![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.jlpp.org\/old_blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/Prison-Rape.png\" "\\"Prison")
<\/a>\n\nThe Bureau of Justice Statistics <\/a>\n\nThe Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report<\/a> in 2007 finding that 4.5% (or 60,500) of more than 1.3 million inmates had been subjected to sexual abuse in the previous year alone\u2014and many organizations believe the report greatly underestimates the reality. Prisoner victims of sexual abuse are often repeatedly abused over long periods of time, unable to escape their perpetrators. Inmates who are gay, transgender, young, mentally ill, or incarcerated for the first time (\u201cfish<\/a>\u201d) are particularly vulnerable. The perpetrators often treat their victims like property, \u201cselling\u201d them to other inmates within the facility. Just Detention International<\/a> advocates, working to stop sexual violence in prisons, treat it as an epidemic which shows<\/a> \u201ca serious, systemic failure to protect the basic human rights of inmates.\u201d\n\nT.J. Parsell<\/a>, an activist committed to ending prison rape, wrote a powerful memoir<\/a> detailing his own horrifying experience as a 17-year-old boy helplessly trying to survive repeated sexual assault during his four-year incarceration. His prison time began with a gang rape that landed him in the hospital ward, and throughout the book, he candidly details what it was like to always be the \u201cproperty\u201d of other inmates for his own protection.\n\nFor the past few decades, sex researchers have stressed a link between viewing porn and sexual violence toward women. But now, researchers argue<\/a> that masturbation may actually have the power to displace the perpetrator\u2019s urge to rape<\/a>.\n\nIf pornography facilitates masturbation, does allowing pornography have the potential to deter<\/em> sex crimes in prisons<\/a>? The 10th Circuit doesn\u2019t think so, at least according to its recent opinion in Sperry v. Werholtz<\/em><\/a>. Kansas inmate Jeffrey Sperry challenged his state\u2019s ban on access to sexually explicit material in prisons, contending it violated his First Amendment rights. The 10th Circuit ultimately agreed that the Kansas regulation was neutral and \u201crationally related to\u201d its penal objective of maintaining security in prisons.\n\nBut is the ban on pornography really necessary to meet security concerns? If it were, does Kansas have safer prisons than other states that do not<\/em> ban prisoner access sexually explicit material?\n\nAnd what if some of these researchers are right in their prediction that access to pornography would actually make prison life safer for inmates vulnerable to sexual exploitation? As prison rape has become more and more pervasive in recent decades, the question\u2014as uncomfortable as it may be\u2014begs our attention.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 20% of inmates in men\u2019s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. Might pornography help deter sex crimes in prisons?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[825,1205,1229,1230,1383,1384,1488],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-blogs","tag-incarceration","tag-pornography","tag-prison-rape","tag-prisons","tag-sexual-abuse","tag-sexual-assault","tag-t-j-parsell"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}