from the top bunk of his bed. When correctional officers cut him down, Hulin was comatose, and he died four months later. Hulin had been raped, beaten, and forced to perform oral sex within three days of his arrival at the unit. He asked to be placed in protective custody and was turned down. After his suicide, a picture of his small shoulders and thin face circulated on major news networks and Hulin became a symbol of two related phenomena. One was the prevalence of new laws that allowed youth to be sent to adult prisons, rather than juvenile facilities, for non-violent crimes (Hulin had committed second-degree arson, resulting in less than $500 of property damage). The other was prison rape. Among prisoners and their keepers, Hulin’s experienceto passage hoped it would create standards to protect particular classes of prisoners. Recent news reports on PREA have focused almost exclusively on the plight of transgender and gay inmates, but originally the spotlight was on a much larger population: the young and inexperienced. “There was an assumption from the beginning of PREA that we wanted to protect the vulnerable,” says Cindy Struckman-Johnson, a University of South Dakota psychologist. “Age was a given. It’s the number one vulnerability.” Struckman-Johnson served on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which formed as a requirement of the 2003 law. The commission held a series of public hearings, and one of the first to testify was Steven Babbitt, who had entered an adult prison at age 18 for a non-violent theft. After