US federal women’s prison plagued by rampant staff sexual abuse to close

The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) is closing a federal women’s prison in California that has been plagued by rampant staff sexual abuse of incarcerated residents.

Colette Peters, the BoP director, said in a statement to the Associated Press on Monday that Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin is “not meeting expected standards and that the best course of action is to close the facility”.

The unusual closure announcement follows a series of criminal trials of former correctional officers found to have repeatedly sexually abused women in their custody at FCI Dublin, located 21 miles east of Oakland. A 2022 AP investigation also revealed that the facility was known among staff and residents as the “rape club” due to the widespread sexual violence by officers.

Peters said BoP had “taken unprecedented steps and provided a tremendous amount of resources to address culture, recruitment and retention, aging infrastructure – and most critical – employee misconduct”. The decision to shutter the embattled prison, she said, was “made after ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of those unprecedented steps and additional resources”.

FCI Dublin is one of six women-only federal prisons in the US, and the only one in the west. It currently incarcerates 605 people who will be transferred to other facilities, Peters said. No employees will be losing their jobs, she added.

Eight FCI Dublin employees have been charged with sexually abusing incarcerated women since 2021, according to the AP. Five have pleaded guilty and two were convicted at trial, including Ray Garcia, the former warden who ran the facility. One case is still pending.

Advocates for the incarcerated residents have said the abuse documented in the criminal proceedings does not capture the full extent of the extensive misconduct, and eight FCI Dublin residents sued BoP last year. Their complaint alleged that incarcerated residents continued to face severe retaliation for reporting sexual misconduct, including being placed in solitary confinement.

Last year, the Guardian reported on the case of a former FCI Dublin resident who reported being sexually abused by multiple guards, but after completing her sentence was transferred to US immigration custody threatened with deportation. Advocates said last year that several survivors of sexual abuse in the prison were deported and that dozens more were threatened with removal from the US.

FCI Dublin is one of many women’s prisons in the US to be plagued with major sexual abuse scandals. The two state women’s prisons in California have also faced repeated controversies surrounding guards harassing and assaulting residents, and retaliating against those who speak out. One former state guard was charged last year with nearly 100 sexual abuse counts, accused of violating at least 22 women in custody.

In 2022, the US Senate reported that staff have sexually abused women in custody in at least two-thirds of BoP facilities, finding that some women were abused for months or years on end.