Irony...
I found an interesting article that was posted this past April about Ronnie’s prison…
http://www.amarillo.com/stories/041308/new_10088328.shtml
National prison survey: Clements second in sexual assaults
By Dan Packard
dan.packard@amarillo.com
Publication Date: 04/13/08
A national survey of prison inmates showed the William P. Clements Jr. Unit near Amarillo to have the second-highest rate of sexual victimization.
According to the survey conducted on behalf of the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, 13.9 percent of Clements inmates reported being sexually victimized.
Only the Estelle Unit outside Huntsville ranked higher with 15.7 percent rate.
Five Texas prisons rank in the survey's top 10. The other three are Allred near Wichita Falls, 9.9 percent; Mountain View outside Gatesville, 9.5 percent; and Coffield near Tennessee Colony, 9.3 percent. All are men's prisons, except Mountain View.
The national average was 4.5 percent.
Only 234 cases of alleged sexual assaults were reported to the Office of the Inspector General in all Texas prisons in 2007, a figure which makes Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, skeptical of the survey's accuracy.
"Sex abuse within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is not a common occurrence based on the number of allegations reported to TDCJ or the Office of the Inspector General, which is not consistent with the results obtained through the anonymous survey," she said. "The confidential nature of the survey precludes further investigation, so it is difficult to make definitive statements regarding the findings."
The survey polled 23,398 inmates from April through August 2007 at 146 adult state and federal confinement facilities. Of those, 1,109 prisoners reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization.
About 2.1 percent of all inmates reported a sexual incident with another inmate, and 2.9 percent reported an incident with a prison staff member.
Officials at Clements, a medium-security facility housing about 3,600 prisoners, could not be reached for comment.
Lyons said many allegations of sexual victimization do not include the basic legal elements of sexual assault and could include legitimate security precautions such as strip searches.
"Texas prison officials have a zero tolerance policy against sexual encounters of any kind within the system," she said. "The TDCJ, in conjunction with several independent entities such as the Office of the Inspector General and the Special Prosecution Unit, has an extensive program aimed at preventing, investigating and prosecuting sexual assault and other acts of violence.
"This program is in operation at all TDCJ correctional facilities, including the five units specifically mentioned in this study.”