The AP found that, in California, a third of all inmate homicides happen to sex offenders. That may not seem like much. But when you consider that the California corrections system is rife with gang warfare, the fact that one third of these victims were almost definitely not in gangs is telling…half of all inmates murdered in Maine’s prisons system were convicted of sex offenses. A quarter of Oklahoma’s inmate homicide victims in 10 years bore convictions for sex crimes. At a conservative estimate, 75 percent of murder victims in Nebraska prisons were sex offenders.

None of these statistics offends many people; safeguarding sex offenders is repugnant to most.

Prison administrators are often complicit with these homicides. When one inmate in the Tarrant County, Texas Jail killed his cellmate, a man convicted of sex crimes against children, an officer and two nurses watched the attack for 11 minutes before intervening. While investigators ferreted out and charged the inmates who assaulted guards and started fires in the 2015 Nebraska prison riot that left two men convicted of sex crimes dead, no one has solved the murder mysteries from those same events.

______________________

Earlier this month, a person required to register was drowned by his cellmate in a Jail toilet. After that incident, FAC initiated a campaign to educate inmates on Facts vs. Myths of people required to register. Our first step is to place a quarter-page ad in Prison Legal News, a widely read inmate publication. We will run the ad for three consecutive editions. We are hopeful that the ad will dispel some of the myths about people on the registry, reduce the stigma and help protect our loved ones who are incarcerated. The ad will be funded by our general fund and we asked for members to help fund the ad by making contributions to our general fund. For those who did, much appreciated!