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RAPE BEHIND BARS - REPORT
NY
Times Editorial Board - May 25, 2013
A
new
federal report shows that the nation’s prisons and jails have a long way to
go before they comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. That 2003 law
requires institutions receiving federal money to adopt a zero-tolerance policy
on rape and to embrace rigorous prevention measures like those outlined last
year by the Justice Department.
The report, released this
month by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, makes clear that prisons and
other correctional institutions are falling well short of the law’s requirement
to address this kind of abuse. It names several institutions that have
particularly high rates of inmate-on-inmate or staff-on-inmate assaults.
The data is based on
surveys carried out between February 2011 and May 2012 at 233 state and federal
prisons; 358 county jails; and 15 special confinement facilities operated by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military and correctional authorities
on Indian reservations. Prisoners participated in the surveys by answering
computer-based questionnaires. According to the report, an estimated 80,000
prison and county jail inmates experienced sexual abuse during the previous 12
months, roughly 4 percent of all prison inmates and 3.2 percent of jail inmates
nationwide. High rates of victimization were found among inmates who were gay
or lesbian, inmates who had been raped or sexually abused before incarceration,
and inmates who suffered from mental illness.
Previous studies have
found that juveniles housed in adult facilities were at greater risk of sexual
assault than adults. In this study, however, 16- and 17-year-olds housed in
adult jails and prisons did not report significantly higher rates of abuse.
Children’s advocates and
some researchers dispute this finding, arguing that young people may have been
less likely to be candid on a computer-based survey because they feared that
the authorities might be monitoring their answers. Some critics have urged the
Bureau of Justice Statistics to repeat the investigation using live
interviewers from outside the corrections system.
The study found that some
institutions had rates of sexual abuse at least twice the national average. It
singled out more than 40 prisons and local jails. In addition, it cited two
military facilities and a jail on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South
Dakota.
Under the Prison Rape
Elimination Act, a federal review panel at the Justice Department can summon
the administrators who operate some of these facilities to hearings to explain
their policies.
In addition to exercising
that option, the Justice Department needs to press prisons and jails to create
detailed systems for preventing and investigating rape and to improve medical
and mental health care for victims. Despite the federal law, it is clear that
not enough has been done to make sure all inmates are protected from rape.