The Justice Department had been slow in issuing guidelines for the prevention of prison rape -- they were supposed to be released in June of last year -- but they finally did so on Monday. I'm still reading the report itself, but the Justice Department has released a series of bullet points summarizing some of their recommendations:
Ban cross-gender strip searches, and for juveniles, cross-gender pat-down searches;
Check the backgrounds of new hires and not hire past abusers;
Establish an evidence protocol to preserve evidence following an incident and train investigators to act promptly and diligently;
Screen inmates through a process that takes into account their safety and assign them to housing in a way that best protects them;
Provide multiple methods to report sexual abuse;
Provide inmates access to outside victim advocates for emotional support services related to sexual abuse;
Provide appropriate medical and mental health care to victims;
Prepare a written policy mandating zero tolerance toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment;
Discipline staff and inmate assailants appropriately, with termination as the presumptive disciplinary sanction for staff who have engaged in sexual touching;
Train employees on their responsibilities in preventing, recognizing and responding to sexual abuse;
Allow inmates a reasonable amount of time to file grievances so as to preserve their ability to seek legal redress after exhausting administrative remedies; and
Conduct audits to assess compliance.
When the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission released its report last year, it found that one in 20 prisoners, or 60,000 people, are sexually assaulted each year. I'm willing to bet that those numbers are low, not just because sexual abuse is underreported in general, but because prison and jail are the kind of environments where people are even less likely to admit having been victimized for fear of being targeted again.
