Via gloomy50 @ Flickr.
The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a creation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, spent five years studying prison rape and has recently proposed standards for eliminating it. The report is a sad, disturbing read.
Not only does sexual assault make the environment within correctional facilities more dangerous and insecure, it leaves devastating mental, emotional and physical scars on individuals who are eventually released from prison. It is a hindrance to rehabilitation and successful re-entrance to the community. And often, we – the public – are financing it. In a survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more prisoners reported abuse by staff than by other inmates. Victims and witnesses are bullied to keep quiet, and even when they do speak out, their reports are often dismissed. It is not entirely unsurprising to me that authoritarian-types who hold power over confined individuals would sadistically abuse that power, but it’s sickening nonetheless.
Naturally, certain members of the imprisoned population are more at risk than others. Those who lack experience in correctional facilities, inmates who are small in stature, and young prisoners are frequent targets of sexual abuse by other prisoners. The sexual abuse rate is higher for imprisoned youth than for adult prisoners; youth incarcerated with adults are at the most risk. Whilst girls represented 15 percent of confined youth in 2006, they made up 36 percent of all victims in substantiated incidents of sexual assault that year.
Non-heterosexual and gender-nonconforming individuals are at extremely high risk for abuse. Male-to-female trans people are typically placed in men’s facilities when they are imprisoned. As you might expect, the results are not pretty. Lesbian and bisexual women are disproportionately represented among women who reported being sexually assaulted; male officers pose a particularly high danger. Research indicates that some officials believe that homosexuality equals consent to sex acts with other men; in turn they may ignore those incidents. So, rape myths are impediments to justice for those in the prison system as well as those outside. Inmates with physical and mental disabilities or illnesses are more vulnerable, as well. Being imprisoned exacerbates oppression for those who are already marginalized.
The standards set by NPREC focus on prevention, detection and response to sexual assault. Priorities include educating inmates about their rights, instituting stricter hiring policies, efficient supervision, commitment to zero tolerance and banning cross-gender searches except in emergencies. I think bringing gay, trans and disability rights activists, juvenile advocates, and sexual abuse experts from diverse backgrounds into the fold at correctional institutes is an important step in achieving the goal of reducing prison rape and better serving victims when it occurs. Last week’s report does stress the necessity of taking inmates’ risk factors into account when placing them in cells and programs. I am glad people are having a conversation about this issue and I hope this report leads to some real action.
Thanks for dealing with this heartbreaking topic. It is especially problematic in federal prisons for two reasons:
1. They don’t hand out condoms in fed. prison. (Not that availability of condoms is going to make rapists use them, but still). You know, because you’re not supposed to be having sex in the first place in prison! You can thank Reagan for that one.
2. The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) which was passed to make it harder for prisoners to sue prisons over conditions of confinement, severely limits the rape cases in which a prisoner can sue prison officials because of the harm done to them. Courts have interpreted the law to limit awards to “physical” injury. Can’t sue for “emotional” damage. So if you, like an old client of mine, are passed around a facility as a sex “slave,” aided and abetted and bought and sold even by the correctional workers charged with your safety, unless you can prove that you were physically injured from the rapes, no dice.
Sick world, ain’t it?
I sat on a grand jury in Brooklyn a couple years ago where one juror was a corrections officer at Riker’s Island. He swore up and down that rape doesn’t happen there and we all just stared at him in disbelief. We heard three rape cases and, not surprisingly, the warden was the one who was always like “Well, she’s probably lying.” (In one case, involving a man who raped his three daughters, one of my fellow jurors got out of her chair and almost physically attacked him for saying that.) It was sick, and made me feel really sorry for the inmates this guy was watching over.
From what I understand, approximately one in every 31 adults in the U.S. is in prison, in jail or on supervised release. Given the sheer number of people in prison and the attitude towards prison-rape, I wonder what kind of culture are we creating?
For everyone who says that any individual deserves to get raped, they are also sanctioning the creation of a rapist.
Prison rape also cannot be justified as a punishment when you begin to consider the number of mentally ill patients who are also locked up for the lack of a better system (I think it is upto 16% of the incarcerated population according to the Justice Department).
Dahlia Lithwick had an article in Newsweek where she said that the current system ends up creating a “mass of meaner, more violent and less employable people at exit.” I completely agree.
I wonder if new national standards (as a result of this report) will override PLRA, JD. What do you think?
Spicy, that is the number I read in the report, too. Lithwick is completely correct, according to the available evidence.
Becky, I can’t believe a corrections officer was allowed onto a grand jury, full-stop. How on earth wasn’t he disqualified?
Re prison guards, I’d just point to the Stanford Prison Experiment. ‘Nuff said.
Well, maybe not. Anecdotally, I knew of a guy whose life’s dream was to be a police officer. He applied to several city PDs in several states and couldn’t get through the background and psych checks. He ended up doing a stint as a prison guard. To begin with, he was an ignorant, entitled guy who desperately wanted to be in a position of power (he considers himself a wolf in a world where there are only two kinds of people: wolves and sheep). By the time he’d been rejected by several PDs, he was also angry and feeling as though he had been denied something he deserved. Scary.
@meg: unlike a trial jury, pretty much everyone can sit on a grand jury. You’re just hearing evidence to decide whether to indict, so there’s no selection process the way there is with a trial jury. If you’re over 18 and a US citizen, there’s no way of escaping a grand jury summons.
I’m not sure Sarah, but I don’t think that national standards would be justiciable and the PLRA would still be applied by courts. National standards would be good for willing facilities who take on the recommendations, but in terms of individual lawsuits and accountability, what we need is federal legislative reform of the PLRA to classify rape as de facto physical injury regardless of one’s medical status after the fact.