Recommendations from The Associated Press investigation into the sexual abuse of incarcerated women

As part of a wide-ranging two-year investigation into prison labor, The Associated Press found that correctional staff across the country have been accused of using inmate work assignments to sexually abuse incarcerated women by luring them into isolated, safe locations. security cameras. Many cases follow a similar pattern: the accusers are avenged, while the accused face little or no punishment.

Here are packages from AP investigation:

Although they make up only 10 percent of the nation’s total prison population, women’s incarceration rates have risen from about 26,000 in 1980 to nearly 200,000 today. Most of the women were incarcerated for non-violent crimes that are often drug-related.

In all 50 states, reporters found cases in which women said they were assaulted by staff while doing jobs such as cooking or doing laundry in correctional facilities or in work-release programs that placed them in private businesses such as national fast food restaurants and hotel chains.

Accused correctional staff often quit or retire before internal investigations are completed, sometimes withholding pensions and other benefits, experts say. With no paper trail and severe staffing shortages nationwide, some are simply transferred or hired to other facilities or get positions overseeing vulnerable populations such as minors. Even when accusations lead to criminal charges, convictions can be rare, which also makes it possible for perpetrators to avoid placement on sex offender registries.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed more than two decades ago, created a reporting channel that led to a threefold increase in allegations of sexual misconduct by staff involving male, female and transsexuals from 2010 to 2020 in prisons and jails across the country. .

Internationally, prison rape is recognized as a form of torture. In some states, corrections officers argue that despite the clear power imbalance, inmates have consented. Laws vary from state to state. For example, sexually abusing an inmate may be a misdemeanor in Kentucky with a maximum sentence of 12 months, but prison rape is a felony in Pennsylvania that carries up to seven years behind bars.

In cases that were confirmed through internal investigations nationwide, less than 6 percent of the nearly 1,000 staff members who allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with male and female inmates in 2019 and 2020 were prosecuted, according to the latest figures from the Department of Justice.

Brandy Moore White, head of the union that represents 30,000 correctional employees in federal prisons, said chronic understaffing is part of the problem, noting that staff are also vulnerable to abuse by inmates. “If you have 10 staff supervising 500 inmates,” she said, “there’s time for people who have bad intentions to do things they shouldn’t.”

Women were targeted from their days on slave plantations, when they were raped by their owners, to the decades that followed emancipation and involved the leasing of convicts to private companies. Widespread reports of sexual abuse eventually led to the creation of reformatories, where women were no longer supervised by men. This began to change in the 1970s, as anti-discrimination laws opened the door to cross-gender surveillance, just as the number of women incarcerated began to rise.

Most female victims were abused before they were incarcerated, research shows. They rarely report assaults, fearing they won’t be believed or will be punished, from losing their jobs to being placed in solitary confinement or denied contact with their children. And many parolees have little time left to serve and are wary of doing anything that could send them back to prison or add time to their sentences.

Some guards believe that women with substance abuse problems are used to using sex as a commodity on the streets, holding them partly responsible for their own victimization, said Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University and one of the leading experts on country in prison rape. . “They’re looked at as kind of the lowest of the low,” she said. “They’re not really women—they’re just other things.”

As part of the AP investigation — which revealed everything from multinational companies benefiting from prison labor to the lack of rights and protections for incarcerated workers — reporters spoke with more than 100 current and former inmates across the country, including women who stated that they were sexually abused by correctional officers. personal.

Reporters also pored over thousands of pages of court records, police reports, audits and other documents detailing graphic stories of systemic sexual violence and cover-ups from New York to Florida and California.

Those cases prompted a bipartisan Senate investigation two years ago that found inmates were sexually abused by guards, guards, chaplains or other staff in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons over the past decade. And just last month, US lawmakers held a hearing to discuss how to better protect detainees.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for criminal justice reporting. This story was also supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Human Rights in collaboration with Arnold Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content.

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