Mitigating Prison Violence
Cynthia Evans
CJ522: Comparative Correctional Systems
June 17, 2014

Mitigating Prison Violence
Violence in prison systems remains to be a persistent problem among enforcers and inmates alike. Not only does it compromise inmate safety and institutional security, it distorts the purpose of prison systems as penitentiary systems meant to discourage criminal behavior. Adding to this complication, the problem is present in nearly all prison systems worldwide, with some systems more prone to it than others. In America, homicide inside jails and state prisons has remained relatively low in recent years at 3 per 100,000 on average (Mumola, 2005). The same cannot be said for Brazilian prisons, however; in 2013 alone, around 60 inmates were killed in Brazilian prisons, and three others died through decapitation and heavy mutilation at the beginning of the year (Cawley, 2014).
Violence in prison systems is by no means limited to physical violence or individual assaults. In the first place, “violence in prison” is a broad category, which involves a range of situations and actions from certain parties, with violence as their common factor. It may involve riots, mutinies, and individual assaults. It may also, in fact, be taken to mean any form of violence—usually physical and/or sexual—done by inmates to fellow inmates, or prison staff to inmates. For example, while physical violence is an all-time low in American prisons, sexual violence is on the rise there. Prison rape, alongside other abusive and nonconsensual sexual acts, is a rampant problem in both inmate-to-inmate and staff-on-inmate. In 2011 alone, around 2,002 alleged cases of inmate-to-inmate and 1,992 staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct have been reported, and—granted the present difficulty of ascertaining such allegations inside prisons—with a heavily discrepant number of substantiated