Taking back thirty years to my crusade against rape in prison was a recent article in the Chicago Tribune:
When I figured out that HIV was being spread much more in Illinois prisons than in the general population from a CDC-financed study (which the CDC refused to publish), it seemed there were two ways for infection to occur:
- shared needles (including tattoos) and
- sexual contact
I sent press releases and letters to Downstate papers near prisons seeking information from men who had been raped in prison.
One of the first told of being raped in Cook County Jail, but most reported being raped in state prisons.
As a member of the bi-partisan Prison Reform Committee Co-Chaired by then State Rep., now Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and now-deceased Tom Johnson, I focused on preventing prison rape.
We got to the point of figuring out that there were too many spots in state prisons without cameras–think of the stairway rape in “The Mayor of Kingstown.”
George Ryan’s Corrections Director Don Snyder estimated it would cost $10 million, but, unfortunately, it was a bad budget year.
His predecessor, Howard Peters, took the three monkeys approach to the problem, so Ryan’s appointee’s willingness to consider solutions was a welcome change.
Besides the recent suit against Cook County, recent deaths of two prime movers on the national scene brought the subject to mind.
United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter just died.
He wrote the prison rape decision Farmer V. Brennan in 1994.
Also, national leader David Horowitz, who developed of the coalition that led to the unanimous passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, died at the end of April.
And now comes the Trump Administration eliminating funding to implement the legislation.
According to “The Advocate, “When asked for comment, a DOJ spokesperson told The Appeal in an email that ‘discretionary funds that are no longer aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.’ The administration’s priorities are ‘prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off of the streets, and protecting American institutions from toxic DEI and sanctuary city policies.’”
