Dennis Byrne, Society Should Not Take for Granted the Horror of Prison Rape, Chicago Tribune, August 18, 2003.

At last, everyone in Congress agrees on something. Not a single dissent. No threatened filibuster. No one holding out, to logroll some projects for back home.

What could this remarkable consensus be about? No, it's not a pay increase for Congress; even that usually brings on schisms. The answer is: a bill to eliminate prison rape. A couple of weeks ago the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 swept through the Senate and House without objection, and with little notice.

It's truly amazing that not just a few, but all, lawmakers support doing something about prison rape. Not just to reduce it, but to eliminate it.

Is this some kind of utopian trip? Most people take prison rape for granted. The public sentiment seems to be, "It's just the way things are." Nothing you can do, short of locking up everyone in solitary. Predators and gangs run the prisons.

Besides, if cons don't want to be raped, they shouldn't have done the crime and got themselves sent to prison in the first place. Some folks might even say the cons deserved it.

Michael Blucker didn't deserve it. The Crystal Lake inmate was gang raped and turned into a sex slave while serving time in Illinois Department of Corrections prisons. For stealing a car, he received an HIV death sentence, at the hands of his fellow prisoners and a system that failed to protect him.

Russell D. Smith didn't deserve it either. Smith was a rape victim while at the Marion, Ill., federal penitentiary. In 1980, he formed a group called Stop Prison Rape, the harbinger in Illinois of what turned into a national movement culminating in the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

The bill, awaiting President George W. Bush's signature as of this writing, remarkably drew strong support from liberals and conservatives. Sponsors ranged from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Amnesty International USA, the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and dozens of other groups across the ideological spectrum supported it, under the aegis of the conservative Hudson Institute.

But the sailing wasn't always so smooth. Blucker lost his suit against the Illinois Department of Corrections for failing to protect him from sexual predation. And former State Rep. Cal Skinner Jr. (R-Crystal Lake), a maverick conservative, unsuccessfully introduced legislation in 1995 to protect Illinois prisoners against rape and HIV transmission.

Obviously, the collective conscience of the Illinois General Assembly was less well-honed than that of Congress or Skinner. Still, one can wonder what took so long for Congress to act.

The provisions in the Prison Rape Elimination Act are hardly extravagant, unworkable or revolutionary. Under it, the Justice Department will annually survey prisons to establish the prevalence of prison rape rates and publicly rat out the worst local, state and federal prisons. It will nurture and fund ideas to prevent and prosecute prison rape. A new National Prison Rape Education Commission after two years of study will issue a comprehensive report on prison rape and recommend standards, to be finalized by the U.S. attorney general. Prisons that fail to adopt and comply with the standards will suffer a 5 percent reduction in federal prison grants.

The loss can be avoided by using the 5 percent to come into compliance with the standards. So, the nation has another "program," costing an estimated $60 million a year. One gets the sinking feeling that the legislation flew through Congress because in the federal budgetary cosmos, $60 million is a just a speck of space dust, and that some lawmakers just brushed it off their table with a "What would it hurt?" Or a "What's it matter? It's not gonna work anyway."

I disagree. Doing just this much--as opposed to doing nothing--is an important start. Especially when some prison officials, either naively or disingenuously, persist in denying that prison rape is a problem. I prefer to think that members of Congress did something because they unanimously understood that no one--man, woman or minor in confinement--"deserves" to be raped.

Prison rape is no joke, as it is often treated. Prison rape, and the high chance of contracting HIV/AIDS from it (and then passing it along to the general population after receiving parole), is not part of any sentence. Including capital punishment.