Corruption, Federal Prisons

 Well, I never worried about being raped.

Berman's daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.

Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.

Most of the guards retired before they could be fired, meaning they walked with their retirement benefits intact. Over the last five years, Berman's daughter and the rest of those women were failed by nearly everyone around them at every level of government.

Federal Prison Guards Confessed to Rape and Got Away With It 

 The following makes sense to me, only because it sounds like all the other protections "available" to prisoners:

Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in 2003. It was supposed to create zero-tolerance policies for sexual abuse in U.S. prisons and jails. PREA is mostly toothless, though—and in the federal prison system, festering corruption made it a bad joke. In December 2022, the former warden of a federal women's prison in California was convicted of sexually abusing incarcerated women. He was also the prison's PREA compliance officer.

The last paragraph below extends, in my opinion, further than the crimes detailed int eh story:

Last December, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released the results of a 10-month investigation into sexual abuse of incarcerated women in the federal prison system.

The report found that the Bureau of Prisons has failed to implement PREA and that long delays in investigating complaints created a backlog of more than 8,000 internal affairs cases. The report concluded that these failures "allowed serious, repeated sexual abuse in at least four facilities to go undetected," including Coleman.

"BOP's internal affairs practices have failed to hold employees accountable, and multiple admitted sexual abusers were not criminally prosecuted as a result," the report said.

 I think I see now how one CO was removed from his position in handcuffs and then restored to his position, or, at least, why he was not criminal prosecuted:

Internal Affairs then forced the correctional officers to sit for sworn interviews. Once those officers confessed to sexual assault, the possibility of criminal prosecution evaporated. The Supreme Court ruled in a 1967 case, Garrity v. New Jersey, that when a government employee is compelled to answer questions under oath as a condition of employment, it would violate the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination for prosecutors to use those statements.

By compelling prison guards to admit to criminal conduct, BOP internal affairs investigators got enough dirt to kick them out of the agency but also shielded them from future criminal prosecution.

And this sounds familiar, too, and a reason for no one writing up a CO at Fort Dix:

There are innumerable small ways a correctional officer can make life difficult for an inmate. At the pettiest level, getting on the wrong side of an officer could lead to losing a desirable work assignment. Maybe your stuff starts getting tossed during "random" searches, or your requests to see a nurse get ignored. You get write-ups for ticky-tacky disciplinary infractions.

The Coleman women also all say it was well-known that if you reported a correctional officer for misconduct, you would be transferred to another federal prison, worse than Coleman and hundreds of miles from your family. If you weren't sent to another federal prison, there was another possible destination. When Coleman women had to be held in higher security housing, either because of a disciplinary infraction or for their own safety—or at least that was the justification—they could be sent to the nearby Sumter County Detention Center.

Why did this happen – as well as the corruption I saw? Prisons dehumanize people. I suspect the guards are as dehumanized as the inmates, but the guards are in a position of power to institute and maintain the inmates' degradation.

For those that were incarcerated at Coleman, Ursiny says retaliation started as soon as the lawsuit hit the docket. Ursiny says officers started calling the women who joined the suit "homewreckers," "thirsty bitches," and "whores." She remembers one night a guard flipped on the lights in the dormitory and started screaming obscenities at them.

 All of that brutalization occurs, of course, at the behest of the American people.

The BOP announced in December, shortly after the Senate PSI report was released, that it would prioritize applications for early release from victims of sexual misconduct. So far it has struggled to follow through on the promise. In April, an investigation by The Appeal uncovered "sexual violence, retaliation, and other constitutional abuses" at another federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.

Congress continues to pressure the BOP from the outside, too. Sens. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.), Mike Braun (R–Ind.), and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) introduced the Federal Prison Oversight Act earlier this year. The bill would require the Department of Justice's inspector general to conduct detailed inspections of each of the BOP's 122 facilities and, more significantly, to create an independent Justice Department ombudsman to investigate complaints.

At the end of last year, Biden signed the Prison Camera Reform Act, which will require the BOP to fix its broken surveillance camera systems and improve their coverage.

 

sch 9/14