The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) mandated that the Department of Justice release regulations aimed at ending sexual abuse in detention. Recently, the regulations have been released. They contain a lot of the things we’ve been looking for!
- Protection for vulnerable inmates, such as queer people and youths, who are the most likely to be raped.
- Stronger procedures for detecting and preventing sexual assaults by staff.
- Inmates can speak to trained counselors about their abuse.
- No time limits to report abuse.
- Independent audits of each facility every three years, which will be made available to the public.
Sexual violence, against any victim, is an assault on human dignity and an affront to American values.
[Stephen Colbert: “I just feel like my heart is going to burst because it’s full of rainbows.”]
Fucking FINALLY.
I’m torn between being excited about this and being amazed at just how far behind we are on this issue. These are the most basic protections, let’s hope and work for much, much more.
I sometimes wonder if there would be more support for stopping prison rape if, instead of saying “Inmates don’t deserve to be raped” we took the angle of “Some criminals like to rape people and they shouldn’t be rewarded by being sent to a free rape buffet.”
Regardless, I’m glad we’re doing something about it and President Obama should be commended for handling a problem that, unfortunately, isn’t very popular with the general population.
Male guards shouldn’t be used to guard female prisoners, but they are. Amy Fisher, who stabbed Joey Buttafuco’s wife, was raped and offered to gurads from other prisons when she was confined. Most of the other abuse is prisoner on prisoner, and it’s frequently used by guards as a tool to enforce discipline, as above.
It’s nice to have the standards in place, but I have to wonder since 79% of staff sexual abuse is female staff abusing male prisoners why does it only prevent cross gender pat down searches of adult, female prisoners? It’s nice to prevent 21% of sexual abuse. It’s better to prevent 79% of sexual abuse. Ideally we’d prevent it all. Here are the standards: • Develop and maintain a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual abuse; • Designate a PREA point person to coordinate compliance efforts; • Screen inmates for risk of being sexually abused or sexually abusive, and use screening information… Read more »
I am amazingly happy to hear this, but i’m not sure if it would apply to jails as well? I remember when I did a tour of a jail for one of my classes in college, the guard mentioned that after certain number of offenses (or the original crime) the juveniles are released into general population, and implied they had what was coming to them.
This rocks, Ozy!