Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., Jessica Stroop, BJS Statistician

June 30, 2017    NCJ 250752

Describes the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) activities to collect data and report on the incidence and effects of sexual victimization in correctional facilities, as required by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) (P.L. 108-79). The report summarizes BJS’s efforts during 2016 and 2017, which included item-by-item assessments of the National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC) and the National Inmate Survey (NIS), and an in-depth analysis of facility- and individual-level correlates of sexual victimization in the juvenile facilities. The report also discusses the activities BJS undertook to obtain data collection agents for both the NSYC-3 and NIS-4, and it highlights the data collection activities completed for the Survey of Sexual Victimization (SSV). This report meets the PREA requirement to report on BJS’s activities for the preceding calendar year by June 30 of each year.

Highlights:

• Rates of youth-on-youth sexual assault in female-only juvenile facilities (5.3%) were more than three times greater than those in male-only facilities (1.5%).
• Youth-on-youth sexual assault was lowest (1.1%) in facilities where almost all youth in the facility reported that they first learned sexual assault was not allowed within the first 24 hours of arrival.
• In male-only juvenile facilities, 5.7% of youth reported staff sexual misconduct, compared to 1.4% in female-only facilities.
• Facilities with a change in staffing levels during the previous 12 months (7.1%) had higher rates of staff sexual misconduct than facilities with no change (3.1%).
• Rates of staff sexual misconduct were highest in facilities where youth perceived the facility staff to be unfair (10.3%), youth had the fewest positive perceptions of staff (9.7%), and youth worried about physical assault by other youth (8.2%) or staff (11.2%).

Part of the PREA Data Collection Activities Series

Full report (PDF 316K)
ASCII file (20K)

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