The Prison “Red Zone”: Assessing the Temporal Risk of Sexual Victimization in U.S. Prisons

• In Event: Institutional and Specialized Sexual Abuse Issues

Abstract

Prior research has consistently found evidence for a “red zone”—a temporal pattern in the risk of sexual victimization on college campuses and in the military. Rates of sexual victimization are much higher during the freshman year than during any other year in college. In the military, the new recruits are disproportionately the targets of sexual assault. In this study, using data from the 2011-2012 National Inmate Survey, the largest nationally representative study of sexual violence in prisons to date, we examine whether the “red zone” pattern extends to prisons. Similar to the military and college campuses, prisons are total institutions that have their own corpora of informal in-group knowledge about avoiding sexual violence. Like these other institutions, prisons carry the same potential for increased vulnerability among its new inhabitants. Investigating the temporal pattern of victimization in prison will extend and broaden the findings of the previous literature from particular institution-specific contexts to a more general institutional framework. Uncovering a “red zone” may also aid in sexual violence prevention efforts by providing evidence that resources could be more effectively used if they were targeted at the inmates near the beginning of their prison terms.

Authors

• Valerio Bacak, Rutgers University

• Stephen Cranney, Baylor University

• Aleksandar Stulhofer, University of Zagreb