US to pay nearly $116M to settle lawsuits over rampant sexual abuse at California women's prison

[December 18, 2024]  By MICHAEL R. SISAK and MICHAEL BALSAMO

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct.

Under settlements approved Tuesday, the Justice Department will pay an average of about $1.1 million to each of 103 women who sued the Bureau of Prisons over their treatment at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.

The agreements were finalized the same day a federal judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit that requires the Bureau of Prisons to open some facilities to a court-appointed monitor and publicly acknowledge abuse at FCI Dublin.

“We were sentenced to prison, we were not sentenced to be assaulted and abused,” lawsuit plaintiff and former Dublin prisoner Aimee Chavira said.

“I hope this settlement will help survivors, like me, as they begin to heal – but money will not repair the harm that BOP did to us, or free survivors who continue to suffer in prison, or bring back survivors who were deported and separated from their families," Chavira said.

The Bureau of Prisons acknowledged the settlements in a statement Tuesday.

The agency said it “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior and takes seriously its duty to protect the individuals in our custody as well as maintain the safety of our employees and community."

Tuesday's settlements cover an initial wave of lawsuits seeking monetary compensation from the Bureau of Prisons after former warden Ray Garcia and other employees at FCI Dublin went to prison for sexually abusing inmates. Subsequent lawsuits have yet to be resolved.

The Bureau of Prisons and lawyers for the plaintiffs said individual settlement amounts were decided through a third-party process that included in-depth interviews with each woman.

An AP investigation found a culture of abuse and cover-ups that had persisted for years at the prison. That reporting led to increased scrutiny from Congress and pledges from the Bureau of Prisons that it would fix problems and change the culture at the prison.

The lawsuits describe a “pervasive culture of sexual misconduct and retaliation” and allege that the Bureau of Prisons “deliberately ignored alarming warning signs and sex abuse allegations” at the low-security facility about 21 miles (34 kilometers) east of Oakland.

They were filed by individual plaintiffs with the assistance of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition, the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and other groups.

The plaintiffs included a transgender former inmate who accused Garcia of molesting him and forcing him to touch Garcia's genitals in a recreation area that was out of view of surveillance cameras. Later, the inmate said, Garcia brought him drugs in an attempt to keep him quiet.

Another plaintiff alleged that her supervisor on the prison's recycling crew, Ross Klinger, had sexual intercourse with her in a storage container, contacted her via email and Snapchat and took her to a motel for sex twice after she was released to a halfway house.

The Federal Correctional Institution stands in Dublin, Calif., Dec. 5, 2022. The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

Another plaintiff said a safety administrator, John Bellhouse, forced himself on her as he put his foot against his office door to trap her inside. When she reported the abuse to an internal prison investigator, she said he replied, “If it’s not on camera then you’re beat.”

Since 2021, at least eight FCI Dublin employees have been charged with sexually abusing inmates. Five pleaded guilty. Two were convicted at trial. Another case is pending.

Garcia was convicted in 2022 of abusing three inmates and is serving a 70-month prison sentence. Klinger pleaded guilty to abusing at least two inmates and was sentenced to five years of supervised release. Bellhouse was convicted of sexually abusing two inmates and is serving a 63-month prison sentence.

Some inmates who alleged abuse at FCI Dublin say they have been the victims of similar misconduct at other institutions, and the AP has found multiple arrests and convictions of Bureau of Prisons staff members for sexually abusing prisoners at other federal lockups.

“It was impossible for survivors to escape the culture of abuse that permeated FCI Dublin,” plaintiffs' lawyer Deborah Golden said. “No one was safe. Even those who weren’t assaulted lived in daily terror that it might happen to them at any moment.”

She described the trauma suffered by FCI Dublin's victims as “a searing indictment of our entire prison system’s failure to confront its longstanding abuse crisis” and said the settlements “sound an urgent alarm to policymakers and politicians” to make sure it doesn't happen again.

In July, President Joe Biden signed a law strengthening oversight of the agency after AP reporting spotlighted its many flaws.

In settling the class-action lawsuit, the Bureau of Prisons and plaintiffs' lawyers filed a proposed consent decree calling for a variety of reforms, including a monitor to scrutinize the treatment of nearly 500 ex-Dublin prisoners now housed at more than a dozen federal lockups across the U.S.

Also under that agreement, agency director Colette Peters “will issue a formal, public acknowledgement to victims of staff sexual abuse at FCI Dublin” as part of the settlement.

The Bureau of Prisons announced Dec. 5 that it was permanently shutting down FCI Dublin after a security and infrastructure assessment following its temporary closure in April.

The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that it agreed to “the substantive terms of a proposed settlement to resolve all injunctive claims” in the class-action lawsuit and that “the decision to permanently close (FCI Dublin) is not a result of the agreement.”

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