SEXUAL ABUSE OF WOMEN PRISONERS IN THE UNITED STATES
Women incarcerated in United States state prisons face a serious and potentially pervasive problem of sexual misconduct by prison officials.32 Human Rights Watch found that male officers have engaged in rape, sexual assault, inappropriate sexual contact, verbal degradation and unwarranted visual surveillance of female prisoners in eleven prisons in five states and the District of Columbia.33 Two prison systems that Human Rights Watch investigated, in Georgia and the District of Columbia, have taken initial steps to address this problem. But most states are failing to address custodial sexual misconduct adequately and have yet to train officers to avoid such misconduct or to put in place administrative measures and, where appropriate, to apply criminal sanctions to prohibit and punish this egregious human rights abuse.
Our findings are based on an eighteen-month investigation, from 1993 to 1995, of state prisons in California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York,and the District of Columbia.34 Our interviews with prisoners posed a number of initial problems, primarily as a result of the prisoners' pervasive fear that they would be retaliated against for speaking with us.35 At the prisoners' request, and for their protection, we have withheld their real names and the exact place, date and time of their interviews.
Our findings, while profoundly troubling, scratch only the surface of the problem of sexual misconduct in the state correctional systems that we investigated and, perhaps, in United States' women's prisons as a whole. We found not only evidence of serious state violations, but also warning signs of a grave and potentially explosive national problem of custodial sexual misconduct in women's prisons. The need to address this problem is particularly urgent given that the female prison population in the United States is increasing at almost double the rate of the male population.36 Absentsignificant reform by state corrections and criminal justice systems the potential for custodial sexual misconduct in U.S. women's prisons can only increase.
32 The following material is part of an upcoming report from Human Rights Watch on sexual misconduct in U.S. state women's prisons.
33 Each of the fifty states operates and maintains its own prison system. These systems are separate and distinct from the federal prison system, which is overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Thus, the applicable law will be different for each state. Most crimes are prosecuted in state courts, under state criminal law, and prisoners are sentenced to terms in state institutions.
34 The respective correctional systems generally cooperated with our investigation and permitted us to conduct unsupervised interviews of female prisoners in their facilities' visiting or attorney rooms. However, the official tendency to downplay or even deny reports of sexual misconduct made this an extremely difficult problem for us to investigate. While no state correctional officials flatly refused to speak with us concerning sexual misconduct in their facilities, such interviews were often unnecessarily difficult and, in some cases, impossible to arrange.
35 In rare instances, prisoners came forward for the first time upon learning of our visit to their facility. But in the majority of cases, we interviewed prisoners who lodged complaints of sexual misconduct prior to our investigation. In addition to the female prisoners and the relevant corrections authorities in the facilities where they were being held, we also interviewed the prisoners' attorneys, volunteers who work in women's facilities, local and national women's and civil liberty organizations with prison expertise, current and former corrections employees, and U.S. Department of Justice officials responsible for overseeing state correctional systems.
36 According to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BOJS), the population of incarcerated women in the United States has increased from 14,000 in 1980 to 40,556 in 1989, an increase of approximately 200 percent. This increase is nearly double that of men, whose population rose 112 percent in the same period. Greenfield and Minor-Harper, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Special Report: Women in Prison (Virginia: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1991). As of March 1995, there were over 1,900 women in the Illinois prison population, a number which has nearly quadrupled since 1983, while the male population has doubled. California's prison population increased by 450 percent between 1980 and 1993, while, in roughly the same time period, the overall prison population, including men and women, grew at 346 percent. California Department of Corrections, Commission Report on Female Inmates and Parolee Issues (California: California Department of Corrections, 1994), p. V.
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