Another ugly report about some ugly realities involving prison rape by guards in federal prisons

This new Reason article discusses a new disconcerting report emerging from the US Senate.  The piece is fully headlined, “Senate Investigation Finds Federal Prisons Fail to Prevent or Investigate Rapes; Long delays and management failures ‘allowed serious, repeated sexual abuse in at least four facilities to go undetected’.”  Here is how it gets started:

The federal Bureau of Prison’s deeply flawed, backlogged system for investigating sexual assault fails to protect female inmates from rape while protecting employees who commit sexual assault, according to a bipartisan report issued today by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

The PSI investigation found that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has failed to implement a federal law to prevent prison rapes, and that long delays in investigating complaints have led to a backlog of more than 8,000 internal affairs cases, leading to failures to hold employees accountable. The report says that these management failures “allowed serious, repeated sexual abuse in at least four facilities to go undetected.”

“BOP’s internal affairs practices have failed to hold employees accountable, and multiple admitted sexual abusers were not criminally prosecuted as a result,” the report concludes. “Further, for a decade, BOP failed to respond to this abuse or implement agency-wide reforms.”

Overall, the PSI investigation found that BOP employees sexually abused female inmates in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons over the last decade.  However, the report focused on four prisons — MCC New York, MDC Brooklyn, FCC Coleman, and FCI Dublin — where it says multiple BOP employees abused multiple women.

The 68-page report from the Senate PSI is available at this link.  It makes for hard, but important, reading.