42 U.S.C. § 15602
Section 15602 · Purposes
Amended 1 time on record
Applied in 5 court decisions — leading case Giraldo v. Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (2008)
Most recently applied in John Does 8-10 v. Rick Snyder (December 2019)
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year.Markers show enactment, consequential amendments, and circuit splits over this section — watch for a citation surge after a change or a disagreement. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
The purposes of this chapter are to—
(1) establish a zero-tolerance standard for the incidence of prison rape in prisons in the United States;
(2) make the prevention of prison rape a top priority in each prison system;
(3) develop and implement national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of prison rape;
(4) increase the available data and information on the incidence of prison rape, consequently improving the management and administration of correctional facilities;
(5) standardize the definitions used for collecting data on the incidence of prison rape;
(6) increase the accountability of prison officials who fail to detect, prevent, reduce, and punish prison rape;
(7) protect the Eighth Amendment rights of Federal, State, and local prisoners;
(8) increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Federal expenditures through grant programs such as those dealing with health care; mental health care; disease prevention; crime prevention, investigation, and prosecution; prison construction, maintenance, and operation; race relations; poverty; unemployment; and homelessness; and
(9) reduce the costs that prison rape imposes on interstate commerce.