Background
Public awareness of the phenomenon of prison rape is a relatively recent development and estimates to its prevalence have varied widely for decades. In 1974 Carl Weiss and David James Friar wrote that 46 million Americans would one day be incarcerated; of that number, they claimed, 10 million would be raped. A 1992 estimate from the Federal Bureau of Prisons conjectured that between 9 and 20 percent of inmates had been sexually assaulted. Studies in 1982 and 1996 both concluded that the rate was somewhere between 12 and 14 percent. A 1986 study by Daniel Lockwood put the number at around 23 percent for maximum security prisons in New York. In contrast, Christine Saum's 1994 survey of 101 inmates showed 5 had been sexually assaulted.
In 2001 Human Rights Watch released a paper, titled "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons". The release of that paper was the single event that contributed most to the passage of PREA two years later. Human Rights Watch had published several papers on the topic of prison rape in the years since its initial report on the topic in 1996. The 1996 paper "All too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons" was released during a time when there was almost no Congressional support for legislation aimed at prison rape. A 1998 attempt by Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) known as the Custodial Sexual Abuse Act of 1998 was attached to the reauthorization bill for the Violence Against Women Act but summarily removed and never reintroduced.
Michael Horowitz has also been credited with playing a large part in the passage of PREA. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute led a part of the broad coalition of the bill's supporters.
Read more about this topic: Prison Rape Elimination Act Of 2003
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