Rape is a fact of life for the incarcerated. Can American society maintain the commitment expressed in recent federal legislation to eliminate the rampant and costly sexual abuse that has been institutionalized into its system of incarceration? Each year, as many as 200,000 individuals are victims of various types of sexual abuse perpetrated in American prisons, jails, juvenile detention facilities, and lockups. As many as 80,000 of them suffer violent or repeated rape. Those who are outside the incarceration experience are largely unaware of this ongoing physical and mental damage—abuses that not only affect the victims and perpetrators, but also impose vast costs on society as a whole. This book supplies a uniquely full account of this widespread sexual abuse problem. Author Michael Singer has drawn on official reports to provide a realistic assessment of the staggering financial cost to society of this sexual abuse, and comprehensively addressed the current, severely limited legal procedures for combating sexual abuse in incarceration. The book also provides an evaluation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 and its recently announced national standards, and assesses their likely future impact on the institution of prison rape in America.

The Myth of Prison Rape provides a nuanced glimpse into the complex sexual dynamics of American prison. Drawing on results from the most comprehensive study of inmate sexuality to date, Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert analyze the intricacies of sexuality and sexual violence in daily inmate life. Pulled from over 500 interviews from male and female high-security inmates, their research assesses inmate perception, belief, opinion, and explanation of their own behavior as it relates directly and indirectly to sexual life and sexual violence. Dynamic case studies and interview excerpts enliven this cultural study of sexuality, safety, and violence in American prisons, and an appendix introduces readers to prison sexual vocabulary.

This study examines prison sexual violence in adult and juvenile New York State prisons. To an inmate, the formal structure of a prison – its planned work, recreation, and rehabilitation – may be a thin veneer. The ‘real’ world is the social environment, created by the convict community, and sexual violence is a traditional part of that environment. A range of sexual behaviors, all perceived as threatening and offensive by the targets of aggressors were examined, with discussion on the nature of the overture, the physical and verbal response of the target, his thoughts and feelings, the living patterns resulting from sexual pressure, and how peers and staff react. In this population, sexual aggression is shown to be racially-based: most aggressors were black, and most victims were white, of a slighter build than the aggressor, and perceived as having feminine physical and personality characteristics. About half of the 152 incidents examined involved physical violence, half initiated by aggressors coercing targets; the rest from targets reacting to threats. Both aggressors and targets tended to come from outside and prison social subcultures which used aggression as a primary means of relieving frustration and irritation. After fights, targets reported that aggressors left them alone, that they moved around the prison with less fear, felt better about themselves, and had a higher status among other prisoners. Sexual attacks increased fear, and victims continued to be affected emotionally months after the event. Prison staff did not usually intervene directly in the incidents, nor is there evidence that such intervention would be effective in reducing the problem. The author recommends the provision of program alternatives such as the Alternatives to Violence (AVP) and other conflict resolutions programs. (NCJRS, modified).

Focusing on discourse generated between 1969 and 2006 in the legal arena and in the print news media, the author takes an historical-interpretive approach to illuminate the role of cultural forces and attendant ideologies in shaping the contours of the phenomenon commonly known as OC prison rape.OCO Locating this work within the sociology of punishment, the author employs frame analysis and draws on two previously unrelated literatures OCo GarlandOCOs cultural analytic model and constitutive legal scholarship OCo to produce a genealogy of discourse about sexual assault in carceral settings as manifest in two important arenas of meaning making. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of the often counterintuitive relationship between these discourses over time, the book considers the recent unanimous passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (2003) at a highly punitive historical moment in a nation that has traditionally preferred to litigate rather than legislate questions around the treatment of those it incarcerates."

When seventeen-year-old T. J. Parsell held up the local Photo Mat with a toy gun, he was sentenced to four and a half to fifteen years in prison. The first night of his term, four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would "own" him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered), Parsell's experience that first night haunted him throughout the rest of his sentence. In an effort to silence the guilt and pain of its victims, the issue of prisoner rape is a story that has not been told. For the first time Parsell, one of America's leading spokespeople for prison reform, shares the story of his coming of age behind bars. He gives voice to countless others who have been exposed to an incarceration system that turns a blind eye to the abuse of the prisoners in its charge. Since life behind bars is so often exploited by television and movie re-enactments, the real story has yet to be told. Fish is the first breakout story to do that.

VI. BODY AND SOUL