Takeaways from The Associated Press investigation into sexual abuse of incarcerated women

As part of an extensive two-year investigation into prison labor, the Associated Press found that prison staff across the country were accused of using inmates’ job duties to sexually abuse incarcerated women, luring them to isolated spots out of view of security cameras. Many cases follow a similar pattern: Accusers are retaliated against, while the accused receives little or no punishment.

Here are the results of AP’s research:

Women behind bars are the fastest growing population

Although they represent only 10% of the nation’s overall prison population, incarceration rates for women have increased from about 26,000 in 1980 to nearly 200,000 today. Most women were imprisoned for non-violent crimes, often drug-related.

Reporters in all 50 states found cases in which women said they were assaulted by staff in correctional facilities while doing jobs such as kitchen or laundry work or in work release programs that placed them in private businesses such as national fast food restaurants and hotel chains.

Experts say accused prison staff often quit or retired before internal investigations were completed, sometimes withholding pensions and other benefits. With no paper trail and severe staffing shortages across the country, some are simply transferred to other facilities or hired or placed in positions supervising vulnerable populations such as youth. Even if the allegations lead to criminal charges, convictions can be rare, making it possible for perpetrators to avoid being placed on the sex offender registry.

Prison rape is illegal, but laws vary widely

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed more than two decades ago, is a conduit for reporting that led to a threefold increase in the number of allegations of sexual abuse by staff involving male, female and transgender inmates in jails and prisons across the country from 2010 to 2020. created. .

Internationally, prison rape is considered a form of torture. In some states, corrections officers claim that inmates consented despite a clear power imbalance. Laws vary from state to state. For example, sexual abuse of an inmate can be a misdemeanor in Kentucky and punishable by a maximum of 12 months in prison, while prison rape is a felony in Pennsylvania with up to seven years behind bars.

In cases confirmed by internal investigations across the country, less than 6% of the nearly 1,000 staff members reported to have engaged in sexual misconduct with male and female inmates in 2019 and 2020 were prosecuted, according to the latest figures from the Department of Justice.

Brandy Moore White, president of the union that represents 30,000 prison staff in federal prisons, said chronic labor shortages are part of the problem, noting that staff are also vulnerable to abuse by inmates. “If you have 10 staff members supervising 500 inmates, there’s time for people with bad intentions to do things they shouldn’t be doing,” he said.

Fear of retaliation

Women were targeted from their days on slave plantations, where they were raped by their owners, to the decades following emancipation that included the leasing of convicts to private companies. Widespread reports of sexual abuse eventually led to the establishment of reformatories where women were no longer supervised by men. This began to change in the 1970s, when anti-discrimination laws opened the door to cross-gender policing and the number of incarcerated women began to rise.

Research shows that most female victims were abused before incarceration. They rarely report attacks because they fear they won’t be believed or will be punished in ways ranging from losing their jobs to being placed in solitary confinement or being denied contact with their children. And many people on work release have only a short time to serve and are wary of doing anything that could send them back to prison or extend their sentences.

Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University and one of the nation’s leading experts on prison rape, said some guards believe women with substance abuse problems are accustomed to using sex as a commodity on the streets and see them as partly responsible for their own victimization. . “They are considered the lowest of the low,” he said. “They’re not actually women; they’re just something else.”

We investigate labor abuses

As part of the AP’s investigation — which exposed everything from multinational corporations that benefit from prison labor to incarcerated workers’ lack of rights and protections — reporters spoke with more than 100 current and former inmates across the country, including women who say they were sexually abused in prisons. staff.

Reporters also combed through thousands of pages of court files, police reports, audits and other documents detailing graphic stories of systemic sexual violence and cover-ups from New York to Florida to California.

Those cases led to a bipartisan Senate investigation two years ago; that investigation found that inmates were sexually abused by guards, guards, chaplains or other staff in at least two-thirds of all women’s federal prisons over the past decade. And just last month, U.S. lawmakers held a hearing to discuss how to better protect prisoners.