Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense

Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense
The News Tribune

Rape and sexual abuse remain too much a fact of life behind bars.
That’s intolerable. In the United States, our criminal justice system sends convicts to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
The recommendations of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission could be a step toward changing the prison culture that permits sexual abuse to continue.
The commission found that more than 60,000 prisoners are the victims of rape and sexual abuse each year. Many inmates are afraid to report such crimes and even those who do are often ignored or dismissed.
Not only hardcore criminals are being victimized. The commission heard from former inmates who made relatively minor mistakes – a political protest gone wrong, a drunken driving arrest or a probation violation – and ended up being brutally raped.
No matter what they did to land in jail, captives are a vulnerable population. They depend on prison authorities to protect them, and it’s in the best interests of those officials to do so.
Prisoners will seek protection where they can find it. When the only safe harbor is a gang, the repercussions affect not only prison safety but also public safety when prisoners carry their gangster ways to the streets after their release.
The commission is recommending that Attorney General Eric Holder issue standards that require prisons to have zero-tolerance policies on rape, better staff training and improved screening to identify prisoners vulnerable to abuse, among other measures. States could lose federal prison money if they fail to comply.
The cost to staff and equip jails and prisons accordingly will be high. But so too is the cost of the status quo.
Washington officials just agreed to pay $1 million to settle part of a class action lawsuit by current and former female inmates who claimed they were sexually assaulted by corrections officers at the state’s Purdy prison. Still pending is a dispute over what the state will do to prevent other inmates from being abused and to keep abuse allegations from languishing in files.
The rape commission’s report is significant not just for its recommendations but also for its attempts to quantify the problem. As much as sexual abuse has been assumed an inevitable consequence of confinement, its actual scope hasn’t been well documented.
In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison system’s failure to prevent sexual abuse of inmates can be a violation of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The caveat was that corrections officials must have known or should have known about the abuse.
Credible deniability, if there ever was such a thing, is in short supply today.


On September 10, 2004, Vili and Mary announced that they have been together constantly since her release. They plan to marry and Mary is willing to have more children for him. After her release from prison Vili petitioned the courts to lift the court imposed restraining order so they could see each other. The judge lifted the order barring contact between Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau..

A suburban Seattle school district elementary school teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, was 34, and the married mother of four children in 1996, when she and Vili Fualaau, her sixth grade student entered into a sexual relationship. She was arrested in 1997 when she was pregnant with their child and sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to have no contact with Vili. A month later she was caught her car with him and she was pregnant with their second child. She served seven and a half years in prison for having sex with a minor. She was released from prison on August 4, 2004. Mary will be staying with a former coworker in a home close to where her girls live with their father's family. It is rumored that Mary and Vili plan to write another book together. Their first book was published and popular in France.

Mary wrote a book about her affair with Vili. Mary's former cellmate, Christina Dress, a close friend and co-author of her book said when Mary arrived at Purdy women's prison in 1998, she was harassed by inmates and guards.
"Inmates were preparing and sending her food with chemicals in it, spit in it, things like that. Tama Lisa and I put a stop to that...already been at prison, we knew how to handle it." Christina Dress - King 5 TV News

Talk About Becoming the Enemy

We also know that, even after the supposed banning of some measures that had been previously approved by the Secretary of Defense, these techniques continued at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and probably other prisons, even while the Inspector General was putting a seal of approval on the whole affair.

As Josh White wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program -- dubbed the "frequent flyer" program in official documents -- on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.