Maggie Hyde/MNS
Prison rape survivor Marilyn Shirley tells her story at a press conference Tuesday where she and religious leaders asked the government to address rape in prisons.
WASHINGTON — Incarcerated for drug charges in 1998, Marilyn Shirley walked out of prison with fresh psychological scars. Six months before she was to be released, in 2000, she was raped by a guard at the Texas prison where she was serving time.
“I am still haunted by the words he whispered in my ear,” said Shirley.
“Do you think you’re the only one?” her attacker asked her.
Religious leaders and others who heard her story have decided that the incidence of rape and assault in American prisons is a canker of the system that can no longer go untreated. They are asking Department of Justice officials to help eradicate the problem by introducing national standards on rape for prisons.
An estimated one in 20 inmates was sexually assaulted in the past year, amounting to an estimated 60,000 according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Shirley recounted her ordeal at a press conference Tuesday, where she and a panel of diverse civil rights, religious and human rights leaders presented a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking him to approve the national standards that would govern correctional facilities.
“What we are witnessing is justice denied,” said Tim Goeglein, vice president of external relations at Focus on the Family and one of the signers of the letter.
Other signers included representatives from the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals, Sojourners, as well as the United Methodist Church, United Church of Christ, American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Focus on the Family, a group that is concerned with issues of marriage, family and parenting, worries that the scars of rape could persist once prisoners return to society.
“Millions of young people in America have one or two parents in prison,” Goeglein said.
Members of the United Methodist Church have encountered the problem in their ministries, said Bill Mefford, director of civil and human rights for the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society. They want to see the government do something to address it.
“Our people care about this, “ he said.
The standards, proposed last year, would subject institutions to being audited and establish a protocol for handling the issue of rape in their facilities. According to the Prison Elimination Act, passed unanimously by Congress in 2003, they were supposed to be enacted by Holder by June of this year.
Many of the same groups present Tuesday worked together to pass the act, which pushed for better data on prison rapes and established the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, an independent overseeing body.
Department of Justice Spokeswoman Hannah August said the department is working diligently and plans to send the approved standards to the Office of Management and Budget this fall.
Holder explained the delay in a March letter to the House Appropriations Committee.
“We want to make sure that we get this right,” he wrote, also acknowledged that it was an urgent issue.
“This is something that I think needs to be done, not tomorrow, but yesterday,” he wrote.
The standards have already been adopted by California and Oregon without significant additional costs, according to Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship.
Opponents of the standards say they would be too costly and inconvenient for the already strapped prison system to mandate.
Meanwhile, religious leaders believe the cause cannot wait.
“If we say the sanctity of every human life matters, we have to look to the reality of people like Marilyn Shirley,” said Goeglein.
Shirley, whose attacker was eventually convicted and sentenced, still suffers bouts of depression and is on five different medications to help her deal with the trauma. She says the bureaucratic hold-up is hard to bear.
“I have waited a long time for my country to take the issue seriously,” she said.