Sex assault, retaliation complaints still persist across U.S. prisons, special master finds in 1st report
DUBLIN, Calif. - The special master's first report on how women who were once incarcerated at the now-closed FCI Dublin all-women's prison was released on Tuesday, which states that nothing much has changed despite the high-profile sex scandal that was thrust into the national spotlight, and that women are still complaining of being sexually assaulted, retaliated against and not getting medical care at more than a dozen federal facilities across the country.
Special Master Wendy Still, the former chief Alameda County probation department officer, and her all-female team that includes a doctor, nurse and a prison rape expert, came to these findings that span just one month, from March 31 to April 30. It is the first of her monthly reports to be made public since a legal consent decree was approved in February of this year.
"The report finds significant deficiencies and affirms much of what survivors of BOP already know," said Kara Janssen, senior counsel at Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld in San Francisco. "That the problems that came to light at FCI Dublin were symptoms of larger, systemic problems throughout BOP."
In an email, Bureau of Prisons spokesman Benjamin O'Cone told KTVU that "for privacy, safety, and security reasons, the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not comment on matters related to pending litigation, ongoing legal proceedings, or ongoing investigations."
It is unclear exactly what will occur next following these findings, which include 13 complaints of sexual abuse, three complaints of physical abuse and 17 complaints of retaliation in the month of April alone.
When the women did report the abuse, many women said there was "no follow-up action taken by BOP," the report notes, which is a violation of the consent decree requirements.
In addition, the report's authors noted that women experienced significant delays in accessing medical care, partly due to understaffing across the prison system and partly due to the BOP having no system for recording, tracking and auditing medical care requests.
The report also listed dozens of anecdotes. Some include:
- One woman said she and others feel that they have to hang sheets around their bed frames at night to keep officers from leering at them.
- One woman said an officer asked her to "suck his dick," and in another case, a prison doctor told another woman seeking treatment for a spider bite that she was "beautiful" and played her inappropriate songs on his phone.
- One woman alleged she was groped by a medical staffer, who threatened to withhold her medication if she told anymore what he did.
- One woman reported she was on a bus en route to the airport to board a flight to another prison. The flight was canceled because of bad weather. But the driver announced: "Blame the Dublin girls; they’re bad luck."
- Another woman said she was housed in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, and felt suicidal. Her clothing was "cut off" in a room full of men, and she was "forced to don a suicide smock" with no underpants, and then placed in four-point restraints and tied down to the bed while a male officer watched her.
- Some medical staff have told women that they should "feel lucky they are getting care since they are illegal aliens or criminals" and they should not "expect special care because they are from Dublin, and no amount of ‘whining to lawyers’ will get them care."
Powerless in Prison: The fallout of FCI Dublin
In April, the Bureau of Prisons abruptly shut down the troubled FCI Dublin. KTVU interviews dozens of women and explains what led up to the closure, questioning whether this was retaliation for outside oversight over the prison, which has been riddled with sex abuse for decades.
Still and her team were given the unprecedented power to conduct an assessment by U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers as part of a 2023 class action lawsuit and subsequent consent decree filed on behalf of about 600 incarcerated women at FCI Dublin, where 10 correctional officers have now been charged with sex crimes; seven of them so far have been found guilty, convicted and sentenced to prison themselves. Two officers were just indicted last week.
There are currently 305 women who were once at FCI Dublin, who are now currently incarcerated in 15 prisons across the country. These women were bussed to these various locations after the Bureau of Prisons shut down FCI Dublin in April 2025, days after the judge granted Still her special master role.
Even though FCI Dublin is now closed, the judge granted Still the authority to oversee the women involved in the class action lawsuit, California Coalition for Women Prisoners v. the Federal Bureau of Prisons, for two years as part of a two-year consent decree that was approved in February 2025. Part of this settlement means that Still will issue a monthly, public report until 2027.
Despite her oversight authority, Still noted in her report that there were several obstacles in preparing and releasing her findings, including getting computers and network access from the Bureau of Prisons, and extracting data from the prison's cumbersome systems slowed her team down. She also said that the BOP's own data is "oftentimes insufficient to allow for a thorough and comprehensive analysis."