The national commission which was established by the Prison Rape Elimination Act has issued draft standards for adult prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities. These standards will guide corrections officials as they work to eliminate prison rape. The standards are the result of an exhaustive process that included eight public hearings, discussions with hundreds of experts, visits to numerous correctional and detention facilities, and extensive work with diverse stakeholders including corrections professionals, medical providers, researchers, rape survivors and their families, advocates and legal experts.
I am honored to serve on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, an impressive and dedicated group of leaders. These standards will be the legacy of the Commission’s work. Long after the commission disbands, the standards will be in place to hold officials accountable for keeping their facilities safe from prison rape.
A 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study found that at least 4.5 percent of the inmates surveyed reported an incident of sexual victimization, either inmate-on-inmate or staff on-inmate, in the preceding year. Given the current U.S. prison population, that means more than 60,500 prisoners were victims of sexual violence in just one year alone. And it is generally conceded that inmates are very reluctant to report being raped. So, this figure probably significantly understates the problem.
It is a stain on our national honor that men and women are raped while in our custody. No crime, no matter how horrid, includes being raped as part of the sentence. Sexual abuse in our prisons violates the basic human rights of incarcerated men and women, and carries significant consequences for all of society because inmates that have been rape victims carry the physical and emotional scars, as well as potentially communicable diseases, as they return home after their sentences.
The standards cover a range of issues on ways to detect, prevent, and punish acts of sexual violence behind bars, including training, inmate classification, reporting of incidents, investigation and resolution of complaints, preservation of evidence, medical and mental health care for victims, and data collection. The public has until July 7 to comment on the draft standards.
The Commission has already met with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, American Correctional Association, Association of State Correctional Administrators, American Jail Association, and National Sheriff’s Association to consider their concerns about the standards. Their feedback was very helpful to the commission. We want the standards to be tough, but we don’t want them to be impossible for prison administrators to attain. In June the Commission will meet with survivors of prison rape to get their perspective.
Also in June, the Commission will release draft standards for juvenile, community corrections, and lockup facilities. At the conclusion of the public comment periods, the commission staff will review and integrate public feedback into the draft standards for final approval by the commission. The standards, along with the Commission’s final report, will be presented to the President, Congress, and the U.S. Attorney General.
At that point, it will depend on pressure from the public to insure that the standards are adopted by the Attorney General and by each state’s prison system. The release of these draft standards is a very important step toward eliminating rape in our prisons. But now we need to build public support for adopting and applying these standards so that prisoners in every prison in the U.S. are safe from sexual assault while in the custody of our government. Jesus told us that whatever we do for “the least of these”, we do unto Him.
In His service,
Pat Nolan
Vice President, Prison Fellowship
Resources
|
