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Purpose The Prison Rape Elimination Act has brought significant attention to the issue of sexual victimization within correctional institutions. While the actual risk of sexual victimization remains low, the perception of rape among inmates is high. Given how one's fear can translate into behavior, understanding how institutions impact the culture surrounding prison rape highlights areas for reducing violence within prisons. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This study includes secondary analysis of a quantitative database created from semi-structured interviews with 564 high security, general population inmates. Using fear of rape as the outcome of interest, bivariate and logistic regression analyses are used to comment on the impact of individual and facility level characteristics on this outcome. Findings In general, the results from this study suggest that the greatest risk factors for fearing rape while in prison are being male, having a mental health issue, and hearing about rape within the institution. From these specific findings a few general lessons can be learned with the hope that practitioners can translate these lessons into policy initiatives in order to combat fear of rape among our inmate population. Originality/value This paper aims to fill a gap in the research on how the facility contributes to the fear of rape within prison. The end goal is to inform policy makers so that suggestions can be made to combat this problem and prevent further misconduct within these facilities.

Security designation tools are a key feature of all prisons in the United States, intended as objective measures of risk that funnel inmates into security levels-to prison environments varying in degree of intrusiveness, restriction, dangerousness, and cost. These tools are mostly (if not all) validated by measuring inmates on a set of characteristics, using scores from summations of that information to assign inmates to prisons of varying security level, and then observing whether inmates assumed more risky did in fact offend more. That approach leaves open the possibility of endogeneity--that the harsher prisons are themselves bringing about higher misconduct and thus biasing coefficients assessing individual risk. The current study assesses this potential bias by following an entry cohort of inmates to more than 100 facilities in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and exploiting the substantial variation in classification scores within a given prison that derive from systematic overrides of security-level designations for reasons not associated with risk of misconduct. By estimating pooled models of misconduct along with prison-fixed effects specifications, the data show that a portion of the predictive accuracy thought associated with the risk-designation tool used in BOP was a function of facility-level contamination (endogeneity).