AP investigation: Women’s prison fostered culture of abuse
By Michael Balsamo and Michael R. Sisak | Associated Press
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. The allegations at Dublin, which so far have resulted in four arrests, are endemic of a larger problem within the beleaguered Bureau of Prisons. In 2020, the same year some of the women at Dublin complained, 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.
She said the agency is fully 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. Union officials say the vast majority of Dublin employees are honest and hardworking, and are upset that the allegations and actions of some workers have tarnished the prison’s reputation.
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 over her treatment, said she was fired from her prison commissary job as retaliation. When she went to report her firing, she said a Dublin counselor took her abuser’s side, responding: “Child, do you want him to lose his job?” The woman was moved to a different prison a week later.
The FBI said Friday that it is continuing to investigate and is looking for anyone who may 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. 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, prosecutors said.
Klinger told the women he wanted to marry them and father their children, even proposing to one of them with a diamond ring after she was discharged to a halfway house, prosecutors said. Another prisoner aware of the abuse reported Klinger to the Bureau of Prisons in June 2020, according to the FBI, but he was still allowed to transfer to a federal jail in San Diego months later.
John Russell Bellhouse, 39, a prison safety administrator, is scheduled to be arraigned this month on charges he sexually abused an inmate he called his “girlfriend” from February to December 2020. He was placed on leave in March and arrested in December.
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