by Dyanne Petersen

About the author: Dyanne Petersen was an inmate at the Federal Prison Camp in Dublin, California, when she wrote this account for Liberty magazine, a libertarian publication.

On March 30, 1999, a special investigator for violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka, issued her report in Geneva to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. One of her conclusions was that sexual misconduct by prison guards is common in women’s prisons in the U.S., based on her June 1998 visits to state and Federal prisons in six states and Washington, D.C. As reported in the New York Times, “In some prisons, she said that she was told that ‘at least two-thirds of the female inmates have been sexually or physically abused.&rsquo...