NEWSPRISON RAPE

Sex in prison just got a little safer.

A San Francisco county jail has added 16 condom machines for its 750 prisoners, in an effort to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease behind bars. It's a wise move, as prisoners will have sex whether they have condoms or not, but it's already drawing controversy from opponents, who say the condom dispensers are a way to coddle prisoners.

One of America's most outspoken opponents of prisoners' rights, Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, tweeted today when he heard the news:  "This is ridiculous, what's next, pink underwear?" Apparently Joe thinks sex behind bars and sexually transmitted disease is a joke, since he's famous for handing out pink underwear to prisoners.

Today, 300 prisoners in the United States will be raped. And the Department of Justice continues to stall on doing anything about it.

A report released yesterday by the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that approximately 88,500 prisoners were raped in 2009 — and the advocacy organization Just Detention International says this estimate is guaranteed to be low due to underreporting. The number is certainly higher than 100,000 they say.

And as we've written here before, the government has been dragging its feet far too long on fixes to this problem.In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, launching a study and — hopefully — eventual reforms. Last year, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission recommended a sensible set of reforms that would sharply reduce the number of sexual assaults in American prisons. But Attorney General Eric Holder says he needs at least until the fall to send proposed standards to the White House Office of Management and Budgets. It'll clearly be 2011 before any rules are actually put into place. By then, another 100,000 Americans will have suffered needless sexual assault.

These standards aren't rocket science — they include increased electronic

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in prisons and jails are among our country's most vulnerable people — and what's more, they're virtually invisible to mainstream society.

GritTV checked in this week on the issue of LGBT young people behind bars and brought us one of the more thoughtful (and frightening) presentations of the issues I've seen in a while. (Watch the full episode after the jump.) As their episode reveals, the treatment of LGBT youth in prison brings into focus a dangerous mix of many of our prison system's worst flaws.

We frequently cover the issue of sexual assault in prison, and LGBT youth are among the most victimized populations behind bars. Juveniles are vulnerable in adult prisons — or in any prison, for that matter — and LGBT youth are often the most vulnerable of that group.

But this week, GritTV guests Gabrielle Prisco and Daniel Redman didn't focus only on juvenile issues or prison rape. Instead, they connected important dots on this issue: to homelessness, to the school-to-prison pipeline and the severely excessive use of solitary confinement for our most vulnerable prisoners.

In his excellent recent Nation article, Redman tells the stories of terrified young people — often in need of help — who find themselves in the most hostile environments imaginable. LGBT youth make up 15% of the juvenile prison population, he reports, and they report 12 times the number of sexual assaults as straight youth do.

This week marked another lost opportunity for the Obama administration, as the Justice Department missed a long-looming deadline to address prison rape.

As we've written before, we knew this day was coming — Attorney General Eric Holder had previously announced that he planned to miss this deadline by as much as a year. But giving the public a heads-up doesn't make this policy failure okay. The federal government has already spent six years studying the issue of prison rape and developing a plan to reduce it. We have that plan. We need to implement it. Tell Holder to make reforms to address prison rape a priority now.

Maybe Holder would like to explain his delay directly to someone like Kimberly Yates, who was repeatedly sexually assaulted while she served a federal drug sentence. Like many of the 100,000 other people victimized by sexual assault in American prisons each year, Yates' assault was made much worse by the fact that officials knew what was happening, but failed to act.

"What makes my case especially alarming," she wrote, "is the fact that the Bureau of Prisons was put on notice about this officer but continued to allow (the rapist) to work in that position, knowing what he had done and that he could do it to someone else. The standards must address this."

It's been seven years since Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and a year since the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission recommended a sensible set of reforms that would sharply reduce the number of sexual assaults in American prisons. Still, the Department of Justice is stalling, and the rapes continue.

Should we let a price tag stop us from ending prison rape?

That's the real question facing the U.S. federal government today. While the White House deserves some credit for working to prevent prison sexual assaults, at this point, the feds are moving far too — in fact, shockingly — slowly.

The Department of Justice is wrapping up two days of hearings on the issue today, but a deadline for the agency to finalize national binding standards for dealing with prison rape is expected to slip by quietly later this month. Attorney General Eric Holder admits he’ll miss the June 23 deadline — by as much as a year. How is that okay?

More than 10,000 activists have already signed a petition here on Change.org, urging the DOJ to enact the standards recommended a year ago by the blue-ribbon Prison Rape Elimination Commission. The DOJ seems to be listening, and has posted more than public 1,100 comments online. Meanwhile, the New York Times joined the call this week, chastising Holder for delays in enacting the recommended standards. But the response? Still more delay.

So why is Holder dragging his feet? It all comes down to cost.

I can think of few people that would be more justified in writing a spittle-inflected harangue about the criminal justice system than Wilbert Rideau. In 1961, Rideau was convicted of murder by an all-white jury, and sentenced to death. That conviction was later overturned. But he was tried again, and again. Each time, the sentence was overturned.

In the 1970s, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Rideau grew into his adulthood in jails, solitary confinement and Angola Prison. In 2005, he received yet another trial, and was convicted of manslaughter, a crime he had confessed to from the start. He was sentenced to 21 years of incarceration — but by then, he'd already served 44 years. Today he is a free man, after spending an unnecessary 23 years behind bars.

Rideau has plenty to be angry about, but his recently released memoir In the Place of Justice (Alfred A. Knopf; $26.95) is not an angry book, or a denunciatory screed. It is a reporter's book: 366 pages of sober observation and self-reflection. If Rideau has revenge on his mind, he has decided to pursue it by telling the truth.

The Obama administration has worked hard to burnish its credentials as a global leader in the fight against sexual violence. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has met with rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo and led over 60 nations to push for a UN envoy to focus on the wartime rape of women and children. Meanwhile, the White House has pledged $17 million in funding to support women in conflict-ridden areas of the DRC.

Inspiring stuff. But meanwhile, the White House appears to be forgetting about the violence in its own backyard — specifically, the 100,000 sexual assaults that occur every year in the prisons across the country that operate under the U.S. flag.

That's a figure that comes from the U.S. Department of Justice — a statistic so staggering that even in a setting as polarized as Capitol Hill, agreement on the need to fight prison rape is unequivocal. Back in 2003, when Congress passed the U.S. Prison Rape Elimination Act, it sailed through both chambers with full affirmation from both sides.

Unfortunately, all this mighty store of good intentions has hit a snag. Last June, a set of proposed standards to deal with the prison rape crisis was issued, and Attorney General Eric Holder was given a year to read them and force prisons across the country to come into compliance. But Holder told Congress back in March that he wouldn't be adhering to that deadline. And despite an outpouring of correspondence to the Justice Department on the issue (the public comments period closed yesterday) — including the over 10,600 Change.org members who signed Just Detention International's petition — Holder's shown no sign that he'llto speed up that review.

Carl Chancellor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been writing about social justice issues for decades, is a columnist for Change.org.

What’s another 60,500 or so brutal sexual assaults in the larger scheme of things?

I’m pretty sure that’s not U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s point of view. However, if he decides to put off implementing proposed national standards to decrease sexual abuse behind bars for another year he will be in effect saying just that.

Each year, more than 60,500 sexual assaults occur in our state and federal prison. Roughly 4.5% of the more than 2 million men, women and children behind bars are victims of rape and sexual assault. Our nation’s correctional facilities are failing miserably at protecting the prison population confined within their walls, particularly when you consider that more inmates report sexual abuse at the hands of prison staff than from fellow inmates, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Last year (60,500 sexual assaults ago),  the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission created by Congress back in 2003 ( 423,500 sexual assaults ago) issued a series of proposed national standards to reduce the frequency of sexual assaults involving prisoners. Holder has until June 23 to review those recommendations and make modifications before making the commission’s standards nationally binding. But at this point, due to pushback mainly from corrections officials, it doesn’t appear Holder will meet that deadline, and he'll in all likelihood seek an extension to June 2011 (60,500 sexual assaults from now).

The NPREC standards -- formulated following  years of  research, including input from corrections officials, experts and prison rape survivors -- are getting held up over concerns about costs. Correction officials, citing budgetary constraints, are pressuring Holder and the Justice Department to weaken the standards: in essence, to implement something less than the zero-tolerance policy for prison rape recommended by the commission.

To kick off further discussion about prison rape and how to stop it, I interviewed Lovisa Stannow, Executive Director of Just Detention International, about the organization's efforts to stop sexual abuse in detention, and how readers can help.

1: Just Detention International's recent "Would You Joke Around About this Man Being Raped?" campaign (covered here at Change.org) was extremely powerful. Why does our culture's strong taboo against sexual assault stop at prison walls? Have the ads been effective?

It is very encouraging that the postcard campaign has attracted so much attention over the past few months -- but this campaign is actually not a recent effort. Just Detention International, or JDI as we call ourselves, has been distributing these postcards for several years, to prison officials and others. We revamped our website earlier this year and featured them prominently on the homepage, which led to the ‘discovery' of the images among bloggers.

In the public debate, prisoners tend to be silent and invisible. Most inmates come from marginalized, low-income communities and people of color are vastly over-represented among them. Prisoners cannot stage public relations campaigns to counter injustices on late-night television or on the big screen. But flippant and ill-informed attitudes about inmates and their right to be free from sexual violence are major obstacles to ending this type of abuse. That is why JDI has made it part of its mission to ensure that prisoner rape is described accurately -- as a crime and a devastating human rights violation. The postcard campaign is part of that effort.

Although we still have a long way to go, in recent months we have seen something of an explosion of interest in our work among journalists and opinion leaders. The Washington Post and the New York Times have run editorials on sexual abuse in detention, and columnists and pundits from across the political spectrum have started treating the issue with a new level of concern and seriousness.

2: It's been more than eight months since the release of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report. How important was that report in exposing and addressing the problem, and what are federal and state governments doing (or not doing) to take next steps?

The Commission's report and recommended national standards represents a dramatic shift in the debate about prisoner rape, echoing core messages that JDI has put forward for years. Prisoner rape can be prevented, and there are straightforward steps prisons and jails can take to end this type of violence -- these were themes in the Commission's work and in the resulting media coverage. Reading the report and standards, one is repeatedly struck by how plainly sensible the recommendations are -- and, therefore, by how appalling it is that such basic measures haven't already been standard practice for decades.

Once the standards were released last June, by law, U.S. Attorney General Er

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof devoted his column yesterday to an issue he called a personal “blind spot:” U.S. prisons. While the august columnist has devoted his pen to obvious human rights offenses inside of Guantánamo Bay as well as Chinese and North Korean prisons, he's never touched the issue of prisons in the U.S. But now, reports of widespread sexual assault in juvenile facilities across the country have inspired him to take up the cause of prison reform.

It’s great to have such a prominent voice and a persistent human rights advocate on our side. One way to thank Kristof for bringing awareness to this issue -- and to encourage him to stick with it -- is by posting comments on his blog, which I'd urge you to do.

In his column, Kristof points to the deplorable statistics released recently the Department of Justice, which indicate that almost one in eight youths report being sexually assaulted behind bars. He echoes a sentiment I’ve heard from prisoners over the last decade: how is it possible that Guantánamo gets so much attention from pro bono firms, while garden-variety U.S. prisoners get skipped over? The answers there might be obvious -- Guantánamo has a much higher international profile, et cetera. But while Guantánamo litigation is crucial, it doesn’t change the need for legal help in less marquee cases across our prison-filled nation.