). One of every ten African American males lives behind bars. I've always had a strange, fascinated dread of prison - never mind that I'm not doing anything that could end me up there (though hell, innocence certainly isn't sufficient to keep a fellow out). If I believed in hokum like past lives, I think I'd be convinced I served time in a former one.

So I just read Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, which is every bit as dreadful as it sounds. But I'd have to say it's one of the best books I've ever read - the cliche was true in this case that I couldn't put it down once I'd started reading.

T.J. Parsell did a number of incredibly stupid things as a teenager, culminating in the 1978 armed robbery of a photo mat with a toy gun (he did this "as a joke", and never quite explains what the joke was supposed to have been...). Out of jail awaiting trial for the robbery, he was picked up again, this time on a trespassing charge after letting himself into an empty room at the hotel where he was working, trying to avoid going home drunk to his parents. He would go on to spend four years in Michigan prisons, starting at age 17.

A new fish in the Riverside Correctional Facility, Parsell was tricked within a day or two of arrival into believing a little party was being thrown in his honor; he drank some homemade liquor which turned out to be spiked with Thorazine; in his incapacitated state, he was gang-raped. Afterward there was a coin-toss to see which of the men would "own" him. Parsell caught a break, if you want to call it that, by falling into the relatively benign hands of a former negro-league baseball player called Slide Step. Who was a nice guy, compared with the alternatives.

Complicating things, Parsell is coming to realize during all of this that he's gay. In case anyone happens to be stupid, it should be said that this doesn't relate to the rape. It's a realization that certainly had to emerge in his mind in spite of it.

So, he's gay. And while serving time in another facility - mind that he's now 18 or so - he falls in love with a young prisoner named Paul. You know how that feels, age 18 and in love: just imagine it happening in a prison, and you'll know that you'll never be able to imagine the intensity of this connection. Better yet, Paul's wiser about prison than Parsell, and so together they have a couple of golden months where they manage to put up a joint front and hold off the maniacs and serial rapists. Then they're separated for spending too much time together. Now, if one of them were a "man" and the other a "boy", it wouldn't have mattered if they'd spent all their free time alone. But as two "boys" together, no go. And, shortly after being separated from Paul, Parsell is raped again.

Obviously, this is a pretty serious book. I don't mind saying that as I finished reading it - at work, during lunch - I had a damn hard time keeping myself from openly crying. It closes with an exchange of letters with Paul, whom Parsell tracks down as part of his writing process. In the 25-some years since they'd last seen one another, Parsell put himself through college at night, entered the tech sector, and moved to the east coast to raise an adoptive daughter with his partner. He'd put prison a million miles behind him. Paul, on the other hand, had botched a prison escape, and with the exception of less than one year outside on probation, had remained incarcerated the entire time.

Their letters glow with a kindness and affection that are almost difficult to bear. I mean, for these feelings to have emerged in the midst of such manifest horror.

So that's the positive side - some transcendence is possible here. But the bigger picture is not particularly rosy. Rape and sexual abuse exist in our prisons as a deliberate tool of social ordering and control. I don't just mean that it's used deliberately by prisoners, to establish a pecking order; I mean that the prison authorities themselves tacitly condone and/or even encourage rape. You certainly can't expect much help from them if, as a prisoner, you report threats of rape or actual attacks - apparently the guards' typical line is that they try not to get involved in lovers' quarrels. According to Parsell, the attitude is that to allow rape and sexual servitude in prison helps the stronger and more aggressive prisoners to let off some steam.

Human Rights Watch has prepared a fascinating, if godawful, report on U.S. prisoner rape that's well worth taking a look at. Certainly, a tenth of our state and federal prisoners are subjected to forced or coerced sex, but the figure may be more like one-third.

Midnight Express notwithstanding, I might prefer serving a sentence in Turkey over doing it here in the United States.

...When the Abu Ghraib photos hit, most folks seemed a little baffled by the weird sex stuff. It was as if we could understand that soldiers in the field would be rough with detainees, but what's with all the nudity and pantomimed coitus and panties on guys' heads? Well, it should come as no surprise that the reservists organizing these activities, Charles Graner in particular, had received their training in prisoner control from the good old U.S. correctional system.

The racial aspect of prisoner rape is also uniquely American. Something like 45% of prisoners are black (as against 12% of the general population), 40% white, and 15% hispanic. Rape appears to occur principally within the racial groups - with the exception of white inmates, who tend to be fair game for everybody else.

I think a lot of folks take an attitude toward this phenomenon - since, after all, the existence of prison rape is hardly a secret - that it's more or less what criminals deserve. But I don't think the reality could possibly bear this out, no matter how cruelly you think we ought to treat our lawbreakers. For one thing, slightly over half of our nation's convicts are nonviolent, including fully three-quarters of the new fish (violent offenders tend to have longer sentences). In 2000, 22% of all prisoners were behind bars for no other reason than that they'd gotten high. And as a whole, it's the nonviolent offenders who are the likeliest victims of sexual assault. The worst, most violent criminals in our system - the ones whose punishments we might rightly want to see be the most severe - are most commonly the "beneficiaries" of systemic prisoner rape. Or whatever you'd call it, since "beneficiary" seems awful crazy to say.

This phenomenon could be relatively easy to bring under control. What would help most, of course, is to admit that many of the Mr.-Tough-Guy laws that have gone on the books in the wake of the Reagan Revolution have done this nation terrific harm. Obviously I'm thinking of the "war on drugs" more than anything here. But the fact is that we have no conscionable excuse to throw seven times the people into jail that they do in Europe. We may have a more violent culture here, but it ain't seven times more violent (and, of course, one of the many reasons America is more violent is our miserably robust prison industry, which, for all the reasons I've been describing, sends people back out into the world a lot more violent than they were coming in).

So reducing the prison population would greatly help, not to mention that it would - hey, Republicans! - save us money. Since that won't happen, the next step is simply for prison authorities to exert a modicum of will to stop the problem. Patrolling blind spots of the prison, following up on complaints, use of protective custody, etc. could all begin to change the perception that sexual abuse is tolerated. In 2003 - thanks partly to the group Stop Prisoner Rape, of which T.J. Parnell is a board member - the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was passed. Which is great, but I think is only a beginning.