Takeaways from the Associated Press investigation into sexual abuse of incarcerated women

As part of a sweeping two-year investigation into prison labor, The Associated Press found that prison staff across the country are accused of using inmate work orders to sexually assault incarcerated women and lure them to secluded places out of view of security cameras. Many cases follow a similar pattern: accusers are retaliated against, while the defendants receive little or no punishment.

There are takeaways from this the AP’s investigation:

Although they represent only 10% of the country’s total prison population, the number of female prisoners has risen from about 26,000 in 1980 to almost 200,000 today. Most women are 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 kitchen or laundry work in prisons or in work-release programs that place them at private companies such as national fast-food restaurants and hotel chains.

Accused correctional officers often resign or retire before internal investigations are completed, sometimes retaining pensions and other benefits, experts say. With no paper trail and severe staff shortages nationwide, some are simply transferred or hired at other facilities, or given positions overseeing vulnerable populations such as youth. Even if accusations lead to criminal charges, convictions can be rare, which also allows perpetrators to avoid being placed on sex offender registries.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed more than two decades ago, created a channel for filing reports that resulted in a threefold increase in the number of staff sexual misconduct allegations involving male, female and transgender inmates from 2010 until 2020 in prisons across the country.

Internationally, prison rape is recognized as a form of torture. In some states, correctional officers claim that – despite the apparent balance of power – inmates gave their consent. Laws vary from state to state. For example, sexual abuse of a prisoner can be a crime in Kentucky, with a maximum sentence of 12 months, but rape in prison is a crime in Pennsylvania, punishable by up to seven years behind bars.

In cases confirmed by nationwide internal investigations, fewer than 6% of the nearly 1,000 employees who allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with male and female prisoners in 2019 and 2020 were prosecuted, according to the latest Justice Department figures .

Brandy Moore White, head of the union representing 30,000 prison workers in federal prisons, said chronic labor shortages are part of the problem, noting that staff are also vulnerable to abuse by inmates. “When you have 10 staff members overseeing 500 inmates,” she said, “there is time for people with malicious intent to do things they shouldn’t do.”

Women have been targeted from their days on slave plantations, when they were raped by their owners, to the decades-long period following emancipation, when convicts were rented out to private companies. Widespread reports of sexual abuse eventually led to the establishment of reformatories, where women were no longer supervised by men. That began to change in the 1970s, when anti-discrimination laws opened the door to cross-gender surveillance just as the number of women incarcerated began to rise.

Research shows that most female victims were abused before incarceration. They rarely report abuse for fear that they will not be believed or will be punished, ranging from losing their jobs to being placed in solitary confinement or denied contact with their children. And many who are at large have only a short time left to serve their sentences and are wary of anything that could send them back to prison or extend their sentence.

Some guards believe that women with substance abuse disorders are used to commodifying sex on the street, and see them as partly responsible for their own victimization, said Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University and one of the nation’s top experts on the area of ​​prison rape. . “They are seen as the lowest of the low,” she said. “They’re not really women, they’re just different things.”

As part of the AP’s investigation — which has exposed everything from multinational companies profiting from prison labor to the lack of rights and protections for incarcerated workers — reporters spoke to more than 100 current and former prisoners across the country, including women who said they were sexually assaulted by correctional officers. staff.

Reporters also sifted through thousands of pages of lawsuits, police reports, audits and other documents detailing stories of systemic sexual violence and cover-ups from New York to Florida and California.

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

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

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