A Blind Eye, Still Turned: Getting serious about prison rape

Every day, a large number of men are raped in American jails and prisons. For a nation that prides itself on being a human-rights leader, the sheer number of men raped behind bars -- 240,000 a year according to the activist group Stop Prison Rape -- is a black mark. A common corrections-industry estimate is 12,000 rapes per year. Even if this is the actual number, it still represents more rapes than are reported annually against women in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, San Diego, and Phoenix combined.

For 18 months now, Congress has been considering the Prison Rape Reduction Act, a bipartisan bill that would take resolute though modest action to ascertain the dimensions of the nation's prison-rape problem and confront it. Despite support from leaders in both parties, and no organized opposition, the bill remains mired in committee. The main reasons are 1) disagreement over certain details of the bill and 2) a lack of active support from the Bush administration. "I know that John Ashcroft is for it," says Frank Wolf of Virginia, the bill's lead Republican sponsor in the House. "I was disappointed that [the administration was] not more enthusiastic for it earlier. There has been a lot of foot-dragging. They should have done more to sit down with us and work out a compromise." Others are more blunt. "If Justice gave the nod, it would be law today. It's almost like a culture of 'nyet,'" says Vincent Schiraldi, head of the left-leaning Justice Policy Institute. "But they won't do anything about it." Justice Department spokesman Blain Rethmeier says that the department supports the bill and wants to eliminate any roadblocks facing it. But so far the measure simply isn't moving forward.

For the racist gangs (both black and white) that really run a large percentage of the nation's prisons, rape represents a key means of control. When they arrive behind bars, inmates almost always are challenged to fights. Those who fight poorly or run away are labeled "punks," or rape targets, and are frequently gang-raped. Eventually, a punk settles down to serve a "man," who provides protection in return for regular sex. This practice amounts to daily rape for years on end. While prison rape touches members of all races, the overwhelming majority of serious predators, called "wolves," are black, and the overwhelming majority of punks are white.

To make matters worse, prison rape often becomes a death sentence. Writing in the journal AIDS, researchers Hazel Dean-Gaitor and Patricia Fleming of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that prisoners have nearly six times the AIDS-infection rate of the population as a whole. Despite the horrible nature of the practice and its ubiquity in American prisons, some prison administrators do little to stop it. Others even encourage it: Guards in California's notorious Corcoran State Prison sent troublesome inmates to live with a man -- dubbed the "booty bandit" -- who raped them repeatedly.

The bill making its way through Congress was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Jeff Sessions, and in the House by Frank Wolf and Democrat Robert Scott. Wolf, who represents an affluent northern Virginia district, has emerged as the clear leader in the fight for the bill. "This is just a matter of what I feel I have to do as a citizen and as a Christian," he says. The congressman first became interested in prisons when he visited inmates at the Lorton Correctional Facility in Washington, D.C., before his election to Congress. He now oversees most legislation dealing with prisons.

The bill proposes $60 million for rape-prevention programs, requires states to collect statistics on prison rape, and establishes a commission to study the problem. Prison-accrediting associations, which set the standards most facilities follow, will also have to develop standards for preventing rape. This should help solve the problem in three ways. First, once reliable statistics are available, corrections- systems administrators who tolerate high levels of prison rape will have to come to Washington to answer potentially embarrassing questions about how they run their facilities. Second, the new standards -- similar to those already in place in San Francisco -- will help protect prisoners. Under San Francisco's much-admired rape-prevention protocols, potential victims (weak and effeminate men) are carefully segregated from suspected sex offenders, and all reports of rape are thoroughly investigated. Finally, grant programs will help develop new ways of confronting the problem.

To guarantee compliance, the bill stipulates that states whose prison administrators fail to report statistics will lose small amounts of federal money for criminal-justice programs. (The exact amount is based on a complex formula.) The need for such penalties is clear, as the dismal record of statistics programs without enforcement mechanisms shows. The FBI's 70-year-old Uniform Crime Reporting program -- used to track crime rates -- serves as an example: because it's voluntary, statistics are uneven and thus unreliable.

Nevertheless, the penalty called for by the Prison Rape Reduction Act has become the main roadblock to the bill's passage. In congressional testimony, Tracy Henke, a high-level administrator for many DOJ grant programs and a supporter of the bill, raised fears that denying grant money to non-compliant states would leave some states without adequate money for criminal-justice programs. The corrections industry has expressed similar reservations. "We support the bill's purpose," says Charles Kehoe, president of the American Correctional Association (ACA). "But we have a number of concerns about the particulars." One legitimate concern voiced by Kehoe is that the commission established to study the problem should include corrections and law-enforcement professionals. But on the subject of penalizing non-compliant states, Kehoe is "reluctant to suggest an enforcement mechanism," claiming that a combination of "subtle peer pressure" and the desire to do the right thing will get corrections professionals to report statistics. Kehoe denies that prison administrators have ever ignored the problem, even though the ACA itself did not begin drafting standards specifically intended to prevent rape until earlier this year.

"This is a bill that just about everybody believes should pass," says Pat Nolan, head of the Justice Fellowship, a sister organization of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship. "And it's disturbing that it gets hung up over a minor issue like this." Indeed, it's unclear why Henke, Kehoe, or anyone else should object to states' losing grant money. After all, no state is entitled to federal monies, much less a state whose inaction undermines the purpose of a federal program.

There's an obvious role for government in stopping prison rape, especially in light of the Supreme Court's 1994 decision in Farmer v. Brennan, which found that pervasive jailhouse rape violates prisoners' constitutional rights. After all, government exists to protect just such rights. Whatever punishment inmates may deserve, repeated rape is not one that we can condone.

Congressman Wolf, for his part, is fed up with the entire matter and says that he'll attach it to a major appropriations bill if the inaction continues. This will ensure its passage. But, he says, it's something the Bush administration should get its muscle behind. "This bill embodies the idea of compassionate conservatism. It's a problem that they aren't making sure that it gets done."

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