They Are Still Waiting For Their Me Too Moment

This article, by activist Kim Brown, appeared on the Huffington site yesterday.  It deals with the too-common occurrence of the sexual assault of women in prison:

" The Me Too movement has successfully taken down some powerful men who sexually abuse and harass women. But a large group of survivors has been excluded from the conversation: incarcerated women."

"Over 85 percent of incarcerated women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes ― and the abuse is repeated behind prison walls. Women in prison are disproportionately women of color, and the vast majority are economically marginalized.

Incarcerated women cannot escape their abusers, and they place themselves at risk of retaliation if they speak up. When an incarcerated woman does come forward about sexual abuse, the prison’s response is often to transfer her out of the facility ― not the officer. This system effectively keeps the men who commit such violence inside, and brands the victims who speak up as “troublemakers” and “snitches.” Most incarcerated women want to avoid transferring facilities because this could jeopardize their minimal access to family visits"

However, lest we think that sexual assault in prison is only a women's problem, it is part of a pervasive prison culture that affects men, too.  Some of you may have read this article which appeared in the Atlantic Magazine in 2015:

"Reports about prison rape by advocacy groups led to occasional efforts by federal lawmakers to address the problem. None of those initiatives gained any wide support until 2001, when Human Rights Watch released “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons,” which focused less on perpetrators than on failures by correctional staff and policies to prevent rape. The report included harrowing first-person accounts. “The opposite of compassion is not hatred,” wrote one Florida prisoner, describing the violence he’d endured. “It’s indifference.”
The revelations brought together liberal human rights activists, government-distrustful libertarians, and Christian conservatives. PREA (the Prison Rape Elimination Act) was passed unanimously."
The lawmakers and advocates who pushed the law to passage hoped it would create standards to protect particular classes of prisoners. Recent news reports on PREA have focused almost exclusively on the plight of transgender and gay inmates, but originally the spotlight was on a much larger population: the young and inexperienced. “There was an assumption from the beginning of PREA that we wanted to protect the vulnerable,” says Cindy Struckman-Johnson, a University of South Dakota psychologist. “Age was a given. It’s the number one vulnerability.”

Unfortunately the PREA has not ended the problem.  Said the young man who was quoted in the Atlantic article;
“I feel like prison is 25 years behind the real world,” he said that morning. “In order to understand, you can’t be in the world looking in. You have to be in, looking out.”
And as Kim Brown said in the Huffinton article, "Even though we broke the law, rape, intimidation and sexual harassment were not part of our sentence."