PRISON RAPE TOO SEVERE A PENALTY

Nowadays it is called tough love. Used to be it was what you did when
you were at wit's end with your kid.

Say, for instance, your son was locked up in a holding pen on drug
charges. Would you post bail? The boy's been on the wrong road for a
long time; you've tried every other means of punishment; all have failed.

So you make the hard call, leave him in jail for the
night.

And it's the worst mistake of your life.

``Let him be punished. Let him learn,'' Les Lothstein, director of
psychology at Hartford's Institute of Living remembers the parents
saying.

Thus the son, a ``very vulnerable, white middle-class adolescent''
spent a night in a holding pen with adult offenders.

This is what happened - he and the other kids in there got stripped
down, rolled up in a rug from the waist up, to be serially raped by
every adult in the pen.

That was in Cleveland, where Lothstein was a consultant to the police
department during the '70s and '80s. But similar stuff was happening
everywhere. Still does in some places.

``There were kids who became mute. They had all kinds of traumatic
anxiety,'' says Lothstein. His bile still rises these many years later.

There are still states where children are legally housed in prisons
with adults. Here in Connecticut, ``We could house 16- year-olds with
40-year olds, legally,'' says a Department of Correction spokeswoman,
Heather Ziemba. ``We just don't do it.''

Connecticut is actually ``fairly good'' when it comes to segregating
vulnerable prisoners, said Lothstein, who now works with police forces
all over the state.

But policy is not law. And prison rape, even if it's likelier to be
children raping children or adults raping adults, still occurs.

Almost 2 million men and boys are in prison in this country, most to
be released some day. Two million men and boys learning lessons about
rape.

Roanne Withers, executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape, explains the
gang-rape dynamic that prevails at most institutions.

``There is an aggressive guy at the top of the pecking order,'' she
said. His followers, sycophants, join in. A nonviolent man who doesn't
participate in the rape will be considered weak. He commits the rape,
rather than get targeted himself.''

He's learning brutality. ``He's practicing intimidation and aggression
he may act out on women when he gets out,'' says Dr. Terry Kupers, an
expert witness in jail cases and author of the book ``Prison Madness.''

Men who rape men are mostly heterosexual inside and outside of prison.
``If you're the top, you're not gay because the man you're having sex
with is a woman in your symbolic world,'' he explains. Sex with a
woman when he gets released? It's just business as usual.

``They're not realizing they are very abusive to women, because in
prison what they are doing would have been considered soft,'' Kupers
says.

Withers talks about her date rape over a decade ago in California by
an ex-inmate friends introduced to her. She did not know when they
went for a walk that he had been released that same month from Chino
prison after doing time on drug charges.

It turned into a ``massive rape,'' she says. And yet his voice
remained ordinary. His exact words can't be printed here, but they
went something like this: ``I have respect for you so I'm only going
to have sex with you vaginally.''

As date rape was an unknown commodity in those days, she did not
report it, nor do those raped in prison, for fear of being labeled
snitches.

Typically, prison rape victims become severely depressed and suffer
profound post-traumatic stress that they will not receive treatment
for while incarcerated. Since the state mental hospitals shut down,
about 10 percent of prisoners suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar
disorder.

So you understand why the severely depressed and those suffering from
shock, who cause few behavior problems, are low priority in prison.

The fear they will get AIDS compounds their trauma. Nobody, after all,
practices safe rape.

Stephen Donaldson, the famous former president of Stop Prisoner Rape,
died several years ago of AIDS he got in prison.

The former AP reporter, jailed in 1973 after being arrested during a
peaceful Quaker protest at the White House against the bombing of
Cambodia, got transferred to a cellblock with violent offenders when
he refused to plead guilty.

There he was gang-raped about 60 times in a two-day period,
necessitating surgery.

He became the first survivor of prison rape to speak out against it
publicly, and he won some champions.

And yet it remains an unpopular cause - even though there is no law
anywhere, federal or state, that deems rape a fit punishment for
anyone whatever their age or crime.

``Prison rape touches something toxic in the male imagination of this
society,'' posits Kupers. ``It's a terror. Terror of being at the
bottom of the heap, fear of being defeated in battle, whether for a
promotion or in a bar fight . . . fear `I could be there, if I made
the wrong move.' ''

To some extent, that fear is real. You don't have to commit murder to
end up in jail. A joyride in somebody else's car, a CD boosted from a
store, a night in the drunk tank is all it takes.

Many of us have survived some pivotal moment - usually in our youth -
when all might have gone sour had we run out of luck and into a
lesson. Many of us don't want to remember.