While San Francisco was honing its rape-prevention protocols, the state's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, was joking that he "would love to personally escort" Enron CEO Ken Lay "to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.' "

Prison rape cases are difficult to prove, and juries can be stingy with damages:

In Butler v. Dowd, a Missouri jury found that three inmates had been raped due to deliberate indifference from the staff, violating the inmates' Eighth Amendment right to be free of "cruel and unusual" punishment. In another case in Connecticut, James v. Tilghman, a jury found that corrections officials' decision to place an inmate in a cell with a suspected sexual predator similarly violated the prisoner's constitutional rights. In those cases, the juries awarded the inmates $1 and nothing, respectively. Both "awards" were upheld on appeal.

[hat tip to defense lawyer Todd Bussert]

Update: This article about 17 year old Wayne Boatright is sad. If we are going to sentence juvenile offenders to adult terms, we have an obligation to create safe prison facilities for them:

Delores Boatwright remembers when her grandson, Wayne, confided on the phone that he was afraid of some of the older men in prison with him, afraid that he would "lose his manhood." The 17-year-old Boatwright asked to be put in protective custody, a locked, solitary cell, where he stayed from mid-October until Dec. 15. He signed himself out because he didn't want to spend Christmas Day, his 18th birthday, alone, his grandmother said. About two months later, on the night of Feb. 21, he was raped and strangled, apparently by adult inmates.