Prisoners rarely volunteer to come forward with a complaint of sexual misconduct. Should a prisoner choose to report such abuse, or be compelled to do so by bodily injury, pregnancy or other factors, she not only faces potential punishment, but more often than not confronts a prison system that discourages such complaints, curtails their investigation, treats the complainant with a combination of indifference and suspicion and exposes her to the risk of retaliation from both officers and fellow prisoners.
All of the states that we visited provide internal grievance mechanisms that are available in theory to female prisoners for a wide variety of complaints. However, these grievance mechanisms often have not functioned effectively for prisoner complaints of sexual misconduct. Grievance forms have not been consistently made available to prisoners, nor have prisoners been informed about the rules and procedures governing their use. Moreover, the procedures generally lack even a pretense of confidentiality. Officers have been told not only of complaints against them but also of the identity of the complainant. For instance, in Illinois, the first statement a woman prisoner wrote about an alleged rape reportedly was provided to the implicated officer. Subsequently, according to the prisoner, the officer and his colleagues harassed her for submitting the statement.105 At least three of the states that we visited, Michigan, California and, to a lesser extent, New York, require the prisoner to confront informally the corrections officer implicated in her complaint before filing a formal grievance. This effectively denies her the right to complain.
Even if a prisoner surmounts these obstacles and manages to make a complaint of sexual misconduct, no guarantee exists that the prison authorities will investigate her complaint. No prison that we investigated has published clear guidelines for investigating custodial sexual misconduct, nor were the prisoners that we interviewed aware of such guidelines when they did exist. On at least two occasions, Michigan has assigned an officer toinvestigate himself; not surprisingly both officers cleared themselves of the charges.106
No state that we investigated routinely refers custodial sexual misconduct complaints to independent investigators or, where appropriate, state police or prosecutorial authorities. In our experience, prison administrators generally prefer to handle such matters internally, away from the heightened public scrutiny that often accompanies allegations of custodial sexual misconduct by correctional officers or staff. In the opinion of the deputy counsel for the Illinois department of corrections, there was no need to contact the state police about rape allegations because "in a rape case, there's probably nothing the state police can do that we wouldn't be doing."107 In some cases, the prisoner's attorney and even her family members are kept in the dark about the course of an internal investigation or are shut out of the investigative process altogether.108 This not only leaves the state departments of corrections in the dubious position of investigating themselves but also denies to female prisoners legal remedies that may be available to them outside the correctional system.
The inability of female prisoners successfully to file complaints of sexual misconduct and to see such complaints fully and fairly investigated is attributable in no small measure to a bias against prisoner testimony that pervades all levels of the U.S. corrections and criminal justice systems that we investigated. This bias is particularly crippling in cases of custodial sexual misconduct, because, absent severe physical harm to the prisoner, the availability of evidence other than her own testimony with respect to sexual abuse is extremely limited. For example, officials usually view testimony by other prisoners as insufficient; as prisoners, their veracity also is in doubt. Moreover, professional solidarity often plays a role in derailing investigations into staff sexual misconduct. Prison staff not directly involved in sexualmisconduct often turn a blind eye to such abuse and will rarely testify in support of a prisoner's charge of such misconduct against a fellow officer.109
105 Interview, Illinois, May 1994.
106 Interview, Michigan, March 1994.
107 Interview, Susan O'Leary, deputy counsel of Illinois department of corrections, Illinois, September 27, 1994.
108 In New York, attorneys have had difficulty obtaining statements that their clients may have made to prison officials or investigators. Telephone interview, Ruth Cassell, Prisoners legal Services, January 26, 1995. The mother of a prisoner allegedly raped in an Illinois prison repeatedly contacted the warden in her efforts to pursue an investigation of her daughter's rape. Her phone calls were not returned until she contacted an attorney. She was never notified about the outcome of the investigation. Telephone interview, June 22, 1994.
109 For example, one former employee of the Georgia department of corrections told us, "That's the way the system was—you keep your mouth shut about the rumors and allegations." Interview, former employee, Georgia, March 1994.
This Web page was created using a BETA Version of HTML Transit 4.0.