This study reports that 4.4% of prison inmates and 3.1% of jail inmates experienced sexual victimization within a period of twelve months or since admission to a correctional facility, if the admission took place within less than twelve months. "Nationwide, these percentages suggest that approximately 88,500 adults held in prisons and jails at the time of the survey had been sexually victimized." Approximately 2.1% of prison inmates and 1.5% of jail inmates reported inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization, whereas approximately 2.8% of prison inmates and 2.0% of jail inmates reported staff sexual misconduct. In comparison to male inmates in prisons and jails, the BJS Report found that female inmates were more than twice as likely to report inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization. Reported sexual activity with facility staff involved 2.9% of male prisoners, 2.1% of male jail inmates, 2.1% of female prisoners, and 1.5% of female jail inmates. The rates of reported inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization were significantly higher for inmates who had the following characteristics: Being white or multi-racial, Having a college education, Having a sexual orientation other than heterosexual, and Experiencing sexual victimization prior to coming to the facility. The rates of reported staff sexual misconduct were lower among inmates who were white and twenty-five years old or older, whereas the rates were higher among inmates who had a college education and who experienced sexual victimization before coming to the facility. Among inmates reporting inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization, 13% of male prisoners, 19% of male jail inmates, and 4% of female inmates in both prisons and jails said they were victimized within the first twenty-four hours of admission to a facility.25 Among inmates reporting staff-oninmate sexual victimization, 16% of male prisoners, 30% of male jail inmates, 5% of female prisoners, and 4% of female jail inmates said they were victimized within the first twenty-four hours of admission to a facility. Significantly, most perpetrators of staff sexual misconduct were female and most victims were male: among male victims of staff sexual misconduct, 69% of prisoners and 64% of jail inmates reported sexual activity with female staff

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.

Risk Markers for Sexual Victimization and Predation in Prison contains the results of Dr. Warren and Dr. Jackson's study in response to the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act and extends the literature on prison rape in important and distinct ways.

Federal and State Law

The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts. In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways. On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.