Miami-Dade’s Commitment: We Will End Prisoner Rape
On August 26, 2010, the Miami-Dade County Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) found itself on the list of U.S. jails with the highest rates of sexual abuse in the country. Today, three years later, staff at the jail still talk about the shock they felt when they heard the news – not to mention their embarrassment. “I couldn’t believe it. We were on Dr. Beck’s hit list!” exclaimed Captain John Johnson, whose job it is to ensure compliance with the PREA standards.
The reference to “Dr. Beck’s hit list” says a lot about the power of outside scrutiny and hard data. The report that listed one of the MDCR facilities as especially troubled, “Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09,” was produced by Dr. Allen J. Beck, senior statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Dr. Beck is the man behind all of the BJS’s game-changing inmate surveys on sexual abuse in U.S. detention, surveys that were mandated by PREA.
What set MDCR apart from many other corrections systems that have been listed in the BJS’s reports was that it acknowledged that it had a problem, and committed to fixing it. “As captain of the jail named in the report, I knew I had to do everything I possibly could to make sure that the next list we’d be on would be of jails with the lowest rates of abuse,” said Johnson. His superiors – including MDCR Director Tim Ryan – agreed. “Director Ryan said that we shouldn’t just do this work, we should do it extremely well. He wanted us to be the tip of the spear.”
That’s where JDI entered into the picture.
Since 2011, JDI and MDCR have been partners in the Miami-Dade Inmate Safety Project, a multi-year program supported through a cooperative agreement with the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime. The program aims to prevent and respond to sexual violence in each of MDCR’s five facilities – and its impact has been profound. “We have done things no one had tried before,” explained Johnson. “We launched the first-ever PREA inmate peer education program in a jail setting, we are establishing multi-disciplinary sexual assault response teams, we are soon going to offer inmates confidential rape crisis counseling with outside counselors.”
Stimulating change within an environment as hierarchical and closed off to the outside world as a large jail can be an arduous task. At times, JDI staff have been met with overt hostility by jail officers. “It hasn’t been all roses,” confirmed Johnson. “Some staff still aren’t happy with all the change. But it’s getting better; we are winning that war.”
The specific goal of the Miami-Dade Inmate Safety Project is to end sexual abuse. In the past two years, however, staff and inmates alike have seen a positive shift that reaches far beyond the problem of sexual violence. “Sexual abuse is about dominance. Contraband too is about enhancing your power, about controlling the cell. In the end, it’s all linked. If we solve the problem of sexual abuse, we’ll have much healthier, safer jails,” said Johnson. “Before, the wall between staff and inmates was so thick we didn’t always know what was happening in our own jails. Now inmates know that we care about protecting them. The difference is amazing. It’s culture change.”
JDI Action Update, September 2013
"Before, the wall between staff and inmates was so thick we didn’t always know what was happening in our own jails. Now inmates know that we care about protecting them."