Systemic Deliberate Indifference and Undercounting Prison Rape

Though it’s sixteen years after Farmer v. Brennan, when the Supreme Court (essentially) decided that allowing the rape of prisoners should be considered an advanced (and culpable) form of negligence, change has been slow to come. For one thing, no one really knows how many people are raped in the adult and juvenile systems each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is revising their surveys now; two of their recent surveys indicate that there are 165,400 acts of sexual abuse in their reporting period. (They use “snapshots” of a single day and then extrapolate.) But an evaluation of the methods used suggests that they may be drastically undercounting.

For one thing?

“Inmates who said they had been sexually abused were asked how many times. Their options were 1, 2, 3–10, and 11 times or more; that answers of ‘3–10’ were assigned a value of 5, and ’11 or more’ a value of 12. We know of no reason to think that answers of ‘3–10’ should be skewed so far toward the low end of the range, however-and inmates are sometimes raped many more than twelve times.”

And also challenging these numbers is the sheer volume of people who move in and out of jails; “The number of annual jail admissions is approximately seventeen times higher than the jail population on any given day.” How do you find the real numbers? Not sure, yet: “What is the right multiple-are five, six, seven times 24,700 people molested and raped in jail every year? We don’t know yet, but we hope to soon.”