I was in jail at fourteen, in 1970, for being an incorrigible runaway. It was St. Louis, in a “lost cause” facility where boys from 8 to 17 were waiting for sentencing, almost always to infamous Boonville (the former long-term director blithely described to a reporter (see below) how boys were raped in hallways and in the cafeteria, and there was nothing he could do with such animals).
With the help of corrupt guards I was made to take my turn in a cell with three older boys, who raped, tortured and humiliated me for five days and nights.
It has taken me over forty years to be able to speak of this. All the things ignorant teen boys, themselves brutalized, can do to pretty younger boys when guards permit unfettered control, day and night, in a locked cell. I required corrective surgery later for what they did to me, including an anusectomy.
I was “lucky” because the judge decided to let my mother take me home, at my hearing. But every day is still that day, that cell, those faces and hands.
Being brutally raped changed everything about my life. I re-entered the world of ordinary suburban 9th grade, at a time when America could not face the truths about girls and women being raped, much less boys and men (we still blame the victim, and excuse the rapist). For years, I invented layers of “self” to seem ordinary, to “get over it” all on my own. Had a nervous breakdown in college that I “walked off.”
I became a single parent at 20, and I devoted myself to her. This was spectacularly good for her, and in some ways tragic for me, because I lived within an inauthentic, self-denying heroic bubble for decades, convincing myself I had nullifed everything by being a good dad.
One cannot escape severe trauma, though. After my daughters went on to successful lives, I fell apart. I had no more purpose if I wasn’t heroic dad, and all that I thought I had resolved came crashing back into my life. I found myself bitter, resenting the good life my children had, that everyone seems to have. I began to obsess about hunting down those guards.
I was fourteen. That truth resonates like a bell, over and over, and destroys me. I cry every day now.
If you ask what was the most awful thing I saw,
it was the look on the nine-year-old boy’s face who took his turn after me in that cell. I did nothing to help him. I could do nothing, I know that now, but I will spend the rest of my life believing I should have died trying.
The PREA Act was created in 2002 to stop rape in facilities. The number of rapes has increased every year since. We are damned for our indifference.
Read these (esp 2nd) if you have a strong stomach, and plenty of time to recover.
Boonville reformatory was violent, overcrowded place
Missouri Training School for Boys in Boonville Thread at PrisonTalk dot com where former prisoners and their family members not only discuss the violence, but name names, which guards were vicious sadists, etc. A thread started 15 years ago, and not one re-opened case. God damn Missouri forever.
In Jan 2020, an assistant attorney general for Missouri sent me a written apology for what I went through. He was responding belatedly to a letter I sent years ago. This breakthrough has led to a long article in the Missouri University’s magazine, The Common Reader.