September 2009

Equality and the reach of civil rights laws, writes Hart, have been the focus of constitutional law jurisprudence as well as Supreme Court nomination battles. In regards to affirmative action policy, the high court Hart maintains has "taken a relatively measured middle-ground, limiting the permissible scope of affirmative action significantly, but retaining a core that acknowledges the need to remedy discrimination and the value of diversity."

In her Advance article, "The State-by-State Assault on Equal Opportunity," Hart explores, in part, "A small group of well-funded opponents of equal opportunity, frustrated with the Court's continued rejection of their radical vision of formal equality, has been steadily attempting to shift the debate into the political arena." For example, Hart noted that voters in a growing number of states have approved ballot measures aimed at making affirmative action policy illegal. Each ballot initiative, she writes, "prohibits ‘preferential treatment' on the basis of race or gender in public education, employment or contracting. The term preferential treatment is not defined in the proposed initiatives, but the identical language has been interpreted to prohibit any consideration of race or gender in the covered areas. In states where there initiatives pass, it has become effectively irrelevant what the Supreme Court says about affirmative action."

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the newspaper's editorial notes, operates more than a hundred prisons housing more than 170,000 prisoners and that allegations of sexual abuse lodged against federal prison staff has "more than doubled from 2001 to 2008."

The Inspector General's report finds that while the BOP has implemented procedure for handling allegations of staff sexual abuse, improvements are needed. Allegations of staff sexual abuse have "increased at a faster rate than either the growth in the prison population or the number of BOP staff."

The Post's editorial maintains that the BOP "still needs to articulate a zero-tolerance for sexual abuse and better train personnel to prevent, detect and report sexual crimes. Prisoners need information on how to report abuse. The agency should review policies in some prisons that automatically isolate or transfer a prisoner who has reported abuse. Although done with the intention of protecting a prisoner from further abuse, such actions are often perceived as punishment and have the effect of discouraging disclosure."

Recently, in an ACS Issue Brief, "Improving Prison Oversight to Address Sexual Violence in Detention," authors Melissa Rothstein, east coast program director for Just Detention International (JDI), and Lovisa Stannow, executive director of JDI, offer a number of recommendations for how to prevent sexual abuse in prisons akin to those in the DOJ IG's report. Chief among these recommendations are improving response time to allegations of abuse and monitoring of abuses. Their issue brief is available here.