A California women’s prison so plagued by sexual abuse that it was nicknamed by inmates and workers the “rape club,” the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced Monday.
Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters said the agency was closing the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, where more than half a dozen correctional officers and the former warden were charged or convicted of sexual abuse of inmates.
Peters said the office has “taken unprecedented action and provided a considerable amount of resources to address culture, recruitment and retention, aging infrastructure – and most critically – employee misconduct.”
“Despite these measures and resources, we have determined that FCI Dublin is not meeting expected standards and that the best solution is to close the facility. This decision is made after ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of these unprecedented measures and additional resources.
She said “deactivation planning is currently underway” for the prison which houses 605 inmates. The facility east of Oakland is one of the few federal women’s prisons in Western states.
“It’s a remarkable admission,” said attorney Michael Bien, whose firm is representing inmates in a class-action lawsuit over prison conditions. Prison authorities “say they cannot run this prison safely.” He said the closure does not solve the underlying problem. “How does this solve the problems? The same policies and procedures are in place at other prisons. It’s not the building that did anything wrong. »
Bien said lawyers representing Dublin detainees had not been informed of the closure announcement. He added that a federal judge had just been appointed special master of the prison in the class action and that same judge had ordered that anyone involved in the proceedings could not be transferred from Dublin without his authorization.
Women housed in Dublin will be transferred to other facilities as close as possible to their location of release and no employees will lose their jobs due to the closure, Peters said. The long-term fate of the federal facility is unclear. “Closing the facility may be temporary but result in a change in mission,” she said. Among those detained at the prison were actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman after their convictions in the college admissions scandal.
“This is an unprecedented decision to opt for closure,” said Amaris Montes, West Coast litigation and advocacy director for Right Behind Bars. “It took a while for Dublin.”
These developments are the latest twist in a years-long scandal surrounding the facility. Since an FBI investigation was launched and resulted in arrests in 2021, eight FCI Dublin employees have been accused of sexually abusing inmates. Five pleaded guilty and two were convicted by juries. Another employee is expected to go to trial this year.
Maria Ledesma, a former inmate released from Dublin after two years in 2022, said she was surprised the closure took so long. “I wish it had happened sooner,” the 52-year-old Salt Lake City woman said. During her time there, she witnessed frequent sexual abuse. “There, girls were raped every day,” she said.
Ledesma remembers she was returning from her prison job when she heard footsteps and spotted two people between buildings. “There was the principal, who was pulling up his pants,” she said. “He looked at me, I looked at him and I knew in that moment I had to put my head down and keep walking.”
The closure comes after the FBI raided the prison last month and Warden Art Dulgov — just months into his tenure — and three other top executives were removed from their posts by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said “the FBI investigation into the facility exposed a toxic culture that enabled years of sexual misconduct by employees, five of between them pleading guilty to related charges and two being convicted by juries of ordinary Californians.”
U.S. Senator Alex Padilla called the announcement “long overdue” and said “it is an absolute failure that the horrific crimes committed at this facility have persisted for this long.”
Dulgov was the third new leader of the low-security prison since Warden Ray J. Garcia was convicted of sexually assaulting several women serving time there. Last year, Garcia was sentenced to 70 months in prison for sexually abusing incarcerated women and lying to the FBI as part of a cover-up.
The FBI raid that collected documents and computers came after Dulgov transferred an inmate who was a witness in a lawsuit against the prison, violating a judge’s order barring the movement of witnesses without the court approval.
Last month, a correctional officer who worked at FCI Dublin was sentenced to 72 months in federal prison. Nakie Nunley pleaded guilty to sexually abusing five female inmates and admitted to engaging in sexual acts with two other female inmates at the facility. All of his victims worked at a call center run by Federal Prison Industries at the prison, where he supervised them.
Following the raid, Nancy T. McKinney, a top supervisor in the Regional Bureau of Prisons, was named Dublin’s acting warden. She is the fourth person to hold the position since Garcia was removed from office.
The raid came as the number of women who filed complaints against guards and staff, alleging sexual abuse and retaliation, surpassed 63. That number, lawyers say, is expected to exceed 100.
It is a crime for any prison employee to engage in sexual activity with an incarcerated person, and a person behind bars cannot consent to it.
In March 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez cited the prison’s “culture of sexual abuse” in sentencing Garcia, the former warden, who she said perpetuated that culture.
A federal jury in Oakland found him guilty of three counts of sexual intercourse with an incarcerated person, four counts of improper sexual contact and one count of lying to the FBI.
He groped three incarcerated women and made them pose naked for photos. Before his sentencing, one of his victims told Garcia: “You are a predator and a pervert. You are a disgrace to the federal government.
In 2022, former prison chaplain James Theodore Highhouse was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually assaulting a female inmate at FCI Dublin. Highhouse engaged in predatory behavior with at least six women from 2014 to 2019, according to prosecutors. He claimed that God brought them together, citing the Bible and referencing King David’s many wives to justify his actions.
“There is a culture of rot in Dublin,” another federal judge said at Highhouse’s sentencing. “It is important that the world is aware of this egregious conduct and serious sanction.”
The class action lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons alleges that FCI Dublin and other federal agencies failed to prevent, detect and investigate sexual abuse, thereby placing those detained at the prison at substantial risk of assault sexual. The prison also houses transgender and non-binary people.
The lawsuit alleges that as the correctional officers were being sentenced, other guards continued to sexually harass, grope and assault inmates and subject some people to “transphobic harassment.”
Allegations of sexual assault in Dublin date back to the 1990s. Four employees had previously been convicted of sexually abusing inmates. These incidents, along with civil lawsuits, forced the prison to engage in reforms.
But advocates say those reforms were “ultimately ineffective or abandoned.” In the early 2010s, they note, “a dozen FCI Dublin employees were fired for sexual abuse, including one who filmed himself having sex with inmates and stored tapes in a prison locker – but none were arrested. »
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