Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/prison-rape/)
“These incidents could have had multiple victims or multiple perpetrators, which could result in more persons involved than the total number of incidents,” wrote researchers, who collect that data to meet mandates of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Most of the victims were boys, who, as a group, outnumber incarcerated girls, analysts found.
By allowing for a delay in implementing PREA or letting states off the hook, kids will continue to be exposed to the dangers of adult jails and prisons.
Some 85 percent of U.S. states and territories told the federal Department of Justice that “they intend to take steps to reduce sexual assaults in prisons.”
It’s an optimistic headline: “Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It”. It leads into a comprehensive New York Review of Books article on three recently released Federal government publications. Two of these documents examine sexual abuse in the nation’s detention centers while the other outlines the Department of Justice’s regulations for eliminating prison rape. All three aim to address the appalling number of people—young and old, female and male, citizen and those awaiting deportation— who routinely suffer sexual violence while in lockup, an estimated 209,000 plus every year according to the Justice Department. So where’s the optimism?
I was 18 years old when I was arrested and sent to jail. But the real hell of my life to come started on my 19th birthday, when the state shipped me off to a place called Alto, a notorious youth prison in north Georgia. There was much to fear in this place, but nothing quite frightening as much as the likelihood of sexual assault.
I knew from talking to older guys in jail, before I was sent off to Alto, that rapes were common, but nothing they told me prepared me for the reality of what I witnessed. The place (it has since been shuttered) had been built in the 1930s as a hospital. Fifty years later, it was a dilapidated house of horrors.