Editorial: L.A. County has had years to figure out how to end rape in its jails. It’s time for action

You do the crime, you do the time — yet for too many inmates in U.S. prisons, jails and probation camps, it’s not simply time spent apart from society seeking repentance and rehabilitation. It’s days, months, years of violent, degrading, repeated sexual abuse, perpetrated by other inmates or by the guards who are ostensibly there to keep order.

Two facts of inmate life are generally accepted on the outside with blasé indifference: When you’re behind bars there is a good chance that you will be raped; and if you tell anyone about it there is a good chance you will be beaten or killed (if the assailant was another inmate) or laughed at (if the perpetrator was a guard). In recent years there have been belated efforts to deal with sexual assault and misconduct on college campuses, in workplaces and in government offices, but rape culture in prison persists with too little public outrage or official response. Approximately 200,000 incarcerated men, women and children are sexually assaulted each year, according to federal authorities.

More than half of those rapes are perpetrated by guards and other prison staff.

It took decades, but Congress finally acknowledged the problem and moved to address it in 2003 with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, widely known as PREA. It took another decade for officials to approve federal rules to implement the act, directing state and local institutions to have on-site monitors, to conduct audits every three years, and to provide inmates safe avenues for reporting abuse.

Los Angeles County runs one of the nation’s largest adult jails and has more juveniles on probation, in and out of lockup, than any other jurisdiction. But even now, five years after PREA rules were finalized, the county lacks compliance officers and has yet to conduct an audit.

The Sheriff’s Department has conducted training and last month administered a “test” audit, but in explaining the department’s slow progress, an official recently explained to the Board of Supervisors that PREA is “an unfunded mandate.”

But compliance with the letter of the federal law is largely beside the point, or at least it ought to be. The less-than-robust PREA is too modest for a jurisdiction like Los Angeles County, with its very troubling and very recent history of jail violence perpetrated by deputies against inmates. Ultimately, several Sheriff’s Department officials were convicted in the beatings or related cover-up attempts, including Sheriff Lee Baca.

That experience ought to make the county especially sensitive to the consequences of violence against inmates. And if that’s true of jail beatings, which might conceivably be explained away as a response to inmate misbehavior, it ought to be even more true of sexual assaults, which can have no possible justification.

Yet one jail deputy stands accused of a series of sexual assaults on inmates at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood. A county probation officer pleaded guilty earlier this year to “inappropriately touching” two girls at a juvenile camp. Probation officers have been found in recent years to have had sex with juveniles they were supposed to be mentoring. Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission Executive Director Brian Williams told the Board of Supervisors that 10% to 15% of the public comments before the commission has been PREA-related.

By law, juveniles cannot consent to sex with adults. Likewise, neither juvenile nor adult inmates can legally consent to sex with their guards. In such cases, with the power all on the side of the guard, with no possible retreat for the inmate and enormous fear of retaliation for reporting the crime, sex is rape.

Supervisor Janice Hahn brought some much-needed urgency to the issue earlier this month, and as a result the Sheriff’s Department is due to report on its compliance with PREA by the end of the week. County officials also are to offer a funding plan — in February. But compliance with federal law and guidelines, which is long overdue, should be just the starting point. The ultimate goal must be an incarceration system that temporarily suspends liberty, but not physical safety or human decency, in the service of justice and rehabilitation.

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