Castration or Incarceration?

By Michael S. Serrill

Three rapists face what critics call a cruel and useless punishment

The crime had been nightmarishly brutal: a six-hour gang rape in an Anderson, S.C., motel room by three men, after which the 80-lb. woman victim required four pints of blood and five days of hospitalization. The rapists had pleaded guilty in the hope that as first offenders, they would receive a lenient sentence from Judge C. Victor Pyle. "The defendants," intoned Pyle, "shall be confined to the custody of the South Carolina department of corrections for a period of 30 years." That was the maximum. The real jolt came when the judge added that he would suspend the sentence "upon the defendants' voluntary agreement to be castrated and the successful completion of that surgical procedure."

"It was like someone had hit me over the head with an iron pipe," said one defense attorney, Theo Mitchell. "The sentence shocked everyone in the courtroom--the clerk, the solicitor, the sheriff, even the victim." As for Defendants Roscoe James Brown, 27, Mark Vaughn, 21, and Michael Braxton, 19, "they really didn't understand the import at first," said Glenn W. Thomason, another defense lawyer. "They thought he meant sterilization. I explained that he meant cutting their testicles off. That put them in a state of shock, to put it mildly." Nevertheless, the three are so terrified of a long prison term that they are seriously considering the judge's proposed alternative even as their lawyers are appealing the sentences.

Many Anderson citizens were grimly pleased by the severity of the judge's either-or-decision. But few legal, medical and corrections experts endorse the castration alternative. As a punitive response, it evokes images of both Nazi Germany and pre-Civil War America, where male slaves were emasculated if they were even suspected of sexual intimacy with a white woman. (In the Anderson case, the rapists and their victim are black.) Says University of Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris: "It's in the same spirit as lopping off arms of shoplifters or tongues of libelists." Yale Kamisar, a professor of criminal law at the University of Michigan, argues that castration would obviously violate the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But he acknowledges that it may be no less cruel to be sent to prison, "where you can be gang-raped or God knows what else."

As far as the safety of the community is concerned, freeing a castrated rapist may also be unwise. "I know a lot of rape victims approve, but I'm afraid to have men like this out on the street," says Joy Bennett, executive director of the Rape Crisis Council of Greenville, S.C. A. Nicholas Groth, author of Men Who Rape and director of a program for sex offenders at a Connecticut prison, notes that "rape is the sexual expression of aggression, and not an aggressive expression of sexuality." Furthermore, Groth points out, even after castration, some men are capable of having intercourse. And if they cannot, the male hormone testosterone, produced naturally by the testes, is readily available in artificial form by pill or injection to restore both libido and potency.

The stark alternatives of surgical castration and incarceration ignore some other programs for treating sex offenders. One newly popular approach, sometimes dubbed chemical castration, uses a drug called Depo-Provera,* which sharply diminishes sex drive in men by reducing their production of testosterone. The drug gained national attention last summer when a Texas jury sentenced Rapist Joseph Frank Smith to ten years' probation instead of prison after he volunteered to undergo Depo-Provera therapy. Smith entered the nation's largest program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The program has 150 patients, 80% of them on parole and probation; nearly half are taking Depo-Provera. Dr. Fred Berlin, a co-director of the program, emphasizes that Depo-Provera is only one part of the therapy. The drug temporarily controls the men's sexual appetite while intensive psychotherapy seeks to change their behavior patterns. Berlin claims that during the program's 3 1/2 years of operation, only 15% of the offenders have committed new offenses, compared with a rate that Berlin says can be as high as 85% for sex offenders who are only imprisoned.

Other Depo-Provera programs are under way in at least six locations. A program at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem also includes "aversion therapy," in which sex offenders are shown sexually enticing slides and are subjected to foul odors or mild electric shocks if they become aroused because of deviant feelings. Not all specialists in the field are impressed by these experiments. Richard Seely, who runs a highly regarded psychotherapeutic program for rapists and child molesters in Minnesota, considers Depo-Provera dangerous. He cites two men who became so depressed while taking it that they committed suicide. And in a 1972 experiment he conducted, the drug's effects seemed more psychological than real. "As the next step up from the vindictive barbarism of castration, Depo-Provera leaves me with little hope," says Seely, who believes that what hope there is for treating violent sex offenders lies in years of confinement and therapy.

Rapists Brown, Vaughn and Braxton are likely to wind up with the years of confinement even if they opt for the surgery, which is known "as a bilateral orchidectomy. The last time emasculation was seriously discussed in the U.S. as an alternative to prison was in 1975, when two child molesters told a San Diego judge that they would submit to castration in return for probation. The judge was willing, but it was impossible to find a doctor in California who would do the operation. Surgeons demurred then--as they probably would today--for fear their patients might change their minds after the operation and sue, and because it seemed unethical to perform a procedure whose only medical purpose was to mutilate. --By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by B.J. Phillips/Atlanta and Richard Zacks/Chicago

* Used by women in 83 countries as a long-term birth control agent, Depo-Provera has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for contraception because tests suggest that it causes cancer in female dogs and monkeys. But doctors may prescribe the drug for other purposes, including treatment of sex offenders who volunteer with full knowledge of the risks involved.

With reporting by B.J. Phillips/Atlanta, Richard Zacks/Chicago This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.