Aggregation, Underreporting, and Fatigue: Methodological Challenges of Studying Rape in Prison

• In Event: Norms, Culture and Conflict in American Prisons

Abstract

Despite passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and targeted action by the Bureaus of Justice Assistance and Statistics to fund, collect, and make data publicly available, several methodological challenges persist in measuring and analyzing rape that happens in prisons. In this paper, we examine several factors that undermine accurate assessment of prison rape. First, problems associated with under-reporting of sexual violence in general are compounded in the prison setting due to the inherent power imbalance between prisoners and staff and strong heteropatriarchal gender subtext of prisons. Additionally, artifacts of the data collection itself impede its validity, including survey fatigue, consecutive implementation of non-comparable surveys, and changes to the instruments over time. Further, the lax 10% of federal, state, and county prisons sample requirement and data aggregation beyond the institution level may obscure totals as well as differences by gender and type of institution. Compliance audits, too, vary in the type and depth of information collected. Finally, the process by which prisoners report PREA-based claims varies across institution. Some use a neutral off-site party, such as a hotline, while others have officers or captains serving as PREA investigators, with many even issuing disciplinary actions for false or unfounded claims.

Authors

• Nicole Marie Oehmen, University of Iowa

• Allison Gorga, University of Iowa