An Overview of Prison Rape Elimination Acts (Prea) 2003

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to briefly focus on a reform related to prison called PREA which stands for Prison Rape Elimination Act, 2003. Prison Rape Elimination Act is a US federal law that was implemented in 2003 to eradicate rape in prisons. PREA created principles for recognizing, preventing, and responding to sexual abuse and harassment in correctional settings such as prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and immigration detention centers. The law also requires data collecting and reporting on incidences of sexual abuse within these facilities, as well as staff training to avoid such incidents. However, PREA 2003 could not meet all the criteria included in its principles to eliminate rape culture in the prison. From this concern, the main aim of this paper is to focus on a reform related to prisons called Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) 2003, the reasons why this act was put into place, the current status of prison rape, the positive, and negative impact of PREA 2003, probable strategies that can be helpful for the appropriate implementation of PREA 2003. To accomplish this endeavor, this research followed systematic literature review methods due to the availability of scholarly work in this field. Although PREA 2003 has some positive aspects, the overall analysis of this study has uncovered that PREA 2003 was not implemented accurately due to some of the practical problems related to it. There are still some improvements that need to be accomplished for the appropriate implementation of PREA 2003 for the prisoners. Some suggested ways were discussed in this study to improve the implementation of PREA 2003.