Prison Rape Elimination Act

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Though it is considered “an accepted fact of prison life” (Dumond 2003, 354), male inmate rape in American prisons is an issue that must be taken more seriously. It is considered a foregone conclusion that new inmates will be sexually assaulted when they enter prison, and their experiences often end up becoming the punchline to a joke. How lightly the problem is taken makes it difficult to institute real change that will prevent sexual assault. It is very important, then, to make it known that prison rape is a problem that people need to care about and change. There is policy in place to prevent assaults of this kind, but it does not seem to be solving the problem. Therefore, I suggest that reform be tested on a smaller, more concentrated scale …show more content…
It was passed in 2003 by President George W. Bush and a unanimous Congress after a year of tweaking. PREA has a host of standards, involving preventive and responsive planning, training and education for wardens and inmates, screening for abuse, proper protocol following a report, investigations and discipline, medical and mental care, data review, audits, and state compliance (Unites States Department of Justice 2012, 2-4). The program has not yet been put into full effect, and implementing it across the entire U.S. prison system has been slow going. There are so many prisons and so many incarcerated persons that changing policy throughout the American prison system is a massive undertaking. Because PREA in all its parts has not yet reached all incarceration facilities, it is hard to tell whether or not the policy is helping. What we do know is prison rape rates are not going down and allegations are not at the amount that researchers hypothesize them to …show more content…
According to their statistics, the number of alleged sexual assaults made by inmates rose by about 700 from 2009 to 2011 (Rantala 2014, 7-12) and this can be attributed to more comfort with reporting, but the numbers are still not quite where it is estimated they should be. One of the earliest studies on prison rape found that while less than 1% of the 3,304 inmates surveyed admitted to being victims, the researchers estimated that two-thirds of the population were actually victims (Hensley et al. 2005, 668-669). The American government does not like to endorse things that do not work, especially when it costs taxpayers money. My four proposed test cases will allow for small-scale testing of certain methods to curb sexual assault. If three out the four prisons are not seeing results from a particular method, it will be assumed the problem is with the intervention, and it can be changed without having to reform thousands of prisons. Having these methods tested on such a small scale is attractive to federal policy makers, who want proof that the intervention will work before implementing it across the country. This also prevents bureaucratic roadblocks in the case of an intervention not working, or the overall plan needing to be
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