Prison rape may be an acceptable topic of humor on talk radio and elsewhere, but James E. Robertson, a professor of corrections at Minnesota State University-Mankato, who has studied the problem for 15 years, considers it "is the most tolerated act of terrorism in the US." The FBI says that 89,107 women reported rapes in the United States in 1999. Prison experts, however, say that at least twice that number of men are raped each year in prison.

Neither the federal government nor the state of California keeps statistics on prison rape. Sexual abuse in prison is "massively underreported," said Terry Kupers of Oakland, a psychiatrist who has written and edited books on prison conditions. Kupers believes that more than one-third of all incoming inmates in US jails and prisons are either sexually assaulted or are in imminent danger of attack.

The state of California knows that violent sexual assaults are common, but refuses to take meaningful steps to prevent them, said a high-ranking official with the Department of Corrections who asked to remain anonymous. Some in the department see rape as a cancer that corrections does not fight aggressively because acknowledging its extent would make the department look bad and make the state more vulnerable to lawsuits, the official said. It would also remove a tool that many prison guards use to control prisoners, Robertson said: "There's an implicit quid pro quo between some officers and gangs, as well as the more aggressive inmates: You keep the lid on and we'll leave you alone."

The public also has reason to fear. When they are released, many prison rape victims are carrying STDs and HIV. Prison officials are aware that the combination of sexual assault and the rapid rise of these diseases creates a lethal mix in prisons, but many choose to ignore the problem, said Robert Dumond, a former mental health director with the Massachusetts penal system. Virtually no data have been collected nationally on infections arising from prison sexual assault, he said.

Citing budget woes, the California Department of Corrections does not, as a rule, administer blood tests to new inmates and so does not know how many inmates have undetected HIV/AIDS or hepatitis. An earlier state study, however, indicated that about one-third of all new convicts have either hepatitis B or C. The corrections department says it does know that 20,434 inmates have hepatitis B or C; 742 have HIV; and another 582 have AIDS, up from 157 in 1999. All of these sick inmates are housed in the general population.

Recommendations for stopping rape include isolating perpetrators and allowing conjugal visits, which are now banned for California inmates serving life sentences. Congress is considering action in the form of the Prison Rape Reduction Act, which has strong bipartisan support. Whether President Bush will sign it into law or not is still an open question. The bill, which applies to both state and federal prisons, requires the Justice Department to create a clearinghouse for statistics on prison rape nationwide, ties federal funding for prisons to levels of rape occurrences, provides a hotline for victims, and creates a training program for corrections officials.

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