WENDY MCELROY HAS A COLUMN ON PRISON RAPE that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, on Dec. 31, 2002, there were 2,033,331 people incarcerated in the United States. (Approximately 7 percent of those in state and federal prisons are female.) . . .

Estimates on the rate of prison rape vary. In 2001, Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report that estimated between 250,000 to 600,000 prisoners, overwhelmingly male, are raped each year.

Prison rape seems to be rising as well. Several academic studies in the ’80s estimated that 7 to 15 percent of inmates were raped: a rate of 10 percent amounting to approximately 200,000 people. The apparent increase may be due to the current practice of double bunking and using dorm rooms to compensate for overcrowding.

Read the whole thing. There’s finally a bit of progress on this subject, but not so much that it should be back-burnered.

UPDATE: Via reader Robert Racansky, this bit from Popular Science’s piece on the worst jobs in science:

University of South Dakota psychologist Cindy Struckman- Johnson was one of the first to seek anonymous written narrative testimonies from prisoners about the realities of prison life, and she employed a handful of students to help process the returned surveys. What she got stunned them all: One in ten inmates in the survey had been the victim of a sexual assault, many repeatedly. But it wasn’t the numbers alone that made the impact, it was the vividness of the accounts and the desperation expressed. To read page after first- person page of sexual torture—”This happens every day. Please, please, can you do something about it”—well, says Struckman- Johnson, “some of my students almost couldn’t handle it.”

I can imagine.