Month: November 2016

A Victory in the Fight to Stop Prisoner Rape

  • Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
  • September 2, 2016
  • Prison Legal News

In 2012, Cornelius, a prisoner at a Florida state prison, wrote a letter to a nearby rape crisis center. Cornelius had been sexually assaulted multiple times while incarcerated. The first time was a gang rape that had happened 17 years earlier at a boot camp, when he was just 19 years old. Roughly a decade

The Prison Rape Elimination Act and Beyond: Sexual Violence in Detention

  • Linda McFarlane and Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
  • November 9, 2016
  • Penal Reform International Blog

In 2003, the U.S. passed a law called the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which for the first time mandated the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – an arm of the Department of Justice – to conduct anonymous surveys of prisoners about sexual abuse. These surveys have confirmed what reform advocates had long known – that abuse

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