A Blind Eye, Still Turned: Getting serious about prison rape.

Every day, a large number of men are raped in American jails and prisons. For a nation that prides itself on being a human-rights leader, the sheer number of men raped behind bars -- 240,000 a year according to the activist group Stop Prison Rape -- is a black mark. A common corrections-industry estimate is 12,000 rapes per year. Even if this is the actual number, it still represents more rapes than are reported annually against women in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, San Diego, and Phoenix combined.

For 18 months now, Congress has been considering the Prison Rape Reduction Act, a bipartisan bill that would take resolute though modest action to ascertain the dimensions of the nation's prison-rape problem and confront it. Despite support from leaders in both parties, and no organized opposition, the bill remains mired in committee. The main reasons are 1) disagreement over certain details of the bill and 2) a lack of active support from the Bush administration. "I know that John Ashcroft is for it," says Frank Wolf of Virginia, the bill's lead Republican sponsor in the House. "I was disappointed that [the administration was] not more enthusiastic for it earlier. There has been a lot of foot-dragging. They should have done more to sit down with us and work out a compromise." Others are more blunt. "If Justice gave the nod, it would be law today. It's almost like a culture of 'nyet,'" says Vincent Schiraldi, head of the left-leaning Justice Policy Institute. "But they won't do anything about it." Justice Department spokesman Blain Rethmeier says that the department supports the bill and wants to eliminate any roadblocks facing it. But so far the measure simply isn't moving forward.

For the racist gangs (both black and white) that really run a large percentage of the nation's prisons, rape represents a key means of control. When they arrive behind bars, inmates almost always are challenged to fights. Those who fight poorly or run away are labeled "punks," or rape targets, and are frequently gang-raped. Eventually, a punk settles down to serve a "man," who provides protection in return for regular sex. This practice amounts to daily rape for years on end. While prison rape touches members of all races, the overwhelming majority of serious predators, called "wolves," are black, and the overwhelming majority of punks are white.

To make matters worse, prison rape often becomes a death sentence. Writing in the journal AIDS, researchers Hazel Dean-Gaitor and Patricia Fleming of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that prisoners have nearly six times the AIDS-infection rate of the population as a whole. Despite the horrible nature of the practice and its ubiquity in American prisons, some prison administrators do little to stop it. Others even encourage it: Guards in California's notorious Corcoran State Prison sent troublesome inmates to live with a man -- dubbed the "booty bandit" -- who raped them repeatedly.

The bill making its way through Congress was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Jeff Sessions, and in the House by Frank Wolf and Democrat Robert Scott. Wolf, who represents an affluent northern Virginia district, has emerged as the clear leader in the fight for the bill. "This is just a matter of what I feel I have to do as a citizen and as a Christian," he says. The congressman first became interested in prisons when he visited inmates at the Lorton Correctional Facility in Washington, D.C., before his election to Congress. He now oversees most legislation dealing with prisons.

The bill proposes $60 million for rape-prevention programs, requires states to collect statistics on prison rape, and establishes a commission to study the problem. Prison-accrediting associations, which set the ...