Lovisa Stannow is the executive director of Just Detention International, an international human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.
Convicted of check fraud, a man was repeatedly raped and beaten in an Arkansas prison. He walked out with a death sentence -- not handed down by a judge or jury, but by the corrections staff who failed to keep him safe.
Convicted of check fraud, a man was repeatedly raped and beaten in an Arkansas prison. As a result, he walked out of prison with a death sentence -- not handed down by a judge or jury, but by the corrections staff who failed to keep him safe; Bryson contracted HIV because of the rapes.
At least 60,500 federal and state prison inmates were sexually abused at their current facility in the preceding year alone, according to a 2007 nationwide study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). A similar study revealed that nearly 25,000 county jail detainees were sexually abused in the prior six months. This violence is not limited to adult prisoners – in January, another BJS report found that almost one in eight youth in juvenile detention reported being sexually abused in the preceding year; at the worst facilities, one in three kids were victimized.
