The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) is the first United States federal law intended to deter the sexual assault of prisoners. The bill was signed into law on September 4, 2003.
Background
Public awareness of prison rape is relatively recent and estimates of its prevalence vary widely.
In 1974, Carl Weiss and David James Friar wrote that 46 million Americans would one day be incarcerated; of that number, they claimed, 10 million would be raped. A 1992 estimate from the Federal Bureau of Prisons estimated that between 9 and 20 percent of inmates had been sexually assaulted. Studies in 1982 and 1996 both concluded that the rate was somewhere between 12 and 14 percent. A 1986 study by Daniel Lockwood put the number at around 23 percent for maximum security prisons in New York. In contrast, in Christine Saum's 1994 survey of 101 inmates, only five admitted to have had been sexually assaulted.
In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a paper called No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, the single event that contributed most to PREA's passage two years later. HRW had published several papers on the topic of prison rape in the years since its initial report called All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons, released in 1996, when there was barely any Congressional support for legislation aimed at prison rape. A 1998 attempt by Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), known as the Custodial Sexual Abuse Act of 1998, was attached to the reauthorization bill for the Violence Against Women Act but summarily removed and never reintroduced.
Michael Horowitz, a Hudson Institute senior fellow, has been credited with playing a part in passing PREA by helping to lead a coalition of the bill's supporters.
Support and lobby
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was supported by a broad base of activists, lobbyists, and organizations, particularly Just Detention International. The Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission lobbied for the passage of the legislation as did the conservative organization Concerned Women for America. These groups were part of a diverse coalition of human rights and religious groups which backed the legislation; other groups which supported the act were: Amnesty International USA, Focus on the Family, Human Rights Watch, the NAACP, the National Association of Evangelicals, Penal Reform International, Physicians for Human Rights, the Presbyterian Church USA, Prison Fellowship, the Salvation Army and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
The bill was sponsored, in both houses of the U.S. Congress, by a bipartisan group of legislators. The initial sponsor of the bill in the Senate was Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and, in the House of Representatives the legislation was sponsored by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), who was the initial co-sponsor. The Senate bill picked up four co-sponsors on the day it was passed, they were: Senators Mike DeWine (R-OH), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Edward Kennedy (D-MA). The House bill had a total of 32 co-sponsors, including Scott. The bill passed both the House and Senate by unanimous consent; it passed the Senate on July 21, 2003, and the House on July 25.
Act
Provisions
The Act was passed by both houses of the U.S. Congress and subsequently signed by President George W. Bush in a White House ceremony on September 4, 2003. The act aimed to curb prison rape through a "zero-tolerance" policy, as well as thorough research and information gathering. The act called for developing national standards to prevent incidents of sexual violence in prison. It also made policies more available and obvious. By making data on prison rape more available to the prison administrators as well as making corrections facilities more accountable for incidents pertaining to sexual violence and of prison rape, it would more than likely decrease the crimes.
A major component of PREA was the establishment of a "National Prison Rape Reduction Commission." The panel was established by the act and appointed in June 2004, though the law itself called for the commission's creation within 60 days of its passage. The panel, known as the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC), was charged with undertaking a study on the comprehensive effects of prison rape and its occurrences. The commission was also charged with information gathering through a variety of sources including public hearings. The commission is tasked with issuing a report to include its findings, conclusions and any recommendations.