Several court cases lead to PREA’s passage. These cases directly influenced the shaping of PREA’s policy. The case often cited as most influential in leading to the passage of PREA is the 1994 case of Farmer v. Brennan. Dee Farmer, a male-to-female transsexual, was incarcerated with the general male population in a US Penitentiary in Indiana. While there, she was repeatedly raped, beaten by other inmates, and acquired HIV as a result. In the court filing, she claimed that the prison administration should have known that she was particularly vulnerable to sexual violence because she was transsexual. The US Supreme Court ruled in her favor. The US Supreme Court agreed that it was the responsibility of prison officials to prevent prisoners from harming each other, to the point where prison officials who were “deliberately indifferent” were ruled liable under the Eighth Amendment (Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.) However, the court did not make prison officials liable for all violence between inmates.

The case of Women Prisoners of DC Department of Corrections v. District of Columbia, 1994, was filed by a group of women prisoners in the District of Columbia. The inmates claimed that their constitutional rights had been violated by sexual abuse from prison staff. The women inmates claimed the male staff had used physical force and threats of physical force to make them engage in sexual activity. They also claimed that the male prison staff invaded their privacy by entering their living areas without announcing their presence, sexually harassed them, raped them, and created a hostile, sexualized environment. The women claimed this hostile sexualized environment worsened the negative effects of the abuse that most of these women had suffered in their personal lives before they got to jail. The court found in favor of the women inmates on grounds that their 8th Amendment Rights had been violated. This was the first case where the US Supreme Court addressed prisoner rape.

The case of Neal v Michigan and Anderson v Michigan, (both 1997), two class action suits filed against the Michigan Department of Corrections. The cases involved over 500 women inmates and former inmates claiming repeated rape and other sexual abuse by prison staff while incarcerated in two Michigan correctional facilities. These suits were not filed against the guards at the facilities, but against the Michigan Department of Corrections and its administrative personnel. As one of the attorneys representing the women put it, “Although you may not have known that Guard A was assaulting Prisoner A, you had enough notice of a sexually pervasive prison environment that appropriate action should have been taken.” The case was filed in 1997, but was not settled until 2008. The settlement amount was $100 million for the women. The settlement was paid by the State of Michigan and its taxpayers.

In 2001, Human Rights Watch released a paper, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons. The release of that paper encouraged action and discussion on a national level. The paper surveyed 34 states’ prison systems and documented in gruesome detail accounts of prisoner rape and sexual abuse. The study was then featured on the front page of The New York Times, and later other publications. PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) was backed by a number of groups, including Just Detention International, the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Amnesty International USA, Focus on the Family, Human Rights Watch, NAACP, National Association of Evangelicals, Salvation Army and many other groups. PREA was co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans in Congress and was passed by unanimous consent in the House and Senate, and signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003. PREA was passed as a result of the attention from these cases and the paper, “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons”