17-year-old raped to death in U.S. prison

As more U.S. prisons become privatized and for profit, the U.S. prison population keeps increasing and now stands among the highest in the world.


Each week "Just Detention International" or JDI receives some 30 letters from prisoners who say they have been sexually assaulted in prisons across the United States. Over a quarter of those letters come from one state: Texas.

JDI has three core objectives for its work: To ensure government accountability for prisoner rape, to transform ill-informed public attitudes about sexual violence in detention and to promote access to resources for those who have survived this form of abuse.

Five of the 10 prisons with the highest rates of sexual abuse in the country are in Texas. That includes the first two, Estelle Unit and Clements Unit where Rodney Hulin, 17, was raped until he hanged himself.

In 1978 T.J. Parsell 17, was sentenced to four years imprisonment in an adult prison. Less than 24 hours after being jailed a group of inmates forced to drink Thorazine and raped him. Traumatized and terrorized TJ took years before he was able to testify about the brutal rape that stole his manhood, his identity, and killed his soul.

T.J. a graduate of the University of New York wrote: "A memoir of a boy in a man's prison" and created a movie based on his book.

A survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 4.5 percent of prisoners, nearly 1 in 20 had experienced some form of sexual abuse.

Torture is taking place inside the U.S. prison system which was discovered during a four-month investigation by Deborah Davies in a video showing how American prison inmates are receiving the same treatment as victims of Abu Ghuraib in Iraq.

More than 7.1 million Americans are in prison, on parole or under correctional supervision. Private prisons are one of the fastest growing businesses in the United States, as seen in the phenomenal growth of public enterprises, such as the GEO Group, G4S, and CCA all of which have established sexual harassment, torture and rape cases in privatized prisons.

In fact, privatized prisons are becoming one of the best investments of the 21st century, as more and more people are locked up in prison