Us to Pay Roughly $116 Million to Settle Lawsuits Over Systemic Sexual Abuse at the California Women’s Prison
New York— The United States government will pay about $116 million to settle lawsuits filed by more than 100 women who claim they were raped or mistreated at a now-closed federal prison in California known as the “rape club” due to widespread staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct.
According to settlements announced Tuesday, the Justice Department will pay an average of $1.1 million to each of the 103 women who sued the Bureau of Prisons over their treatment at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.
The agreements were reached on the same day that a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a settlement in a separate class-action case requiring the Bureau of Prisons to open some facilities to a court-appointed monitor and publicly acknowledge mistreatment at FCI Dublin.
“We were sentenced to prison, not to be assaulted and abused,” Aimee Chavira, a case plaintiff and former Dublin prisoner, stated.
“I hope this settlement will help survivors, like me, as they begin to heal – but money will not repair the harm that BOP did to us, or free survivors who continue to suffer in prison, or bring back survivors who were deported and separated from their families,” Chavira told the court.
The Bureau of Prisons announced the settlements in a statement on Tuesday.
According to the organization, it “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior and takes seriously its duty to protect the individuals in our custody as well as maintain the safety of our employees and community.”
The settlements announced on Tuesday address an initial wave of lawsuits seeking monetary compensation from the Bureau of Prisons after former warden Ray Garcia and other workers at FCI Dublin were sentenced to jail for sexually abusing inmates. Subsequent lawsuits have yet to be settled.
According to the Bureau of Prisons and the plaintiffs’ attorneys, individual settlement amounts were determined through a third-party procedure that included in-depth interviews with each lady.
An AP investigation revealed a long-standing culture of abuse and cover-ups at the institution. That reporting prompted more attention from Congress, as well as promises from the Bureau of Prisons to repair problems and modify the prison culture.
The claims describe a “pervasive culture of sexual misconduct and retaliation” and claim that the Bureau of Prisons “deliberately ignored alarming warning signs and sex abuse allegations” at the low-security prison located 21 miles (34 kilometers) east of Oakland.
Individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuits with the help of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition, the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, and other organizations.
The plaintiffs included a transgender former detainee who accused Garcia of abusing him and forcing him to touch Garcia’s genitals in a recreation area away from monitoring cameras. Later, the inmate said Garcia brought him pills to keep him quiet.
Another plaintiff claimed that Ross Klinger, her supervisor on the prison’s recycling team, had sexual relations with her in a storage container, contacted her via email and Snapchat, and drove her to a motel for sex twice after she was released to a halfway home.
Another complainant claimed that John Bellhouse, a safety administrator, forced himself on her by putting his foot on his office door to trap her inside. When she reported the abuse to an internal prison investigator, she claims he said, “If it’s not on camera, you’re beat.”
Since 2021, at least eight FCI Dublin workers have been accused of sexually abusing convicts. Five pleaded guilty. Two people were convicted at trial. Another case is pending.
Garcia was convicted in 2022 of molesting three detainees and is currently serving a 70-month jail sentence. Klinger pled guilty to molesting at least two convicts and was sentenced to five years’ supervised release. Bellhouse was convicted of sexually abusing two convicts and is currently serving a 63-month jail sentence.
Some detainees who were accused of abuse at FCI Dublin claim they have been victims of similar misconduct at other institutions, and the Associated Press has discovered multiple arrests and convictions of Bureau of Prisons employees for sexually abusing convicts at other federal facilities.
“It was impossible for survivors to escape the culture of abuse that permeated FCI Dublin,” plaintiffs’ attorney Deborah Golden stated. “Nobody was safe. Even those who were not molested lived in constant fear that it may happen to them at any time.
She called the anguish faced by FCI Dublin’s victims “a searing indictment of our entire prison system’s failure to confront its longstanding abuse crisis” and stated that the settlements “sound an urgent alarm to policymakers and politicians” to ensure it does not happen again.
Following AP reporting on the agency’s numerous faults, President Joe Biden signed legislation to tighten oversight.
In settling the class-action case, the Bureau of Prisons and plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a proposed consent decree outlining some measures, including the appointment of a monitor to oversee the treatment of almost 500 ex-Dublin convicts currently incarcerated in more than a dozen federal prisons across the country.
As part of the settlement, agency director Colette Peters “will issue a formal, public acknowledgment to victims of staff sexual abuse at FCI Dublin”.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed on December 5 that FCI Dublin would be permanently closed following a security and infrastructure evaluation after its interim closure in April.
The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that it agreed to “the substantive terms of a proposed settlement to resolve all injunctive claims” in the class-action case, but that “the decision to permanently close (FCI Dublin) is not a result of the agreement.”
Source: US to pay nearly $116M to settle lawsuits over rampant sexual abuse at California women’s prison