Sexual Relationships Between Inmates and Prison Employees Fairly Common, Statistics Show
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allanswart/iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — After two New York inmates allegedly traded sex with a female prison employee for help in getting tools they used to break out, questions about relationships between inmates and prison employees were raised.
Such relations are far from infrequent, federal statistics show.
The U.S. Department of Justice‘s Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in January 2014 reviewing data collected on sexual victimization in prisons from 2009 to 2011.
Almost half — 48% — of substantiated incidents of sexual victimization involved guards and inmates, while the other 52% involved only inmates.
The majority of the 48 percent of staff sexual misconduct cases involved female staffers, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported.
Gender appeared to play some kind of role in the nature of the banned relationships, as 84 percent of the relationships that female staffers had with inmates “appeared to be willing,” whereas only 37 percent of the relationships between male guards and inmates qualified as such.
Along the same lines, only one percent of relationships between female staffers and inmates featured threats of physical force or abuse of power, whereas it was true with 20 percent of male staffers’ relations.
ABC News’ calls to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Correctional Employees Union for comment were not returned.
Joyce Mitchell was allegedly involved with inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt, who were, respectively, caught and killed over the weekend after three weeks on the lam.
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