MH-408 Chicken Plucker

Foreword

Dozens of books have been written on prison life, but what about the boy who finds himself sentenced to a term in a reformatory?

During the years when he is maturing, he finds himself surrounded by other youths, also growing up, also discovering their virility, also trapped in the same all-male world. Separated from society and alone, the newcomer quickly learns the written and unwritten rules he will have to live with until he “graduates”: if he breaks these rules, he’ll be punished according to equally fixed laws. He grows accustomed to waking up with the older inmates already hustling to the latrine, naked and balls-swinging with morning hard-ons, and, if he’s old enough, he may show off his prick the same way. In the showers, he checks the way the other youths are built and hung, and he may get his introduction to sex from some horny stud who needs a blow-job or likes the shape of his boyish ass.

Homosexuality? Perhaps, but what other outlet is there for the boy who has been condemned to mature in the hidden world of a reformatory?

At Surrey House, Inc., we were struck by the reality of the problems facing these boys when we received a manuscript titled Chicken Plucker. It is the work of a psychologist at a state reformatory, and for obvious reasons, we have not used his real name as the author of this book. Through a combination of tape-recorded interviews and descriptive short stories, he has given us a picture of what life in a reformatory must be like for the inmates, the guards, the men who work with the boys confined there.

As always, we are printing this book word-for-word with the expressions, scenes and descriptions which might be censored by other editors. We feel that Chicken Plucker tells it like it is, and that’s reason enough for us to offer it to you cold-cock.

Remember that a reformatory—most states call them “boys’ schools”—is considerably different from a prison. The typical prison inmate knows what he can expect once he enters the cold, gray walls—the loneliness, the rough and brutal maleness, the need for sex, the men who take other men in place of women, the men who submit to being taken. But in a reformatory, the boys discover sex for the first time, sometimes experimentally, sometimes by homosexual rape out of fear of being beaten or tortured. Always, in the background, are the guards whose job is to control these boys—and who may find them sexually desirable.

There has been a great deal of talk about “prison reform” since the riots at Attica and other institutions. There have been experiments with “compassionate leaves” and conjugal visits by the inmate’s wife. But what about the unmarried prisoner? Or the gay prisoner whose lover doesn’t qualify as a “wife”?

What about the boy in the reformatory? What is his life like? What happens as he grows up? Where does he turn for sexual relief?

Or, perhaps, the young man who graduates from a reform school is better off, knowing male-sex and being unafraid of it.