The Obama administration has produced new statistics on prison rape which, taken in conjunction with its widespread claims about college campuses, imply that women and even men are safer from rape in prison than they are on college campuses.
In a recent report from the White House states that 8.5 percent of female inmates and 3.7 percent of male inmates experience sexual assault while in prison. More than half of these incidents are committed by prison and jail staff, though the report acknowledges that “many abuse incidents in prisons involve other inmates as perpetrators.”
If one takes these statistics at face value and compares them to other widely reported statistics used by the White House on campus sexual assault, one could conclude that sexual assault is far more common on college campuses than in America’s prisons. After all, the Obama administration loves to tout deeply flawed self-reported surveys showing 20 percent of women and 5 to 8 percent of men are sexually assaulted on college campuses over a four-year college career.
This would mean that men are twice as likely and women nearly three times as likely to be raped on a college campus as they are in prison.
Reason’s Robby Soave, who first made the connection, says it doesn’t add up.
“Perhaps I can accept that women’s prisons are safer than colleges,” writes Soave. “But I have a very difficult time believing that male prisons are significantly safer — for men — than university campuses are,” Soave wrote. “Try taking that idea to its logical conclusion. Imagine the parents of a young man who has been sentenced to four years in a federal penitentiary: instead of crying, they should breathe a sigh of relief and say, ‘At least he wasn’t admitted to Harvard.'”
Soave suggests it’s possible that one study is underreporting prison rape, another is over reporting campus rape or both.
We know the self-reported surveys of campus sexual assault vastly overstate the issue. They’re designed to do so. The White House’s report on prison rape lists the incidence of sexual assault among the general population to be 0.0001 percent of men and 0.004 percent of women. This confirms, yet again, that the college surveys are so overboard as to be unserious. It is unfathomable that college campuses are 5,000 times more dangerous for women than anywhere else.
But don’t expect the White House to recognize how these two statistics don’t make sense when viewed side by side. They have radical feminists to pander to, and a little thing like common sense won’t get in their way.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
