Report Assails NYC Jail's Sex Abuse Response

Описание: (21 Jun 2016) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: apus057923

New York City's Rikers Island jail has entrenched problems dealing with sexual abuse, including emergency hotlines that don't work, confidential complaints read by fellow inmates and investigations that don't interview alleged attackers, according to an internal review obtained by The Associated Press.
The federally-funded report, conducted last year by the Washington, D.C.-based The Moss Group, detailed longstanding problems at Rikers that may be tough to fix.
The report revealed that guards dangerously underestimated the problem, felt helpless to do anything about it and showed "poor professional boundaries" themselves by inappropriately hugging and kissing one another and hanging racy postings in common areas.
The findings come as overseers of the city's 10,000-inmate jail system moved last week to write new city rules spelling out a zero-tolerance sexual assault policy in line with the 2003 federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
At the time of the report, its authors noted, few staff or inmates had heard of the federal law, and education addressing its requirements "did not appear to be occurring."
In response, jail officials say they have appointed a department-wide coordinator, published a 43-page directive of up-to-date standards on sexual assault and trained hundreds of guards and internal investigators.
Phone numbers to sexual assault hotlines posted throughout the jails regularly didn't work, were picked up by answering machines that left no helpful information and, in at least one case, rang to "a private citizens' phone number," according to the report.
Inmates who did disclose harassment or abuse allegations via a formal grievance system had trouble doing so confidentially, because the slips of paper they wrote their claims on were sometimes typed up by other inmates who could read their contents, according to the report.
The report also reviewed the 46 sexual abuse or harassment cases closed by jail investigators in 2014, finding fundamental problems with the thoroughness of the inquiries.


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