Almost nobody is following Rick Perry’s lead in defying the Prison Rape Elimination Act

Emily dePrang has the story.

Back in March, Gov. Rick Perry sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declaring his intent to defy a federal law designed to reduce sexual assault in prison. It was a very Perry letter, slinging around terms like “ridiculous” and “unacceptable” and “costly regulatory mess.” But perhaps the most Perry part was his vow to “encourage my fellow governors to follow suit.”

Now, saying a law is wrong for Texas is one thing. Saying governors of other states—you know, just anywhere—should defy the Prison Rape Elimination Act suggests Perry believes the law is wrong in general principle, not specific application. Or else he’s just grandstanding. (A Google search for “Rick Perry” and “grandstanding” returns 173,000 results.) Either way, Perry appears to have had limited success. May 15 was the deadline for governors either to certify their state prisons were compliant or promise to become so, and the Associated Press reported last week that just four other states joined Perry in saying they planned not to try: Idaho, Indiana, Utah and Arizona.

“Perry is sort of out on his own on this one, which is fantastic news,” says Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, who works for an advocacy group that fights prison sexual assault, Just Detention International.

Lerner-Kinglake is one of many observers who can’t work out why Perry picked this particular battle in the first place. The problems with the law that Perry lists are relatively minor, though he describes them as insurmountable—and some don’t actually exist. Lerner-Kinglake says Perry’s letter contains “so many basic errors. It’s really kind of simple stuff that anyone who took a minute to look at the standards would know.”

For example, Perry writes that governors must certify their state’s compliance “under threat of criminal penalties,” but that’s not true. The only enforcement mechanism is that a state can lose 5 percent of its federal corrections grant money. Perry also says the act’s compliance dates are “impossible to meet,” but governors can—and at least 10 did—give assurance letters by the May 15 deadline promising that they were actively working toward compliance.

Perry also seems to think the new requirements apply to “local jails” and would be too expensive for small counties to implement, but they wouldn’t have to, since the act covers only facilities under Perry’s operational control.

The further you get into the letter’s nitty-gritty, the stranger Perry’s defiance seems.

[…]

Perhaps the most understandable of Perry’s objections is that while the Prison Rape Elimination Act requires the state to keep prisoners under 18 separate from adults, Texas considers 17-year-olds to be adults, so the two standards conflict. But none of the other nine states that incarcerate 17-year-olds as adults appear to have defied the law, and the separation requirement doesn’t kick in for three years. Just in March, the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee held a hearing on raising Texas’ adult prosecution age from 17 to 18. Yet this issue and the alleged gender discrimination problem were the sticking points Perry reiterated in a May 16 letter that was much milder in tone.

Present in the first letter but missing from the second was Perry’s claim that Texas already effectively prevented sexual assault in its prisons. Actually, Texas reports almost four times as many prisoner sexual assaults as the national average, according to a federally-funded study from the JFA Institute. Elizabeth Henneke, an attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, warned at a House hearing that noncompliance could leave the state open to litigation and pointed out that one ex-inmate, who says he was raped at the Travis County Jail, is already suing for $2 million, alleging officials “displayed deliberate indifference to his safety by failing to comply with PREA.”

See here and here for the background. I’m as shocked as you are that Rick Perry could be ill-informed and off base on a political issue. What is annoying about this is that Perry himself is completely shielded from any accountability for his unilateral action. Texas stands to lose some grant money as a result of this, but Perry will be out of office by the time that happens, and I think it’s fair to say that few if any GOP Presidential primary voters will be swayed against him by this. Our next Governor can undo Perry’s action, but it still seems to me that there ought to be a way to make him feel some responsibility for defying a federal law. For once, Rick Perry should not be able to get away with doing whatever the hell he feels like doing regardless of the consequences for others.

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2 Responses to Almost nobody is following Rick Perry’s lead in defying the Prison Rape Elimination Act

  1. Katy Anders says:

    I think you’re right: This is somewhere where Perry can look as though he’s standing up to the feds, and non one is likely to get mad at him because, well… “If those guys didn’t want to get assaulted, they shouldn’t have committed the crime. I don’t feel sorry for ’em.”

    That’s what i picture my grandfather saying about it, anyway, if I were to ask him about it.

  2. Ed Darrell says:

    Still, a sane person might wonder: Who has such an interest in protecting prison rape that they’d pay enough money to Rick Perry so he’d take this stand?

    If you think that’s offensive, then ponder just why it would be that Perry himself would feel so strongly that prison rape needs defending.

    Generally, one might be well advised to steer clear of people who defend crass and gross violations of human rights. Avoid voting for them or extending their policies into law.

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