Seven states won't comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act

Seven Republican governors refuse to implement federal standards to curb prison rape because, they say, it's too expensive and cumbersome. While they avoid putting the law into action, nearly 1 in 10 children under the age of 18 report being sexually victimized in juvenile facilities in the previous 12 months.In 2003, a Republican Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and Republican president George W. Bush signed it into law. Two years ago, the Obama administration evaluated and finalized the law's requirements and set a deadline of March 15, 2014, for states to comply or face a 5 percent loss of funds from the Justice Department for prison purposes.The Act, written with extensive input from prison operators, isn't particularly complicated. It institutes a "zero tolerance" policy on sexual assault (which may lead one to wonder why there wasn't a zero tolerance policy on sexual assault to begin with), requires background checks for prison staff, offers care to prisoners who have been assaulted, provides anonymous reporting mechanisms for assault, and requires regular audits of prisons to make sure they're complying.But now the deadline has passed, and despite having more than a decade to figure out how to comply, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, and Florida are still holdouts.The American prison system is a moral catastrophe. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and we incarcerate more people than any other country ever has in the history of the world. We also imprison people for longer periods of time than most of the developed nations we consider our peers, despite the fact that there's little evidence our long sentences significantly contribute to lower crime rates.Reports of what goes on behind bars are appalling, with prisoners being dehumanized in various ways, and sexual victimization is a pervasive problem. Statistics on prison sexual assaults are hard to come by, because the overwhelming majority of prisoners who are sexually assaulted never report it, and because those attacks are embarrassing for the Department of Justice, giving them little incentive to fully discern the scope of the problem. But the most recent reliable data suggests that somewhere in the neighborhood of 216,000 prisoners are sexually victimized every year — that's approximately 25 people every hour and 600 people a day.With the popular narrative around prison rape still sadly consisting of little beyond "don't drop the soap" jokes, it's no wonder even elected officials are so callous toward prisoners. But punishment for serious crimes should involve time behind bars — not rape or sexual victimization.After all the Republican mishaps around sexual assault — comments about rape lemonade, legitimate rape, girls who "rape so easy" — you'd think someone in the GOP would pause and say, "Hmmm, maybe we should try to rebrand ourselves, and implementing bipartisan, Republican-led legislation to decrease prison rape seems like an easy enough move." Instead, according to the governor of Indiana, states have their own regulations in place and it's cheaper for them to lose Department of Justice grants, which are "certainly less than the overall cost to comply" with the law.Less costly to him, anyway. Those behind bars may be using a different calculus.