Prison Rape

Research

There is limited research focused on the occurrence and prevalence of sexual violence in correctional settings. Most research addressing prison rape has been conducted in the United States over the past 40 years. The first valid and reliable incidence rate comes from a 1968 study of more than 3,300 inmates. This study estimated that the true number of incidents for the more than 60,000 inmates to pass through the system during the 26-month study period was close to 2,000.

More recent research has shown a range of victimization rates. A 1982 study reported that 14% of inmates in one California prison had been sexually victimized, with many forced into long-term sexual victimization patterns, including protective pairings (e.g., partnering with another inmate in a sex-for-protection exchange). Similar rates of victimization were reported at about the same time for a stratified sample of inmates in 17 facilities of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Cindy and David Struckman-Johnson conducted a series of studies that provide the next significant work to address prison sexual violence and produced very different results. This line of research reports that between 20% and 22% of inmates in midwestern prisons are victimized. More recent research continues to report a wide range of rates of victimization. Others have reported that only 1% of [Page 548]a sample of men incarcerated in Oklahoma were sexual violence victims (although 14% reported being threatened or attempted to be coerced). Elsewhere, reports suggest that 8.5% of inmates have been sexually victimized while incarcerated.

Public concern about high rates of prison rape victimization was one reason behind the passage of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003. In addition to creating a mechanism to develop national standards for institutional operations and providing funds for facilities to partially implement such standards, PREA also created a rush of research on prison rape.

One obvious point here is that there are wide discrepancies in the estimates of the rate of prison rape in the United States. Until recently, prison rape was not uniformly defined, and many researchers relied on small and nonrandom samples with poor methods of data collection. Today there are standard definitions, as established by PREA, and used by the PREA-mandated national study of prison rape conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics in the National Inmate Survey. The series of surveys, begun in 2007, of a random sample of 10% of all prisons (as well as jails) in the United States collects data directly from inmates using an audio computer-assisted self-interview that is anonymous and confidential. Widely recognized as the most methodologically sophisticated study of prison rape victimization in the United States, this series of reports consistently shows 4.4% of prison inmates (and 3.1% of jail inmates) report some form of sexual victimization while incarcerated in the prior years. However, more than one half of the instances of sexual victimization reported by inmates were perpetrated by a correctional staff member. Also, female inmates are twice as likely (4.7% vs. 1.9%) to report a sexual victimization while incarcerated.

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