Why Americans Don't Care About Prison Rape

http://www.thenation.com/article/199361/why-americans-dont-care-about-prison-rape#

Following the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), an office within the Department of Justice, has conducted various surveys of inmates, former inmates and incarcerated youths to calculate the number of prison rapes occurring annually. BJS surveys conducted between 2011 and 2012 found that 32 people per 1,000 were sexually abused in jail; forty people per 1,000 were sexually abused in prison; and ninety-five youths per 1,000 were sexually abused in juvenile detention facilities. In contrast, the National Crime Victimization Survey, also a product of the BJS, found that the rate of rape and sexual assault among free women was 1.3 per 1,000 females over the age of 12 in 2012, meaning that a prisoner’s likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault is roughly thirty times higher than that of any given woman on the outside. Allen J. Beck, a senior statistician at BJS, confirmed to The New York Review of Books that nearly 200,000 people total were sexually violated in American detention facilities in 2011. One of the persistent myths surrounding sexual violence inflicted upon prisoners is that other inmates are chiefly responsible; according to the BJS, inmates in state and federal prisons and local jails all reported greater rates of sexual victimization involving staff than other inmates. Despite all this, sexual assaults that take place within prisons are generally not factored into national crime statistics, as if they are somehow expected.

Certain factors nudge an inmate’s likelihood of being victimized even higher. The BJS reports that inmates with mental health problems and inmates who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual were all at higher risk for sexual abuse than the general population. Minors contained in juvenile detention facilities were reported to be at much higher risk than adults contained in adult facilities. Vulnerabilities that exist in the free world are magnified in the carceral system.

Just Detention International, a human rights organization aimed at ending sexual abuse of incarcerated people, collects testimonials from inmates. The accounts are stomach-churning. Micah from California reports residual nerve damage from a torture session involving tasers and stun guns applied to his genitals. He was also anally raped. The prison guard who raped Kimberly in Kentucky to the point of hemorrhaging told her he would hurt her children if she reported the attack, and informed her that he knew their whereabouts. In Louisiana, Rodney was sexually enslaved and prostituted by other inmates, who targeted him because he was gay. Every sickness and pathology in American life—misogyny, homophobia, a legacy of racism and slavery—is amplified in patterns of prison sexual violence.