Training, Compassion Are Key

Potential solutions to prison rape exist--if inmates, corrections officials and society are willing to consider them.

Currently, however, only a handful of U.S. penal institutions truly focus on the problem.

In Florida, the Glades Correctional Institution (GCI) runs the most ambitious rape counseling program at any U.S. prison.

But it’s hardly voluntary:

The program was ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals after inmates filed a trailblazing 1983 lawsuit alleging widespread sexual attacks.

“When I first began in corrections, we’d look at an inmate getting off the bus and say, ‘That guy will get his butt busted before the night’s over,’ ” recalls Sgt. Felix Stevens, GCI’s institutional training chief.

“But we don’t say that anymore. . . . Everybody knows that rapes happen in prison and we have to control it. We haven’t done a very good job.”

These days, GCI correctional officials take a comprehensive course in sexual violence. They’re taught to weed out scared, vulnerable inmates from aggressive convicts and to segregate them. They’re also trained to spot rape trauma and learn how to deal promptly with such cases.

“We can’t be everywhere, every second of the day, and you’ll never control it all,” Stevens says. “But there are certain areas that are prime for such attacks, like showers and television rooms. Those are areas an officer needs to check very frequently, and we need to patrol them more constantly.”

If rape occurs, the key is to get an inmate into immediate counseling and medical care.

Many experts praise San Francisco for launching the nation’s most progressive treatment program.

Under the so-called rape protocol, victims are segregated from other prisoners, given prompt medical checkups and put in touch with counselors.

If inmates request it, evidence is collected from the rape site to support a future prosecution. And the county is more than willing to prosecute.

“The situation is improving because in the last six months we’ve had three to four cases of victims who came forward and said they were assaulted in jail,” says Marilyn Lewis, who runs the rape treatment program at San Francisco General Hospital.

“We tell victims that rape is a violation, pure and simple.”

That’s the message of the “Prisoner Rape Education Tapes,” which Donaldson and others made for the Safer Society Program and Press, a nonprofit project of the New York State Council of Churches.

It’s the only resource of its kind.

At times, the audio information is more than victims can bear. Some have reportedly wept after listening to the recording “Becoming a Survivor.” A second tape, “An Ounce of Prevention,” alerts inmates to the threat of rape.

“The language can be raw and explicit,” Donaldson says. “But inmates are on their own. They have to survive, and that’s how you reach them.”