By C1 Staff
AUSTIN — In contrast to former governor Rick Perry, Gov. Greg Abbott has said that he will comply as much as possible with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a law designed to curb prison rapes.
The Texas Chronicle reports that Abbott wrote in a letter to the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch that the state is working to follow the provisions of PREA “whenever feasible,” after Perry called the law “counterproductive and unnecessarily cumbersome.”
Abbott said he could not certify that Texas is currently in compliance, “every facility that has completed the PREA audit process has been certified as fully compliant.”
The Texas prison system began the PREA auditing process in 2014, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and 32 units out of 108 have been audited thus far. Thirty of those facilities have met all standards, and two are pending completion of the audit process.
The agency plans to have all facilities go through the PREA auditing process over a three-year period.
Last Friday was the deadline for governors to detail to the DOJ whether they were in compliance or how they were working to do so.