Justice misses deadline for new prison rape rules

This comes as no surprise, however, Attorney General Eric Holder missed the deadline for creating guidelines to address prison rape:

Pressured by a resistant prison industry, the Department of Justice (DoJ) will miss its legal deadline on Wednesday for establishing new standards designed to reduce rape in the nation’s prisons.

The long-running saga — which dates to 2003, when Congress passed a law requiring new rules — has angered some lawmakers and prisoner-rights advocates, who contend that each day the guidelines are delayed, preventable assaults are taking place.

“The longer you delay, the more people will be raped in prison,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “It’s unconscionable that [DoJ] officials are blocking it now.
“I don’t know what Holder’s problem is,” he added, referring to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Holder defended the agency Tuesday in a letter to Wolf and Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), another strong supporter of the new guidelines, saying DoJ is moving as quickly as it can.

“It is essential,” Holder wrote, “that the department take the time necessary to craft regulations that will endure.”

The reason the prison industry opposes the new rules seems to be primarily financial. It costs more to protect vulnerable inmates than it does to allow them to be preyed on by other inmates and prison guards:

Testifying before a House panel in March, Holder conceded as much, telling lawmakers that the holdup is largely the result of pushback from prison officials.

“When I speak to wardens, when I speak to people who run local jails, when I speak to people who run state facilities, they look at me and they say, ‘Eric, how are we supposed to do this?’ ” Holder told members of a House Appropriations subcommittee. “ ‘If we are going to segregate people, build new facilities, do training, how are we supposed to do this?’ ”

Keep in mind that these are the same prison officials that push for more funding and money to build prisons. These are the same people who push for stricter laws and sentencing guidelines that end up increasing the number of inmates in prison. These are the same people who support three-strike laws, incarcerating non-violent offenders, and incarcerating children. These are also the same people who push for children to be sentenced and housed with adults. When those issues come up, prison officials do not seem to oppose such laws, policies, or guidelines regardless of the cost.

However, when it comes to protecting inmates, now the prison officials seem to take issue with the cost. That leaves a very particular impression:

“Prison officials claim that it will be too expensive to implement [the standards] — too expensive to prevent staff from raping detainees,” Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Justice Detention International, a prisoner-rights group, wrote in the Huffington Post earlier this year.

Stannow argues that the cost analyses being considered ignore the cost benefits that would result if the prison rapes were reduced. Medical costs could be cut, she says, as well as the legal expenses resulting from prisoner lawsuits.

“These factors are not included in the Department of Justice cost study,” Stannow wrote, “but Attorney General Holder must take them into account.”

A series of recent studies adds legitimacy to the advocates’ concerns. The DoJ, estimates that more than 60,000 prisoners suffer sexual assaults at the hands of guards or other prisoners each year. Another study, released in January, found that 12 percent of juveniles in detention facilities are assaulted.

“It’s brutal,” [ Rep. Frank] Wolf said. “Night is frightening.”

The situation is not just brutal. It is inhumane. In any other situation it would be unacceptable for anyone to knowingly allow someone to be beaten, tortured, and raped just because someone did not want to spend the money to protect potential victims. The potential damage to these people is not something anyone can really gauge.

Ironically, no one can say this is a situation where those with the power to protect inmates do not know the impact of rape has on the victims. Prison officials receive such reports all the time. While money may be the public reason why prison officials oppose the new rules, the real reason might be that those officials do not want people to know the scope of the problem. They may not want people to know about cases like this:

Or cases like those featured in the documentary Turned Out: Sexual Assault Behind Bars (view parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7).

The prison officials might also not people to know that a great deal of the rape happens to targeted groups such as whites, children, smaller people, gay people, or those not affiliated with any gang. Acknowledging the scope of prison rape might seem to some prison officials an admission that they do not have control. So perhaps instead of protecting vulnerable people, many of whom probably should not be in prison anyway, prison officials would rather save some face and money.

That is precisely why Holder should have addressed the new rules, got them passed, and had them instituted. The prison officials simply are not addressing the problem, and with the ever-increasing prison population it reprehensible to allow prison rape to continue.