WASHINGTON /Christian News/ — “Don’t even think of telling. It’s your word against mine, and you will lose. Do you think they’ll believe an inmate like you or a fine upstanding officer like me?”

Marilyn Shirley heard these words as she was brutally raped by a federal prison guard in Texas 10 years ago. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that prison rape is endured each year by:

• Some one in every eight juveniles in custody
• One in 20 adult inmates
• A total of 60,500 victims

On Tuesday, Aug. 17, Shirley will join a bi-partisan coalition of religious, political, human rights and civil rights groups, usually at odds, to unveil a joint letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Signed by 35 organizations, the letter urges Holder to adopt prison rape elimination standards mandated by 2003 legislation and completed 14 months ago. The attorney general missed the June 2010 deadline to adopt these standards designed to end sexual abuse in prisons, eradicate the long-term harm to survivors, their families and their communities, and ensure safety and justice for the incarcerated, among other goals.

Standing in lockstep with Prison Fellowship, other coalition members calling for an immediate end to prison rape include:

• Just Detention International
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Focus on the Family
• NAACP
• Family Research Council
• The Sentencing Project
• National Association of Evangelicals
• Open Society Policy Center
• Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
• Human Rights Watch
• United Methodist Board of Church and Society

“No matter how terrible the crime, no prison sentence includes being raped,” said Prison Fellowship Vice President Pat Nolan, a former federal inmate who leads the organization’s Justice Fellowship criminal justice reform program. “Victims of prison rape are wounded physically and psychologically. They carry those wounds home with them when they return to our communities. We call on Attorney General Holder to put an end to this stain on our nation’s character and quickly adopt standards to hold prison officials accountable for eliminating rape in America’s prisons..”

Prison Fellowship’s Nolan helped develop the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed unanimously by Congress in 2003 and served on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC), tasked with developing standards to guide corrections officials in preventing prison rapes and hold them accountable for achieving results. The NPREC presented those standards to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in June 2009, and the DOJ was statutorily required to adopt them by June 2010. That deadline has passed and the DOJ expects to take another year to review them. The letter-signers caution that any further delay will mean that tens of thousands of additional men, women and youth will be raped in America’s prisons.