Government Releases Long-Awaited Prisoner Rape Report — but Omits Key Data

Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., December 9, 2025 —  Today the federal government released two reports on sexual abuse in detention that have been stripped of their substance, burying critical findings on groups who are most vulnerable. The pair of studies — which draw on anonymous surveys with people held in prisons and jails — show an alarming lack of progress in the effort to end this abuse behind bars. But unlike previous surveys, the reports published today are threadbare, with omissions around the race, gender identity, sexual orientation, prior victimization, and mental health of survivors of sexual abuse. Their publication comes as the government is poised to gut the Prison Rape Elimination Act standards, specifically provisions on incarcerated transgender and intersex people.  

“The federal government is, quite simply, refusing to take responsibility for making prisons and jails safe from sexual abuse,” said McFarlane. “The government is telling us on the one hand that prisoner rape is still a crisis, but then won’t disclose information that would help us understand why and how to stop it. This is an especially appalling move at this moment, when the Department of Justice is intent on shredding protections for incarcerated people.” 

The studies released today — called the Sexual Victimization in Local Jails Reported by Inmates, 2023–24 and Sexual Victimization in Prisons Reported by Inmates, 2023–24 — are part of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Inmate Surveys (NIS), a research series that draws on anonymous questionnaires administered to incarcerated people. These are the fourth in the NIS series and the first published in more than a decade; crucially, they are the first that look at a period after August 2012, when the PREA standards went into effect. The survey of state and federal prisons found that 4 percent of incarcerated people were sexually abused from March 2023 to March 2024 — which is virtually the same as the finding from the previous survey, NIS-3, which covered a 12-month period that ended just before the standards’ release. In jails, the rate of sexual abuse climbed to 4 percent, compared to 3.2 percent in NIS-3. There were 27,541 people in state and federal prisons and 22,549 people in jails whose responses were included in the studies released today. 

The most striking part of these studies is what they lack. The survivors of sexual abuse who completed the surveys, anonymously and voluntarily, shared information about themselves and the people who abused them, as well as circumstances surrounding the assault. The reports state that more data will be released separately, at an unspecified date. Yet any findings on transgender people are almost certain to never see the light of day, given the administration’s refusal to acknowledge their existence. The previous survey, NIS-3, found that 40% of incarcerated transgender people were sexually abused at least once in a one-year period.  

“What’s happening is nothing less than the erasure of evidence of sexual assault being committed against transgender people,” McFarlane said. “The government is suppressing data on crimes being committed in our prisons and jails, often by people funded by our tax dollars. Are they really going to get in the way of ending a human rights crisis, just to prove how much they hate trans people?”

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Just Detention International is a health and human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.