Inmate Rape
When Charles Turner was first sent to prison in 1963, he did not know that fighting off rapists would be part of his punishment.
The convicted burglar learned that lesson while taking a shower one day at the Utah State Prison.
"I didn't see them," Turner, who is black, said of his white attackers. "It was three of them. I got raped . . . But what can you do? They saw someone who was young, didn't know what was going on, and took advantage of it . . . . As long as they have prisons, they'll happen."
Recent studies by Human Rights Watch and Prison Journal magazine estimate that at least one-fifth of the nation's 2 million inmates have either been raped or forced to perform sex acts during incarceration. If those findings—based on interviews with inmates—are accurate, about 1,100 of Utah's 5,600 prisoners have been sexually assaulted behind bars.
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