At federal women’s prison in California, a toxic culture of sexual abuse, cover-ups

The Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif. | Ben Margot / AP

Inside one of the only federal women’s prisons in the United States, inmates say they have been subjected to rampant sexual abuse by correctional officers and even the warden and that they often were threatened or punished when they tried to speak up.

Prisoners and workers at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., have a name for what’s gone on there: “The rape club.”

An Associated Press investigation has found a permissive and toxic culture at the Bay Area lockup, enabling years of sexual misconduct by predatory employees and cover-ups that largely hve kept the abuse out of the public eye.

The AP obtained internal federal Bureau of Prisons documents, statements and recordings from inmates, interviewed current and former prison employees and inmates and reviewed thousands of pages of court records from criminal and civil cases involving Dublin prison staff.

Together, they detail:

• How inmates’ accusations against members of the mostly male staff were ignored or set aside.
• How prisoners could be sent to solitary confinement for reporting abuse.
• And how officials in charge of preventing and investigating sexual misconduct were themselves accused of abusing inmates or neglecting their concerns.

In one instance, a female inmate said a man who was her prison work supervisor taunted her by remarking “let the games begin” when he assigned her to work with a maintenance foreman she accused of rape.

Another worker said he wanted to get inmates pregnant.

The warden — the man in charge at Dublin — kept nude photos on his government-issued cellphone of a woman he is accused of assaulting.

One inmate said she was “overwhelmed with fear, anxiety and anger and cried uncontrollably” after enduring abuse and retaliation at Dublin.

Another said she contemplated suicide when her cries for help went unheeded and now suffers from severe anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Any sexual activity between a prison worker and an inmate is illegal. Correctional employees enjoy substantial power over inmates, controlling every aspect of their lives from mealtime to lights out, and there is no scenario in which an inmate can give consent.

The accusations at Dublin, which so far have resulted in four arrests, are emblematic of a larger problem within the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons. In 2020, there were 422 complaints of staff-on-inmate sexual abuse across the system of 122 prisons and 153,000 inmates. The agency said it substantiated only four of those complaints and that 290 are still being investigated.

A hotbed of corruption and misconduct, the federal prison system has been plagued by crises in recent years, including widespread criminal activity among employees, critically low staffing levels that have hampered responses to emergencies, the rapid spread of COVID-19, a failed response to the pandemic and dozens of escapes.

Last month, embattled director Michael Carvajal announced he was resigning.

A week ago, two inmates were killed in a gang fight at a federal penitentiary in Texas, prompting a nationwide lockdown.

The AP contacted lawyers for every Dublin prison employee charged with sexual abuse or named as a defendant in a lawsuit involving accusations of abuse and tried reaching the men directly through available phone numbers and email addresses. None responded to interview requests. A government lawyer representing one of the men being sued declined to comment.

Thahesha Jusino, the new warden at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., says she’ll “work tirelessly to reaffirm the Bureau of Prisons’ zero tolerance for sexual abuse and sexual harassment.”

Thahesha Jusino, who is taking over as Dublin’s warden at the end of the month, promised to “work tirelessly to reaffirm the Bureau of Prisons’ zero tolerance for sexual abuse and sexual harassment.”

Jusino said the agency is cooperating with the Justice Department’s inspector general on active investigations and noted that a “vast majority” of these cases were referred for investigation by the Bureau of Prisons itself.

“A culture of misconduct or actions not representative of the BOP’s Core Values will not be tolerated,” she said.

The Justice Department said in a written statement: “Zero tolerance means exactly that. The Justice Department is committed to both holding accountable any staff who violate their position of trust and to preventing these crimes from happening in the first place.”

FCI Dublin, about 21 miles east of Oakland, opened in 1974. It was converted in 2012 to one of six women-only facilities in the federal prison system. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman both served time there for their involvement in a college admissions bribery scandal.

As of Feb. 1, it had about 750 inmates, many serving sentences for drug crimes. There are increasingly more women behind bars, though they remain a minority — about 6.5% of the overall federal inmate population.

Union officials say most Dublin employees are honest and hardworking and that the actions of a few have tarnished the prison’s reputation.

“We have veterans, we have ex-law enforcement, we have good people, and they’re very traumatized,” Dublin union president Ed Canales said.

Inmates and prison workers who spoke to the AP did not want their names published for fear of retaliation.

Women made the first internal complaints to staff members about five years ago, court records and internal agency documents show, but it’s not clear whether those complaints went anywhere. The women say they were largely ignored and that the abuse continued.

One inmate who reported a 2017 sexual assault said she was told nothing would be done about her complaint because it was a “he said-she said.” The woman, who is now suing the Bureau of Prisons, said she was fired from her prison commissary job in retaliation. When she went to report her firing, she said a Dublin counselor took her abuser’s side, saying: “Child, do you want him to lose his job?” The woman was moved to a different prison a week later.

In 2019, another Dublin inmate sued — first on her own with handwritten papers, then with the backing of a San Francisco law firm — accusing a maintenance foreman of repeatedly raping her and saying that other workers facilitated the abuse and mocked her for it. When an internal prison investigator finally caught wind of what was happening, the woman said, she was the one who got punished, given three months in solitary confinement and a transfer to a prison in Alabama.

In 2020, another inmate’s report that Dublin workers were abusing inmates broke through to the Justice Department’s inspector general and the FBI, triggering a criminal investigation that has led to the arrest of four employees, including former warden Ray J. Garcia, in the past seven months. If convicted, each could face up to 15 years in prison, though in other recent cases sentences have ranged from three months to two years.

Two of the men are expected to plead guilty in federal court to charges of sexual abuse of a ward.

The Justice Department’s announcements of charges against two employees of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., including warden Ray J. Garcia.

None of the men accused in civil suits has been charged with any crime.

Several Dublin workers are under investigation, though it’s not clear whether the men accused in the lawsuits are among them.

The FBI said it is continuing to investigate and is looking for anyone who might have been victimized to come forward and speak with agents.

The former warden, arrested last September, is accused of molesting an inmate as she tried to push him away. According to prosecutors, Garcia made her and another inmate strip naked as he did rounds and took pictures that were found on his personal laptop computer and government-issued cell phone when the FBI raided his office and home last summer.

The women said the abuse ended when the pandemic exploded and inmates were locked in their cells.

Garcia later was promoted.

The Bureau of Prisons said it didn’t know about the abuse accusations until later.

“If they’re undressing, I’ve already looked,” Garcia, 54, told the FBI in July 2021, according to court records. “I don’t, like, schedule a time like, ‘You be undressed, and I’ll be there.’ ”

Garcia, who was placed on leave after the raid and retired a month after his arrest, also is accused of using his authority to intimidate one of his victims, telling her he was “close friends” with the person responsible for investigating staff misconduct and boasting that he could not be fired, prosecutors said.

Garcia — the highest-ranking federal prison official arrested in more than 10 years — led staff and inmate training on reporting abuse and complying with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, known as PREA, and had control over staff discipline for matters including sexual abuse.

He also was in charge of the legally required “rape elimination” compliance audit, first scheduled for early 2020 but not completed until last September — about the time he was arrested.

The Bureau of Prisons blamed the pandemic for the delay and said the audit, Dublin’s first since 2017, still hasn’t been finalized and can’t be made public.

Garcia appeared to take a hard line on abuse. In one of his first acts after he was named warden in November 2020, he recommended firing maintenance foreman William Martinez, accused of rape in the 2019 suit — albeit for what the staff disciplinary process narrowed to a finding of an “appearance of an inappropriate relationship with an inmate.”

In private, though, Garcia was flouting measures put in place to protect inmates from sexual abuse, and he later panicked that he would get caught for his own behavior, court records show. The woman Garcia is accused of assaulting told investigators that one instance of abuse happened while PREA officials were visiting the prison. She said Garcia assaulted her in a changing stall designed for PREA-compliant searches.

Martinez has denied the accusations and filed a discrimination complaint against the Bureau of Prisons with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has not been charged with any crime.