Dec. 13 (UPI) — Employees have sexually abused female prisoners in at least two-thirds of federal prisons that have held women over the past decade, according to a report issued Tuesday.
The report detailing the widespread abuse was produced by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after an eight-month bipartisan investigation.
It details how Federal Bureau of Prisons employees sexually abused female prisoners and failed “to prevent, detect, and stop recurring sexual abuse, including by senior prison officials.”
“Our findings are deeply disturbing and demonstrate, in my view, that the BOP is failing systemically to prevent, detect, and address sexual abuse of prisoners by its own employees,” subcommittee chair Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., during his opening remarks Tuesday, ahead of the report’s release.
“Let me be absolutely clear: this situation is intolerable.”
The abuse ranged from forcing prisoners to pose for nude photos to abusive and unnecessary gynecological procedures performed on women in Department of Homeland Security custody.
Abuse was not limited to low-ranking officials, either, the subcommittee found.
“At FCI Dublin in California, for example, both the warden and the chaplain sexually abused female prisoners,” Ossoff said.
“We found that BOP has failed to successfully implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA. In the case of FCI Dublin, the PREA compliance officer — the official specifically tasked with ensuring compliance with the federal law whose purpose is the elimination of prison rape — was himself sexually abusing prisoners.”
The Dublin facility became known as the “rape club.” The prison’s former warden was found guilty of eight counts of sexually abusing women after the FBI discovered nude photos on his computer.
In another case, a Florida prison transferred all female prisoners out of the facility two days before a PREA audit, “making it impossible for the auditor to interview female prisoners despite the legal requirement that they interview inmates as part of the audit.”
Ossoff and the subcommittee pointed to a backlog of 8,000 internal affairs cases at the Bureau of Prisons, including at least hundreds of sexual abuse allegations against BOP employees that remain unresolved.
Several women testified Tuesday about their experiences, and said they were often scared of reporting them because of fear of reprisal. Retaliation was almost always guaranteed.
“And given the fear of retaliation by survivors of sexual abuse, the apparent apathy by senior BOP officials at the facility, regional office, and headquarters levels, and severe shortcomings in the investigative practices implemented by BOP’s Office of Internal Affairs and the Department of Justice Inspector General, I suspect the extent of abuse is significantly wider,” Ossoff said.
“In July of this year, the former Director of BOP testified before this very Subcommittee and insisted that BOP was able to keep female prisoners safe from sexual abuse by BOP employees. We now know that that statement was unequivocally false.”
