AZ Prison Rape: Survivor Resources.

From Just Detention International, some resources for survivors of prison rape in Arizona. Hit their site for a sample letter and talking points to AG Holder about the problems with the Prison Rape Elimination Act standards before the April 4, 2011 deadline. They need to be much stronger than the AG is proposing.

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COUNSELING AND OTHER SUPPORT SERVICES: AZ

Arizona Sexual Assault Network
1949 E. Calle de Arcos
Tempe, AZ 85284
Office: (480) 831-1986
Website: www.ArizonaSexualAssaultNetwork.org
Email: info@ArizonaSexualAssaultNetwork.org

Arizona Sexual Assault Network (AzSAN) works to identify and address sexual violence issues through a collaborative statewide public/private network of professionals, individuals, and organizations who are committed to the fight against sexual violence. AzSAN promotes an understanding of the dynamics of sexual violence and the strategies that will be successful in combating the issue. At local, state, and national levels, AzSAN works to encourage new and effective responses to sexual violence. AzSAN can provide information and referrals to survivors and direct them to member agencies or service providers in their geographic area.

Catholic Community Services in Western Arizona
690 E. 32nd Street
Yuma, AZ 85356
24-hour Hotline: (877) 440-0550
Website: www.ccs-soaz.org/ccswa

Catholic Community Services (CCS) in Western Arizona serves survivors of sexual assault in Yuma and La Paz Counties. CCS provides crisis intervention and information and referrals to survivors of sexual assault behind bars who contact the 24-hour hotline, but due to funding restrictions, CCS cannot offer ongoing support such as counseling or case management to survivors with felony convictions. All services are free and confidential.

Catholic Social Services Counseling Program
140 West Speedway, #130
Tucson, AZ 85705
Office: (520) 623-0344
Website: www.ccs-soaz.org
Email: michaelp@ccs-soaz.org

Catholic Social Services is a division of Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona, Inc. The Catholic Social Services Counseling Program provides individual, couples, family, and group mental health counseling to adults and children in the office or in clients' homes. Most services are provided out of the main office near downtown Tucson, but services are also available from a satellite office in South Tucson and a branch office in Nogales, Arizona. Support groups are formed and arranged based on the needs of the community. The CSS Counseling Program staff includes bilingual Spanish/English counselors as well as counselors who specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder. Counseling fees are based on a sliding scale. The $10.00 registration fee can be waived for clients in financial need.

Kingman Aid to Abused People
P.O. Box 1046
Kingman, AZ 86402
Office: (928) 753-6222
24-hour Hotline: (928) 753-4242

Kingman Aid to Abused People (KAAP) provides comprehensive services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence and other crimes in Kingman, Mohave County, and adjacent areas in the Northwestern corner of Arizona. Supportive services include a 24-hour crisis hotline, emergency shelter, residential program, crisis counseling, legal advocacy, case management, and a children’s program. All services are free and confidential.

North Country HealthCare/Northern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault
2920 N. 4th Street
Flagstaff, AZ 86004
Office: (928) 213-6112
Website: www.northcountryhealthcare.org

North Country HealthCare provides healthcare, including counseling and support groups, to the residents of Flagstaff, Seligman, Ash Fork, Grand Canyon, Winslow, St. Johns, Springerville/Eager, Holbrook, and Kingman. NACASA does not operate a 24-hour hotline, but local law enforcement contact the Northern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault (NACASA) to administer medical/forensic examinations (Code R Kits) by specially trained sexual assault nurse examiners. Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) and pregnancy prevention medications are provided to survivors as part of the exam. North Country also offers crisis counseling as well as other behavioral health services to survivors of sexual assault. North Country offers a sliding scale fee for services and will provide healthcare to survivors of sexual assault regardless of their ability to pay.

Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation
375 S. Euclid Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85719
Office: (520) 628-7223
Toll-free: (800) 771-9054
Website: www.saaf.org
E-mail: info@saaf.org

The Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation (SAAF) provides direct services to people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. These services include: case management, peer counseling, support groups, wellness and complementary therapies, emergency financial assistance, medications assistance, transportation, dental services for those who qualify, and advocacy. SAAF works with and provides these direct services to prisoners with HIV/AIDS in the Arizona State system prior to discharge and after their incarceration.

Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault
1600 North Country Club Road
Tucson, AZ 85716
Office: (520) 327-1171
24-hour Bilingual Crisis Line: (520) 327-7273
Toll-free 24-hour Bilingual Crisis Line: (800) 400-1001
TTY Hotline: (520) 327-1721
TTY Hotline Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm
Website: www.sacasa.org
E-mail: postmaster@sacasa.org

The Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault (SACASA) is the oldest and largest sexual assault service provider in the state of Arizona and the only agency serving Tucson, Pima County, and southern Arizona. SACA offers comprehensive, specialized services to children, youth, adults, and families who have been affected by any type of sexual violence, including rape, incest, molestation, and sexual abuse. SACASA’s services for survivors of sexual assault include: advocacy, crisis intervention, specialized mental health services, prevention education, and professional training. The Crisis Services Program provides immediate and comprehensive intervention, care, advocacy, education, and referral services to survivors, secondary victims, and community members throughout southern Arizona. SACASA provides long-term, comprehensive mental health services for primary and secondary victims and survivors of recent and past sexual trauma who are eligible. All services are free and confidential.

Wingspan
425 East Seventh Street
Tucson, AZ 85705
Office: (520) 624-1779
TDD: (520) 884-0450
24-hour Anti-Violence Crisis Line (English/Spanish): (520) 624-0348
Toll-free 24-hour Anti-Violence Crisis Line (English/Spanish): (800) 553-9387
Website: www.wingspan.org
Email: avp@wingspan.org

The Wingspan Anti-Violence Project (AVP) is a social change and social service program that works to address and end violence in the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. The AVP provides free and confidential 24-hour crisis intervention, information, support, referrals, emergency shelter, and advocacy to LGBT victims/survivors of sexual assault and other types of violence. Additionally, Wingspan offers extensive outreach and education programs. All AVP services are available in English and Spanish. Se ofrecen todos los servicios de AVP en español.

LEGAL RESOURCES

Human Rights Advocate Service
P.O. Box 5842
Tucson, AZ 85703
Office: (520) 358-4685
E-mail: rgrc860@aol.com

Human Rights Advocate Services provides services to inmates in Arizona who are victims of sexual assault while incarcerated. Services provided free of charge include: basic legal research, investigative services, public records searches, federal freedom of information act requests, Arizona public records act requests, and attorney referrals. Inmates should send a short letter stating their concern and what help is requested. Supporting documents should not be sent.

Lambda Legal: Western Regional Office
3325 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1300
Los Angeles, CA 90010-1729
Phone: (213) 382-7600
Fax: (213) 351-6050
Website: www.lambdalegal.org
E-mail: legalhelpdesk@lambdalegal.org

Lambda Legal is a national organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work. Western Regional Office provides services for those who are located in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Help Desk Hours (Pacific Standard Time):
Mondays: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Tuesdays: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Wednesdays: 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Thursdays: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Friday: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

If Help Desk staff are busy helping other callers, your call will be routed to the Legal Help Desk voicemail. Please leave the following information: name, state, contact info, best time to reach you, and a brief message outlining your legal inquiry. A Help Desk staff person will return your call.

It is usually most efficient for Help Desk callers to contact Lambda Legal by phone. If you are in a place where you are not able to make long distance calls, Lambda can make an appointment to call you. If you are absolutely unable to call, you may e-mail the organization at legalhelpdesk@lambdalegal.org or write to the addresses above.

State Bar of Arizona: Lawyer Locator and Referral Resources
4201 N. 24th St., Suite 200
Phoenix, AZ 850166288
Office (Maricopa County): (602) 252-4804
Toll Free (OUtside of Maricop County): (866) 482-9227

Southern Regional Office:
270 N. Church Ave., Suite 100
Tuscon, AZ 857012215
Office: (520) 623-9944
Website: www.azbar.org/LegalResources/findlawyer.cfm
Email: azbar@azbar.org

The State Bar of Arizona is a non-profit organization that operates under the supervision of the Arizona Supreme Court. The Bar regulates approximately 13,000 active attorneys in Arizona and provides education and development programs for the legal profession and the public. The Bar and its members are committed to serving the public by making sure the voices of all people in Arizona are heard in our justice system. To search for at attorney in the state of Arizona, use the Lawyer Locator on the State Bar of Arizona website or contact the State Bar via mail

Maricopa County Bar Association
Office: (602) 257-4434

Pima County Bar Association
177 N. Church Avenue, #101 Tucson, AZ 85701
Office: (520) 623-4625

Both the Maricopa and Pima County Bar Associations provide information on lawyers or legal service providers who offer low-cost, no-cost, or self-help services. Some low-cost and no-cost resources require you to meet certain income or other qualifications before services can be provided.

Self-Service Center, Maricopa County Superior Court
101 West Jefferson, 4th Floor
Phoenix, AZ
Office: (602) 506-7353

The Self-Service Center provides citizens with plain-English instructions, forms, and assistance for a variety of legal procedures. The Center also maintains a list of lawyers willing to advise self-represented individuals on a per-hour, non-retained basis.

GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

Criminal Investigation Unit, Office of the Inspector General
Arizona Department of Corrections
1601 W. Jefferson
Phoenix, AZ 85007
Office: (602) 542-1160

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Office of the Inspector General is comprised of various units responsible for the overall policing of the prison system through criminal, administrative, and background investigations; intelligence gathering; prison audits and policy; and maintenance of fire and safety standards. The Criminal Investigations Unit is responsible for investigation of all crimes that occur within the state’s prisons, as well as investigations of inmate protective segregation cases.

300 American prisoners will be raped today.

Hey folks - read this article then please head over to sign the petition to Holder at CriminalJustice.Change.org

----------------------From the New York Review of Books------------------

Prison Rape: Eric Holder's Unfinished Business

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides grim reaffirmation of something we already knew: sexual violence is epidemic within our country’s prisons and jails. According to the report, 64,500 of the inmates who were in a state or federal prison on the day the latest BJS survey was administered had been sexually abused at their current facility within the previous year, as had 24,000 of those who were in a county jail that day—a total of 88,500 people.

In fact, as we’ve explained before, the true national total is much higher. The BJS numbers don’t include thousands who we know are sexually abused in juvenile detention and other kinds of corrections facilities every year, nor do they account for the constant turnover among jailed detainees. Stays in jail are typically short, and several times as many people pass through jail in a year as are held there on any given day. Overall, we can confidently say that well over 100,000 people are sexually abused in American detention facilities every year.

As appalling as this figure is, mere numbers can obscure what is at issue here. So consider the case of Scott Howard. Scott was a gay, non-violent, first-time inmate in a Colorado prison when he was targeted by members of the “2-11 crew,” a white supremacist gang with over 1,000 members in prisons throughout the state. For two years he was forced into prostitution by the gang’s leaders, repeatedly raped and made to perform oral sex. Even after he told prison staff that he was being raped and needed protection from the gang, Scott was told that nothing could be done unless he named his abusers—even though they had threatened to kill him if he did. Because Scott is openly gay, some officials blamed him for the attacks, saying that as a homosexual he should expect to be targeted by one gang or another. And by his account, even those officers who were not hostile didn’t know how to respond to his reports, because appropriate procedures were not in place. They failed to take even the most basic measures to protect him.

Ultimately, despite his fear, Scott did identify some of the gang members who had raped him. Not only did the prison authorities again fail to respond, they later put Scott in a holding cell with one of his previous assailants on the day he was to be released from state custody. Again, he was beaten and forced to perform oral sex. Scott had a civil lawsuit settled in his favor recently, winning financial damages and seventeen policy changes that will now become mandatory in the Colorado prison system. Otherwise, however, nothing about his story is unusual.

In 2003 Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), legislation that, among other things, called into being the bipartisan National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC), a panel of experts charged with devising national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of sexual abuse in detention. But the implementation of these standards is now being held up, because, as Attorney General Eric Holder has explained, according to PREA the new rules should not “impose substantial additional costs compared to the costs presently expended by Federal, State, and local prison authorities.”

Last September, the Justice Department commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton to study what it would cost to implement the NPREC standards. Unfortunately, the results of that study are too flawed to be of much use. Even more concerning is that Mr. Holder has commissioned no study of the benefits of reducing prisoner rape; nor, apparently, does he plan to. Yet as a brief submitted to the Department of Justice by New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity makes clear, “substantial additional costs” can only be understood in relation to the standards’ projected benefits. Moreover, Mr. Holder is legally obligated to analyze the costs and the benefits of the new standards together: he cannot give greater emphasis to one half of the calculation than the other. By failing to perform proper analysis, the Attorney General is delaying the reform mandated by a unanimous Congress in passing PREA—and he has already missed his statutory deadline for issuing a final rule on the standards by more than two months.

Prisoner rape is far more a legal and moral issue than a financial one. Since cost considerations are impeding reform, however, it is worth taking a closer look at the true financial implications of sexual abuse behind bars. There are at least two ways in which the Department might try to estimate the value of reducing sexual abuse in detention. One—called “contingent valuation,” and used frequently by environmental economists—seeks to assign dollar-values to goods not traded in the marketplace. Using its techniques, a recent study concluded that the public values the prevention of a single incident of rape or sexual assault at $237,000, a greater worth than it places on preventing any other kind of crime except homicide.

Alternately, the Justice Department can try to quantify particular, identifiable savings and benefits of preventing prisoner rape, and weigh them against particular, quantifiable costs. The costs (no matter how benefits are measured) are the investments needed by corrections systems to comply with the recommended standards, divided by the Department’s estimation of the percentage by which the standards will actually reduce sexual abuse in detention. As for the benefits, a partial list of those to be considered might begin with the medical cost of treating rape victims, which must be shouldered by corrections systems. This is much more expensive in the prison setting than in the general community, because inmates must be transported to often-distant hospitals and escorted the whole time by security staff. And it is a cost that must be paid, not for every victim of prisoner rape, but for every instance. We can deduce from the new BJS study that victims of sexual abuse in detention suffer an average of three to five incidents apiece.

The Washington Department of Corrections estimates that the cost of providing mental health treatment for victims of prisoner rape or sexual assault—which is different from immediate medical care—is approximately $9,700 per victim. Neither category of care includes treatment for HIV, Hepatitis C, and other sexually transmitted infections, which are of course spread by prisoner rape and also impose great costs on prison health services. Making our prisons and jails safer should have a positive effect generally on the mental health problems that are endemic there. And reducing prisoner rape would also lower the number of suicides and unwanted pregnancies in our prison systems.

Quite apart from the horror it inflicts on the victim, failing to protect an inmate from sexual abuse contributes to the substantial legal costs our prison systems face. While it is extraordinarily difficult for an incarcerated victim to bring a civil lawsuit—the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) was enacted with the explicit purpose of limiting prisoners’ ability to be heard in court—prisons have still had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and fees to inmates who can establish that officials were “deliberately indifferent” in failing to protect them.

When inmates do report sexual abuse in prison, they are often put in “administrative segregation,” isolated housing that can entail being locked alone in a tiny cell for up to twenty-three hours a day. While this is purportedly done to protect them from more assaults, such housing is also used for punishment: inmates in solitary confinement are denied many programs and services, and the extensive isolation often causes or exacerbates mental and emotional problems. It is also enormously expensive. In California, for example, it costs an additional $14,600 per year to house a prisoner in administrative segregation.

Prisons and jails in which sexual abuse is widespread have been shown to be more dangerous than others generally. At such facilities, violence of every kind, importation of contraband, and other problems tend to flourish. Facilities with less sexual abuse thereby have lower overall security costs and fewer security breaches. When prisons are safer for inmates, they are also safer for corrections staff. The various measures called for by NPREC’s standards—among them better surveillance technology and external oversight—will provide a wide range of benefits for the facilities in which they are implemented, going far beyond the reduction of sexual violence.

Preventing prisoner rape will also help inmates successfully re-enter their communities when they’re released from prison (as almost all will be, eventually). Not only will recidivism be decreased and the enormous costs of re-incarceration lowered, this will lower the costs of disability payments, public housing, and other government-subsidy programs. As we know from our extensive work with survivors of prisoner rape, former inmates who have not been sexually abused are far more likely to become members of the legitimate workforce and pay taxes. Severe financial, emotional, and social burdens are removed from the families who support former inmates if their loved ones are released from prison without the lasting trauma of sexual abuse. And the children who depend on those former inmates will also do better. Today, more than a million children in this country have at least one incarcerated parent.

Testifying before a House subcommittee, Attorney General Holder said, “We want to effect substantive, real change, so that the horrors that too often are visited upon people in our prisons [are] eliminated…. It is something that I think needs to be done, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” That was on March 16. In mid-August a Department spokesman said that the Attorney General would send a proposed rule on the standards to the White House Office of Management and Budgets “in the fall.” Even then, however, it will take months for another layer of review. If well over 100,000 inmates are sexually abused every year, that is something like 300 every day, or even more. Since Attorney General Holder said that change needed to come “yesterday”—five months ago now—more than 40,000 people have been sexually abused in detention. Good corrections officers are doing what they can, but they are desperate for the support that binding national standards would give them. It is time for Mr. Holder to act.

August 26, 2010 2:15 p.m.