Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
Since the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA; Public Law 108-79), an annual statistic review is conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to provide transparency and reform against sexual violence in correctional facilities.
According to the BJS website, the review must include: “the identification of the common characteristics of both victims and perpetrators of prison rape; and prisons and prison systems with a high incidence of prison rape.”
“PREA applies to all correctional facilities, including prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, military and Indian country facilities, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.”
The BJS created the National Prison Rape Statistics Program (NPRSP) to conduct four data collection points: “the Survey of Sexual Violence (SSV), the National Inmate Survey (NIS), the National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), and the National Former Prisoner Survey (NFPS).”
Any sexual contact whatsoever between an inmate and a corrections officer is illegal. The number has been rising for five years. Of the 9,000 filed victim allegations of sexual misconduct by inmates.
A 2013 survey by the Department of Justice found that an estimated 80,000 had been sexually victimized over a time frame of two years by inmates or staff.
Only ten percent of the sexual allegations were substantiated in the BJS data. Self-reports versus official reports are also always higher due to fear and fraudulent claims. The victims fear retribution by authorities and many accounts are impossible to verify, imaginary or intended to harm reputations or remove the staff they do not like.
In a press release yesterday, the BJS found that, between 2009 and 2011, “more than half (54 percent) of all substantiated incidents of staff sexual misconduct.” Three-quarters of the staff were fired or resigned after criminal sex offences with inmates.
“About half of all allegations (51 percent) involved nonconsensual sexual acts (the most serious, including penetration) or abusive sexual contacts (less serious, including unwanted touching, grabbing and groping) of inmates with other inmates. Nearly half (49 percent) involved staff sexual misconduct (any sexual act directed toward an inmate by staff) or sexual harassment (demeaning verbal statements of a sexual nature) directed toward inmates.”
Perhaps most surprising, the press release said that “a quarter (26 percent) of all incidents of staff sexual harassment were committed by female staff.” This phenomenon of female sexual contact and impregnation in the US prison system was captured prominently this last year in the news media.
Last April, at the Baltimore City Detention Center, four female prison guards were consensually impregnated by inmates. Two of the women had tattooed the names of the male inmates on their arms. The violations were only a small part to a much bigger smuggling gang operation that involved arrests of thirteen female corrections officers, seven inmates and five co-conspirators.
Tyshinia Love Brewster of Poughkeepsie was impregnated and arrested for rape and official misconduct in the Hudson Valley.
The most famous case was Nancy Gonzalez: an officer at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center at Sunset Park (federal prison), who voluntarily became pregnant by an inmate convicted cop-killer.
More than statistics and numbers, the reporting demonstrates the deterioration of an increasing hypersexual culture in a confined space of heightened aggression and authority. Meanwhile the prison system as a whole is over capacity and mixed-gender staff to prisoner has resulted in a worst case scenario and public relations nightmare for many corrections facilities and the national prison system.
For more details, see: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/svraca0911pr.cfm