PRISON FELLOWSHIP BLOG

Religious leaders and civil rights advocates are pressing the Department of Justice to implement national standards to help prevent an estimated 60,000 cases of prison rape each year.

Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship and a member of the commission that submitted the standards to Holder, told reporters that tens of thousands of inmates will be raped in the next year “because we haven’t taken steps to prevent it.

Liberals and conservatives have united in calling for the U.S. attorney general to implement standards against a form of prison violence.

Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, but even though standards were completed within 14 months, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to implement them.

A number of groups who couldn’t be more different are single-minded on eliminating prison rape. Prison Fellowship, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Family Research Council, Human Rights Watch, Focus on the Family, Sojourners, and others signed onto a letter Tuesday urging U.S.

Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, argues that setting standards would be a good way to reduce the problem of prison rape. He mentions that increasing the lighting in prisons, screening staffers and having independent supervision of facilities can make a tremendous difference.

Ending prison rape is a cause that brought together an unlikely group of organizations which are usually doing combat with each other. Leaders of groups from the left and right gathered to call attention to their letter which presses Attorney General Holder to speed up the process for adopting standards that will hold prison officials accountable for combating rape in prisons.

“The fact that people are not safe in our prisons … is a scandal, that’s a stain on our honor,” said Pat Nolan, vice president of the Prison Fellowship and a former member of the independent commission.

Focus on the Family, George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center, the American Conservative Union and the American Civil Liberties Union are all furious with Attorney General Eric Holder—and amazingly enough, it’s about the same thing.

Advocates for prison inmates on Tuesday accused Attorney General Eric Holder of “dragging his feet” on adopting national standards for preventing rape in prisons.

Justice Department statistics show that an estimated 4.5 percent, or 60,500 inmates, report being victims of sexual assault in federal prisons, said Pat Nolan, vice president of outreach program Prison Fellowship.

An odd coalition of religious groups, human-rights advocates and prison reformers is pushing the Obama administration to hurry new standards designed to eliminate rape in the nation’s prisons — standards that are already two months overdue.

“At this moment, standards to eradicate sexual assault in prisons await your approval,” the groups wrote in an Aug.

Prison Fellowship has partnered with other Christian and prison rights groups across the political spectrum to lobby Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt standards established out of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. Nolan was part of the panel which put together a set of standards to help facilities from local jails up to federal prisons stem the tide of prison rape.

Robert* was going home—if he could figure out how. An ex-prisoner who encountered Christ behind bars, he felt led upon release to start somewhere new. He sold his possessions, scrounged up $500, and set off in a donated van with no fixed destination.

For more than 14 years, Prison Fellowship’s reform arm, Justice Fellowship, has worked to make sentences for drug crimes fairer. We have been part of a large number of groups working to narrow the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine.

In an important victory for justice, President Obama today signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, putting an end to the 100-to-1 disparity between punishments for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

The passage of the bill was a pivotal point in the fight to correct imbalances in our sentencing laws.

Virginia spends too much money locking up nonviolent offenders and not enough on programs to help criminals transition into life after prison, Department of Corrections director Gene Johnson said Tuesday.

Speaking at a statewide conference on prisoner re-entry, Johnson said the state should stop doling out lengthy prison sentences to nonviolent criminals and those with drug convictions and instead focus on locking away violent criminals—and then helping them successfully re-enter society when their prison sentence is over.