The Need for Enhanced Federal Oversight
The U.S. government appears, by and large, to underestimate grossly the problem of rape, sexual assault, criminal sexual contact and other custodial abuse of women in U.S. prisons. For example, in its report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee pursuant to its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.S. State Department said that the "important underlying issue of sexual abuse [by male guards in women's prisons] is addressed through staff training and through criminal statutes prohibiting such activity."113 Based upon our investigation of sexual misconduct in five states, they have vastly understated the problem of sexual abuse in the women's prisons in the U.S. and greatly overstated the degree to which it is being remedied.
When questioned further by a member of the Human Rights Committee about respect for female prisoners' privacy rights, the United States responded that, in order to protect the privacy of female prisoners, "only female officers are allowed to conduct strip or body cavity searches, except in emergency situations."114 The U.S. government representative added that "male officers work in the women's housing units, but they are admonished to respect the inmates' privacy by not intentionally observing them in states of undress."115 In contrast, our research indicates that male guards routinely participate or view strip searches in nonemergency situations and there is little instruction that could be called "admonishing." Thus, these answers do not at all address, and in fact obscure, male correctional officers' routine practice of inappropriately touching and viewing female prisoners under their supervision.
The federal government is not utterly indifferent to this problem. United States federal law expressly criminalizes custodial sexual abuse when it occurs in federal facilities. In addition, our interviews with the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, which has responsibility for overseeing the civil rights of incarcerated persons, and our observations of this division's intervention in at least one of the state correctional systems that we investigated, lead us to conclude that DOJ is keenly aware of the problem and does make efforts, albeit limited, to address it. For example, their investigation in Michigan last year shed much-needed and long-overdue light on the serious problems of sexual abuse and other violations in that state's women's prison. In addition, the DOJ reportedly is pursuing similar inquires in women's prisons in Arizona and Alabama.
The DOJ's presence continues to be negligible to nonexistent in the other state prison systems considered in this report, all of which have cases of custodial sexual misconduct similar to those found in Michigan. Of those other states—California, Illinois, New York and Georgia—only the latter appears to have caught the attention of the DOJ.
Even though the DOJ Civil Rights Division, and in particular the unit that deals with civil litigation, is short on financial and human resources and long on pressing problems in the many institutions of a custodial nature over which it has oversight, concerted, consistent and full federal attention to the problem of rape, sexual assault, and other abuse of female prisoners in United States state prisons for women is long overdue.
Ultimately, the main cause of the problem of custodial sexual misconduct in the United States is the failure of official political will. As the cases of Georgia and the District of Columbia demonstrate, when public officials want (or are compelled) to do something about the problem of sexual misconduct in custody, something gets done. The widespread absence of official resolve to address this problem both creates and perpetuates an extremely volatile situation in U.S. women's prisons that is characterized by the rise in the number of female prisoners being guarded by ill-trained male officers, the absence of appropriate prison rules and criminal law, the lack of adequate reporting and investigatory mechanisms, and the routine failure to discipline or punish offending officers. Taken together, these factors have produced a custodial environment in the United States' women's prisons that is ripe for sexual abuse.
There can be no doubt in the mind of any U.S. public official who cares about the integrity of the penal and criminal justice systems thatsomething needs to be done about custodial sexual abuse of women in U.S. prisons and done now. Given the steadily rising female prison population, the United States can no longer afford for the rape, sexual assault, and other sexual misconduct in its women's prisons to be what one attorney called the "dirty little secret of corrections." The secret is out. The U.S. government must uphold its international human rights obligations to prohibit and punish custodial sexual abuse by its own agents and urge them to assist this country's state governments and departments of corrections to devote the necessary financial and human resources to secure the speedy eradication of this problem.
113 U.S. Department of State, First Periodic Report of the United States on Compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. U.N. Document, HRI/CORE/1/ADD.49, August 17, 1994.
114 Press Release, General Assembly, "Human Rights Committee Concludes Consideration of Initial Report of United States," HR/CT/405, March 31, 1995, p. 4.
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