Fed Guidelines Won't End Prison Rape

The level of sexual abuse behind prison bars is a national scandal. Unfortunately, the federal guidelines proposed to deal with the problem don't go far enough.

Almost eight years after Congress unanimously approved the first-ever federal law to crack down on prison rape and nine months after the Department of Justice missed its initial deadline for issuing anti-prison rape policies, the new federal guidelines remain in limbo. The consensus: Although better than nothing, the proposed guidelines won’t do enough to prevent rape behind bars.

In a statement released following an event at the National Press Club Wednesday March23rd, the former chair of the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Judge Reggie B. Walton, detailed a number of problems with the federal standards. Among them: prohibitions on male federal guards searching female federal prisoners aren’t being enacted (almost all states ban the practice but the feds still allow it), requirements for independent safety audits have been stripped, and there are no firm rape-prevention standards at all for people held in immigration detention.

Quite simply, the level of sexual abuse that goes on behind bars in the United States is a national scandal: even the most conservative estimates indicate that more than 1 inmate in 10 gets sexually assaulted while in detention (Congress estimated 13 percent; some experts think it could be as high as 50 percent for certain groups). While the male-inmate-on-male-inmate assaults are the most common, sexual abuse comes in all varieties. Among other things, guards prey on juvenile inmates at alarming rates.

The arguments against doing more than the existing are either tasteless or wrong. The tasteless arguments postulate that because people are in correctional settings they somehow “deserve” rape. This violates any sense of decency, human rights, or the rule of law. Random rape (most often directed against smaller, weaker prisoners who are in the ethnic/racial minority in their facility) isn’t a fitting penalty for any crime.

The wrong arguments, on the other hand, focus on cost: prison administrators (whose share of state budgets has exploded over the past two decades) say they somehow can’t afford the cost of more assertive anti-rape measures. In fact, the money is there and almost always, it’s money well spent. Studies from the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt put the cost of each rape—lost labor productivity, medical exams, counseling, and the like--at around $100,000 current dollars.  Even if these costs are a lot lower for those in correctional facilities, it still indicates that expenditures of hundreds of extra dollars per inmate would be justified to prevent a single rape. And the measures proposed and rejected will cost pennies; not thousands of dollars.

Prison rape needs to end. The Department of Justices’ standards need revision.

Tweet