When the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was passed last year, it called for the collection of national statistics about the issue and the creation of standards to guide agencies in combating the problem.

Since then, the National Prison Rape Reduction Commission has been created to research prison rape and develop some guidelines for corrections agencies.  Earlier this year, the Bureau of Justice Assistance granted money to several states to help them address the issue of prison rape through new training and education efforts.

Recently, The Corrections Connection talked with A.T. Wall, Director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, which received nearly half a million dollars to help the agency deal with and prevent prison rape in its facilities.

Q: The R.I. DOC recently received a grant. What are the agency's plans?

Wall: When the PREA was passed it was clear that the legislature provided us an opportunity to focus on an area that tarnishes the profession and has been too little acknowledged in the past throughout the corrections field.

We applied for the grant in order to give us tools we could use to address the issue in a comprehensive way. 

Our grant application has focused on a number of areas beginning with prevention and moving all the way through to re-entry.

There are five major pieces to our initiative.  The first is that we are going to contract for the development of an assessment instrument validated to our population that will identify potential predators and victims in our facilities.

It will help us [with] housing assignments, classification decisions, security and the overall management of the inmate population.  The tool will allow us to use data driven management techniques instead of our intuition and hunches.

We also recognize that we need to create an inmate orientation program that focuses on sexual assault and a training program for staff that will assist them in [identifying] potential problems and responding effectively when allegations arise.

We believe that raising the issue with inmates will heighten their consciousness and strengthen their resolve to come forward. We also think that the training of staff will allow them to be more effective in hearing and responding to complaints. After all, line staff may very well be first responders and we need to equipment them with strategies.

We expect to include it as a module in our pre-service and in-service training programs.  Those are geared towards all staff, both sworn and civilian custody and rehabilitation.  Our initial focus will be on our institutional personnel.  Sometimes the allegations surface when an offender has already been released and feels safe enough to speak to a community corrections staff member.

In my experience, offenders will come forward when they think they will be believed and protected.  If we include a section on sexual assault in orientation and also train staff, we increase the likelihood that inmates will tell us what we need to know.

We are augmenting our special investigations unit by hiring an investigator whose expertise will be the prevention, investigation and persecution of sexual abuse incidents. Right now, our investigators handle those cases as part of their overall training.  We think some specialized skills may be needed in that area.

The fourth component moves toward the point of release. We have discharge planners who work with inmates whose terms of incarceration are ending to prepare them for release. One category of discharge planning has been high risk cases.  A high risk case can be  any one of a number of high risk cases. They can include someone serving a long sentence who has not received visits and has no firm place to go when released.

Another category is untreated sex offenders -- inmates who have not participated in sex offender programming while in custody or successfully completed [it].

Our high risk discharge planners find those to be the most difficult cases. They often have very unstable living and work arrangements. They have not dealt with their criminal behavior and they create a great deal of fear in the community.

Some of those inmates have been predatory in prison as well.  We'll be hiring high risk discharge planning staff to work specifically with perpetrators and victims of prison sexual assaults.

Finally, we are a unified agency and are responsible for prisons and jails and probation and parole – specifically we are using the funds to augment our probation staff so we can provide intensive supervision to perpetrators of prison sexual assaults, as well as other high risk offenders.

Q: How does the issue of prison rape affect community and correctional institutions?

Wall:  Whenever an inmate is a sexual predator, there is the concern that the behavior will be repeated in the community. In some cases it may be situational and restricted to the correctional setting. But in other cases, it is part of a larger pattern. Once we've identified an inmate as sexually predatory, we need to work very intensively with that offender in the system and supervise [him] very closely out in the community, so we do not risk a victim in the public at large.

Second, inmates who have been raped in prison carry very heavy baggage.  They deal with feelings of shame and questions about whether they were responsible for what happened.  They can become very angry and depressed.

In some instances, they contract infectious diseases. The effect of prison rape may well result in anti-social behavior on the street. Inmates may self medicate to hide their emotional turmoil by using drugs and spiral into further crime. They may also come out with a generalized rage.  All of those consequences have to be of concern to us if our mission is public safety.

Q: What is the National Prison Rape Reduction Commission doing to help agencies deal with this law?

Wall:  The legislature created a commission, [which] includes appointees of the president and both houses of Congress.  It reports to the attorney general.  The commission's job is the research development and promulgation of standards for jurisdictions to use in dealing with prison rape.  The expectation [is that],  probably,  those won't be available until one to two years from now, however.  Work we are doing in the field should help inform the commission as it develops its standards.

Q: Is the corrections field adequately represented?

Wall: One of the commissioners is a former director of corrections and someone who is still active in the field.  We expect he will provide the commission with a practitioner's point of view.  It is important that we have channels of communication and help shape their thinking and let them know how it looks on the ground.