A decade after President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, sexual abuse is still rampant in America’s corrections facilities, with a growing number of accusations lodged against the very officers charged with protecting their inmates.

Nearly half of all sexual assault accusations reported in U.S. correctional facilities in 2011 were aimed at prison guards or staff, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. That was up 18 percent since 2006.

But the challenge for officials is sorting through cases in which evidence indicates the commission of a crime and those in which prisoners may have been motivated solely by a desire to harm guards they don’t like – a concern corrections unions have raised for years. The report found that only about 10 percent of reported sexual assaults in prison could be substantiated.

Among the accused perpetrators, less than half were prosecuted and 22 percent remained in their jobs, the report said.

‘An inmate is just as threatened by staff as … by other inmates – this wasn’t the prevalent thought just a few years ago,” said Jamie Fellner, who served on the National Rape Elimination Commission that was created by Congress […]