[DanaC]

I can't remember now where I read that factet. It was in a newspaper report ( I think the Guardian) about three years ago.

I did manage to find an interesting article on the subject though. It doesn't give the average time for an inmate to be raped but it does highlight the scale of the problem

From ‘Forecasting Sexual Abuse in Prison: The prison Structure of Masculinity as a Backdrop for “deliberate Indifference”’, in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol 92, no. 1 (2001)

On August 9, 1973, Stephen Donaldson, a Quaker peace activist, was arrested for trespassing after participating in a pray-in at the White House. Upon refusal to post a ten-dollar bond on moral grounds, Donaldson was sent to Washington D.C. jail. In the days that followed, Donaldson experienced a terror that is far too common for tens of thousands of inmates in American correctional institutions. In the course of Donaldsons’ two nights behind bars, he was gang-raped approximately sixty times by numerous inmates. Upon his release Donaldson did what few others have had the strength and courage to do: he spoke out. Donaldson was among the first survivors of jailhouse rape to come forward publicly to describe his abuse………


Experts in the field of prisoner sexual abuse estimate that over 60,000 prisoners are subjected to involuntary sex every day ( Can we put an End to Inmate Rape? U.S.A Today Magazine 1995).

“ It is the rare convict who will never engage in homosexual acts” Lou Torak, ‘Straight talk from Prison: A Convict Reflects on Youth’ in Crime and Society, 40, (1974).

The article goes on to suggest that the vast majority of these acts are not driven by “mutual attraction or affection”, but rather “most sexual acts in prison are the coerced products of dominance, intimidation and terror”.