A case of cost and moral obligation

''I sentence the defendant to two years of rape for the crime of . . . .''

You can be assured you'll never hear a sentence like that delivered from any bench. Ever.

And yet, year after year, thousands of men, women and juveniles emerge from America's prisons and jails having served time for their misdeeds — plus a side sentence that never appeared on any document, delivered sometimes by staff, and sometimes by fellow inmates: rape.

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics keeps track of sexual abuses in the nation's corrections system. This January, the agency released its report for 2007 and 2008, estimating that nearly 217,000 inmates were raped or sexually assaulted. About 17,000 of the victims were juveniles.

Rape is not a pleasant subject to raise at any time. Prison rape even less so. It isn't too hard from the outside to slip into an ''out of sight, out of mind'' frame of thinking when people are sent away: They got what they had coming to them, and tough luck if they become prey to other lawbreakers. As a class of people, inmates don't generally inspire much sympathy.

Sexual assault behind bars is a common and sordid enough reality that in 2003 Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (note that the title said elimination, not reduction, not punishment, but a declaration to stamp it out altogether).

Six years after the legislation, in June 2009, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission created by the law released a study, documenting a crime against the defenseless that is lodged deep in the culture of federal and state prisons as well as in county jails and local detention facilities.

The findings on prison sex assaults are among some of the most depressing reports around. Women, juveniles in adult prisons, gays and transgender individuals are especially vulnerable. Under threat of more violence or death at the hands of the aggressors, victims keep quiet and live a daily hell of fear. Those who summon the courage to report abuse to prison officials more often than not encounter a wall of official silence and inaction.

Disturbing still, inmates are as much at risk from staff (the very people paid to maintain law and order) as from fellow inmates, female staff members no less likely than males to prey on those in their custody.

It is difficult to come away from such reports thinking corrections facilities are much about correcting anything at all. More than we may want to accept, there are enough individual stories to suggest inmates are returning to communities damaged in ways they weren't before they went to jail or prison. Some return infected with serious sexually transmitted diseases. Others live burdened by mental problems from the trauma of rape.

If there's relief in the dismal picture, it is that across the country, there are institutions that manage not to burden their inmates with an additional sentence of sexual abuse. If the moral argument to protect the defenseless is not enough persuasion, the potential of lawsuits brought by violated inmates certainly would prove sufficient incentive to act.

One has to believe the rape-elimination law was enacted in good faith to relieve all of America's inmates of that hidden sentence. It is a moral obligation of the government's to defend the people it undertakes to control, citizens and noncitizens alike, no matter the criminal path that led them there.

The Department of Justice had 12 months, from the day it received the commission's report and recommended standards, to review and write implementation rules to help stamp out sexual predation in the nation's corrections system. That due date passed last summer. A public comment period closed this April on a draft of the final standards submitted early this year by Attorney General Eric Holder.

Nearly two years after the commission urged national standards to remove a shameful failing in our penal system, the Department of Justice estimates the final rules will be published by the end of the year.

In writing the 2003 law, Congress seemed to hedge, in a crucial instance. It called for standards that do not impose a ''substantial'' financial burden on institutions. And so when governments are cutting back, laying off staff, cutting prison services, even privatizing prisons, the question is: How ''substantial'' are we prepared to get to do all the things that need to be done — the better surveillance, the vigilance, the staff training — to eliminate a crime hidden behind barbed wires, a crime we would just as soon not hear about?