Writer and activist T.J. Parsell tells the world about prison rape, by delving into his own life experiences
What T.J. Parsell went through one day when he was a Michigan teen could be deemed a shame: At 17, an impulsive act led to his being arrested. What followed the arrest can only be qualified as a nightmare: Hours after being placed in an adult facility, Parsell was plied with moonshine laced with Thorazine, a sedative prescribed for the mentally ill. Then he was brutally gang raped.
It’s the kind of real-life story that, for most of us, feels too impossible to imagine. But due to Parsell’s willingness to tell his tale — an act he does with unflinching honesty in FISH: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison (Carroll & Graf, 2006, $24.95) — what could have been a heartbreaking, too-dfficult-to-bear autobiography somehow becomes a compelling and ultimately uplifting read.
But make no mistake: There’s a wealth of heartbreak and tragedy in these pages. An alcoholic father. A mother who left because she couldn’t take it. A brother who served time and stuggled with heroin addiction. A hostile stepmother. A stepbrother also caught up in the criminal justice sytem.
And then, Riverside Correctional Facility, where Parsell was sentenced to 4.5 to 15 years. A target there due to his youth and inexperience, he became the “property” of a Black inmate, an act that, while probably keeping him alive, thrust him center stage into the sexual and racial theatrics of prison life.
Now 46, Parsell, who has worked with such groups as Stop Prisoner Rape, has managed to transform the violent events of his youth into an opportunity to educate legislators and prisoners about the dangers of prison rape. Speaking from his Sag Harbor, N.Y. home, he talks about his mistake with a toy gun, the near obliteration of his soul, and the dangers of being a “fish”— prison slang for a new inmate who’s completely out of his element.
So how about we start off talking about what caused you to be imprisoned at 17?
I was at a party where I had a few beers and I was walking home. I found a toy gun and was playing with it: just being a silly kid, really. At that point, I crossed the street and went to a parking lot where there was a Photomat booth. There was a woman inside. I walked up and she slid open the window and, joking, I stuck the gun in. I said, “Your money or your life,” something stupid like that, and she calmly turned to the cash register, opened the drawer, and started taking money out. I didn’t intend to rob her, but in that moment, I thought, “Oh.” She handed me the money and I ran. You know, it was that little, simple, impulsive moment that changed my entire life.
But you had been arrested for something else before, correct?
Yeah, I had an after-school job in a hotel, which my friends worked at, including my stepbrother. We had pinched [stolen] keys to several of the rooms. I got caught and the hotel prosecuted me and I pled guilty in exchange for probation. So I was awaiting sentencing [for stealing hotel keys], when I got pinched for the Photomat.
When I went back to court for the hotel, the judge gave me 2.5 to 4 years. When I went inside, because the armed robbery [charge] was pending, the prison system had to treat me as if I had the maximum sentence for armed robbery, which is life. So it was the timing of the two things that caused me to be placed in Riverside Correctional Facility.
So let’s just get to it: You’re so honest about the sexual violence you experienced there. How hard was it to revisit that for a book?
Oh, my God: It was like therapy on steroids. In therapy you can talk around an issue. But with writing, you gotta go there and really report back from that place.
At the time [of the first rape], I was drugged, so I think that some of the physical agony was deadened by the alcohol and the drugs. My own denial was pretty strong at the time: There were only flash-glimpses of how it made me feel about myself, ’cause at the time, I just shut down.
Not only were you dealing with sexual violence, you were also dealing with your own sexuality. Was that something you could separate at the time?
Ever take a Coke bottle and put sand in it, and then you turn the bottle over, and the sand gets caught in the bottleneck? I think that’s part of what was happening with me: There was so much going on that it was just too overwhelming for me to be able to process it. So it created a real challenge with me in writing about the extent to which my sexuality and my hidden fantasies informed my choices that led me to prison. I mean, I can sit back and think about hearing some of the stories from my older stepbrother, and being titillated by them, but I’d never admit that to anybody. Or even myself.
You suggest in the book an irony about people who commit rape on the outside and come into prison where that outside crime is frowned upon; meanwhile, there’s rape going on inside prison.
It’s sort of one of those double standards that go on inside of a prison: Guys don’t view raping another inmate quite the same way, because of that whole distorted notion of masculinity and manhood they hold. I spoke to a group of inmates in San Francisco and one of the inmates said, “In the California system, we don’t really have inmates to rape: We just have volunteers.” The group really got into a conversation about what’s consensual sex in prison, and the sad reality is that it generally takes one or two violent rapes before a guy starts making compromises just out of the need to survive. So, if you’ve been “turned out,” as they view it, you’ve lost the status of manhood, whether you’re gay or straight. And once you’ve lost your manhood, you need a man. So you go into one of these protective-pairing scenarios, and that’s what these guys are considering as volunteers.
That’s a point I was trying to make early in the book, when I talked about prison being like a photographic negative, where all the values are inverted: What’s bad is good, and what’s good is bad. Kindness is a weakness in there. The more treacherous somebody could be, the higher a standing they have among their fellow inmates. In this particular area — sexuality in prison — they don’t view what they’re doing as rape.
In another part of the book, which really surprised me, were your struggles with race.
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, with a racist mayor, who would arrest African Americans for just driving through town after dark. You can’t talk about Detroit in the late ’60s, early ’70 s without really talking about, or looking at, race, because it’s such a racially segregated area. Even today, it’s very divided. So at Riverside Correctional, I was in the minority for being white.
How long were you at Riverside?
I was there from 17-21, the age that most kids are away at college: That was my education. I think my “higher power” knew I’d be able to handle it, that I’d be able to survive, and I’d be able to do what I’m doing now.
But there are some people who are in that situation and they don’t necessarily survive it, or they come out severely scarred.
I think that most who go through it come out severely scarred. I was. That’s the tragedy of what’s going on in these places. The sexual violence there is so devastating to the sense of self, and over 95 percent of all prisoners are eventually released. Most of them don’t have the resources to get the treatment they need to recover from what they experience, and the states aren’t providing that treatment either. So, this is everyone’s problem. I was a walking time bomb for a long time. I bottomed out from alcohol and drugs when I was 27, and that was really what sort of set me on a road to recovery and therapy. I don’t know how I went from 21 to 27: I was just drinking and drugging and trying to forget what happened.
How did you come to the point where you could talk or even write about it?
I went into a Manhattan video store, and there was a past episode of Oz [the HBO series about prison life] playing on a TV. An inmate had been raped and the young men behind the counter were laughing. That was the crystallizing, defining moment for me. My older brother, who I write about in the book, had died of a heroin overdose. The combination of the two things put me in that place where I was ready to write.
Those things led to your involvement with the Prison Rape Elimination Act?
Well, when I decided that I was going to write, I got online to see what existed and there wasn’t a lot. But I found Human Rights Watch was working on a study about prisoner rape and getting the bill through Congress, so I got swept up in this whole movement.
Can we really eliminate prison rape?
I think that it’s probably too ambitious of a goal, but I think we can greatly reduce it by doing some of the obvious things, like not putting teenaged boys with adult predators, for one. We know who are typically more vulnerable inmates: the non-violent first-time offenders, the young men that do not have gang affiliation, the mentally ill, gay inmates.
There are a lot of physical areas that can make a difference. The physical layout of jails and prisons, eliminating blind spots, providing and installing cameras, things like that, and changing attitudes of corrections personnel is an important element of it. The homophobia in corrections is a major contributing factor.
You’ve said you tell your friends who have a hard time reading the book it has a happy ending.
In some ways, prisoner rape and sexual assault are dominant factors, but that’s not what the book is about. Ultimately, it’s a coming-of-age story. It’s a story of survival. It’s a story of redemption. I ultimately was able to survive that experience and I was able to build a life for myself: put myself through college and have a successful career in software. It would have been very easy for me to just continue on with my nice middle-class life and not look back, but when people found out I had been there, they always had two questions: What was it like and how did you survive? And those are two primary questions that I hope the book addresses.
By ROSETTE ROYALE, Staff Writer