Prison Rape: A Fact Sheet

October 1, 2001

Prisoner rape is torture — the infliction of severe emotional and/or physical pain as punishment and/or coercion. Long after the body has healed, the emotions remain traumatized, shamed and stigmatized. Suicide is the leading cause of death behind bars. Sexual assault is the leading cause of suicide in confinement. Prisoner rape costs taxpayers dearly in recidivism, health care, and increasing numbers of law suits. This was excerpted from materials prepared by Stop Prisoner Rape

  • Prisoner rape is torture — the infliction of severe emotional and/or physical pain as punishment and/or coercion. Long after the body has healed, the emotions remain traumatized, shamed and stigmatized.
  • Suicide is the leading cause of death behind bars. Sexual assault is the leading cause of suicide in confinement. 
  • Prisoner rape costs taxpayers dearly in recidivism, health care, and increasing numbers of law suits.
  • Overcrowded and understaffed institutions (including mental hospitals) are the chief reasons for rape.
  • Various studies have shown the rape rate of male prisoners to be from nine to twenty-two percent. With a national prison population of almost two million in 1999, even at the lowest percentage, this means tens of thousands of male prisoners are raped daily. 
  • The term “homosexual rape” is misleading since the overwhelming majority of prisoner rape victims and perpetrators are heterosexual. 
  • Prisoner rape not only violates basic human rights but also the 8th and 13th amendments to the Constitution forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and slavery respectively. Once raped behind bars, the victim is often sexually enslaved and sometimes forced into prostitution. 
  • All elected officials and the majority of the electorate have long known this barbarism takes place in U.S. correctional institutions and have done little if anything to stop it. “You shut your mind to it,” Judge Vincent Femia of  Prince George’s County, Maryland, told The Washington Post in 1982. 
  • Not only guards but other members of the criminal justice system use prisoner rape as a “management tool.” 
  • Prisoner rape can be greatly reduced at no extra cost to taxpayers by separating the obviously vulnerable prisoners from the obviously violent ones and by more vigilant staff.


For more information: Stop Prisoner Rape

This Fact Sheet originally appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Justice Matters.