American prisons are a disgrace and a national shame, and prison rapes are one of the most viscerally appalling reminders of that. These statistics are likely

American prisons are a disgrace and a national shame, and prison rapes are one of the most viscerally appalling reminders of that. These statistics are likely misleading, though: it only includes the 9k or so cases that jail administrators reported. That's likely at least an order of magnitude less than happen in reality, and it's likely that the small minority that are actually reported by administrators have special aspects of them that make them highly non-representative of all sexual violence in prisons. They've passed through (at least) three filters already, for instance: the prisoner deciding to report it at all; the guard reported to seeing fit to report it to higher ups; and the higher ups deciding to report it to the overseeing agency. Not sure which direction that'd go in, for the record, but it's worth keeping in mind while parsing this report.