Prison Rape Elimination Act

Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003

Long title	An Act to provide for the analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape in Federal, State, and local institutions and to provide information, resources, recommendations, and funding to protect individuals from prison rape.
Acronyms (colloquial)	PREA
Enacted by	the 108th United States Congress
Effective	September 4, 2003
Citations
Public law	108-79
Statutes at Large	117 Stat. 972
Codification
Titles amended	42 U.S.C.: Public Health and Social Welfare
U.S.C. sections created	42 U.S.C. ch. 147 § 15601 et seq.
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S. 1435 by Jeff Sessions (R–AL) on July 21, 2003 Committee consideration by House Judiciary Passed the Senate on July 21, 2003 (passed unanimous consent) Passed the House of Representatives on July 25, 2003 (passed without objection) Signed into law by President George W. Bush on September 4, 2003
Major amendments
Second Chance Act of 2007

The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) is the first United States federal law passed dealing with the sexual assault of prisoners. The bill was signed into law on September 4, 2003.

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 conjectured 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, Christine Saum's 1994 survey of 101 inmates showed 5 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.

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