Hell Behind Bars: The crime that dare not speak its name.

Prison rape may be America's most ignored crime problem. Since the mid 1970s, male-on-male rape has become more common than male-on-female rape, and a key reason for this is that the prison population has quadrupled. Prison rape tortures inmates, spreads AIDS, and increases the power of racist gangs-but almost nobody wants to talk about it. Academic research suggests that the problem is widespread. University of Nebraska professor Cindy Stuckman-Johnson reported in The Journal of Sex Research that 22 percent of male inmates in Nebraska prisons experienced unwanted sexual contact. Extrapolating from her Nebraska findings and earlier studies in New York, California, and Pennsylvania, Stephen Donaldson, the late president of the activist group Stop Prisoner Rape, estimated that over 240,000 men get raped in prison each year. By contrast, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1999 men raped 141,000 women.

And while female rape victims typically get raped only once, imprisoned men can get raped thousands of times; physically weak inmates get raped the most. Accounts of prison life by authors such as Harold S. Long and James Hogshire depict a horrible pattern: Prisoners arriving at correctional facilities typically get challenged to a fight within a few days of arrival; those who fight poorly or run away get labeled as "punks" or sex slaves. Punks-usually young, nonviolent offenders, and often pretrial detainees-typically fall victim to a series of gang rapes that may continue for anywhere from a few days to several years. A survival-minded punk eventually settles down to serve a "man" who protects him from other predators in return for regular sex for the man and his friends. In effect, this can amount to daily rape for years on end. Rampant prison overcrowding-which shows only minimal signs of easing-has made this problem even worse: With more men in each cell, it becomes possible for some serial rapists to acquire harems of punks.

Regular group anal sex spreads AIDS very quickly. "AIDS is a major, major threat in prisons, and the fact that any rape may be a death sentence plays up the psychological terror involved in rape," says Terry Kupers, an Oakland psychiatrist who has written extensively about mental health in prisons. Writing in the journal AIDS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers Hazel Dean-Gaitor and Patricia Fleming find that prisoners have nearly six times the AIDS-infection rate of the population as a whole.

Prison rape also carries strong racial overtones. Prison administrators "want to keep the black gangs quiet," says Ginnette West, the mother of a prison-rape victim who runs the small Illinois-based activist group Mothers Against Prison Rape-HIV/AIDS. "They know they'll be in an uproar if they don't get something to release their sex drive, and usually it's young, nonviolent inmates of a different race." The view from the inside is much the same: "The wolves [serial rapists] are almost all black, while punks are almost all white," writes Hogshire in his book, You Are Going to Prison. The white-supremacist gangs that proliferate behind prison bars do the same thing in reverse, seeking out black punks.

Rape serves as a prison-management tool. Racist gangs make things easier for prison administrators: They spend so much time fighting one another that they don't turn against staff. Rape often serves as a form of punishment for those who threaten to disrupt the flow of drugs and other contraband that the gangs control in most prison systems. Indeed, prison administrators sometimes facilitate rapes: A 1998 Los Angeles Times investigation of brutality in California's Corcoran State Prison found that guards sometimes sent troublesome prisoners to live with one man, who raped inmates in return for favors from prison staff. Such practices are common. "I've heard about prisons where they always make sure there is ...