×
You have no more free articles available this month. Subscribe today.
Guards Rape, Sexually Harass and Smuggle at Colorado Prisons
by Matthew T. Clarke
There are new troubles at several prisons in Colorado. At a 250-bed GRW-run private prison in Brush, a tiny town 91 miles northwest of Denver, the newly-resigned ex-warden and two guards have been indicted in relation to felony sexual contact with eight female prisoners. A guard lieutenant at a state prison has been arrested for sexually assaulting a male prisoner. Another nine people have been charged with smuggling contraband into the Brush Correctional Facility (BCF). Background checks also revealed that five of the guards at BCF had felony convictions and three others had questionable criminal backgrounds. The U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stated in federal court that a high-ranking employee of Dominion Correctional Services of Edmond, Oklahoma, forced a female subordinate to engage in sexual activities at Crowley County Correctional Facility (CCCF) when that company was running that prison. The female guard filed suit in federal court alleging outrageous sexual conduct by the superior, retaliation and gender discrimination. Dominion settled the suit for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, a guard at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility (AVCF) has been arrested for allegedly raping a male state prisoner.
GRW Doing Good and
Doing Well at Brush?
In a November 27, 2001, article, Fortune Small Business (FSB) hailed Brush as a model private prison and GRW, which manages six other prisons in Texas, Missouri, and Illinois, and owns a youthful-offender program in Kansas, as a private prison company that really cares about its charges. The FSB article compares BCF to a college campus and lauded GRW's owner Gil Walker for his personal involvement with prisoners. Of course, the article glossed over the fact that no college campus really looks like a medium-security prison or locks its students into six-bunk cells every night. The article also missed the fact that, although Walker's personal business philosophy is doing good and doing well--which he explained as making a tidy profit for positively influencing, people's lives--when dealing with a prison, you must screen potential employees carefully, train them well and supervise them properly if you want the personal philosophy to become a corporate philosophy that trickles down to the individual prisoners.
Guards Allegedly Sexually Assault Eight Prisoners at Brush
Just how good GRW is at running prisons is questionable. After two BCF prisoners complained of having been raped by a male guard, Walker used the oldest trick in the book to deflect heat from his company--he blamed the victims. He said that the two female inmates wanted to get back to Hawaii and also an opportunity to sue our company." Walker doesn't seem to get it. It is a felony for guards to have sex with prisoners in Colorado. Consent is not an issue. Intent is not an issue. Like statutory rape, it is a felony--no excuses.
Former BCF guard Fredrick Henry Woller, 32, was indicted for the class-five felony of sexual assault in a penal institution on March 9, 2005. The same day, former BCF warden Richard Rick" Soares, 57, was charged with the class-five felony of hindering the investigation into Woller's criminal conduct. The previous week, former BCF guard Russel Rollinson, 31, had been indicted on two counts of sexual assault in a penal institution. Those charges involved two Hawaiian prisoners. Allison Morgan, Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) spokesperson, revealed that a total of three BCF guards had sex with a total of eight prisoners--two from Hawaii, two from Colorado, and four from Wyoming. Morgan said two of the guards had been fired and the other placed on administrative leave. Morgan also blamed the victims claiming that some Hawaiian and Wyoming prisoners had sex with the guards because they believed they would be returned to their home states and be close to their families.
The charges against Rollison involved sexual activity in the prison law library that took place in January 2005 with the two Hawaiian prisoners ages 23 and 35. Rollison admitted to the sexual contact, but claimed it was consensual." The women alleged they were raped. Their lawyer, Myles Breiner of Honolulu, said Rollinson forced the women to perform a sex act. If convicted, Rollison could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
Woller allegedly had sex with a prisoner on October 1, 2004, and received help from Soares in covering it up on November 22, 2004. Soares delayed reporting the allegations against Woller to the DOC until January 11, 2005. The DOC then sent a team to Brush to investigate the allegations. Soares resigned at GRW's request on February 18, 2005. Soares was a 29-year DOC veteran who started as a guard and served as warden of Arkansas Valley Corrections Facility (AVCF), Limon Correctional Facility and Sterling Correctional Facility before retiring in 2003.
Bad Employee Background
Checks at Brush
Responding to the scandal, Walker said, that his company does extensive background checks prior to hiring guards and Rollison, who had been a police officer for many years, passed the check. Be that as it may, the investigation of BCF's guards that resulted from the sexual assault allegations revealed that several did not and could not have passed a background check. According to Morgan, five BCF guards were convicted felons and three had questionable criminal backgrounds requiring further investigation. All but one of the eight have been fired or resigned. In each case, the fingerprints submitted to the DOC for background checks were smudged or unreadable and returned to BCF for redoing. However, BCF never submitted new fingerprints. The eight include: Angela Gallegos, 28, who was arrested for a felony but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment in 2002; Heather Henry, 24, whose arrest record included harassment, domestic violence-assault, violating protective orders, and child abuse; and Richard Fairchild, 42, who was convicted of domestic violence and violating a restraining order.
Walker's reaction was to admit that these are the type of people who should not be working at a prison.
We don't hire questionable people, and that's the embarrassing part," said Walker.
To the contrary, GRW did hire questionable people. Left on its own, GRW would never have fired them because, as GRW admitted, none of the eight were involved in any known misconduct at the prison (other than presumably lying on their job applications regarding their criminal histories).
That was a failure of leadership," said. Morgan.
That should be the embarrassing part: that the Brush administration didn't perform the background checks properly and didn't report the allegations of sexual assault by a guard promptly. Had the alleged sexual assault by Woller been reported and investigated promptly, the sexual assault by Rollinson, which occurred over two months later, might never have occurred at all. Thus, GRW is in large part to blame for the subsequent sexual assaults by its guards.
Smuggling Ring at Brush
Another problem uncovered by the investigation into the sexual assaults was a tobacco smuggling ring at Brush involving two guards, five Hawaiian prisoners and two Hawaiian visitors. Tobacco has been banned in Colorado prisons since 1999 and smuggling it into a prison is a felony. The seven were charged with the class-six felonies of introduction of contraband and conspiracy to introduce contraband. They include guards Gail Guerrero and Maria Ramirez, 46; prisoners Pamala Akopian, 31, Pisa Tuvale, 35, Annette Cummings, 38, Janice Crokett, 47, Jeanette Dillion, 38; and visitors Charmayne Kalama, 28, and Stannie T. Muramoto, 46.
Wyoming Withdraws Its Prisoners From BCF
The multi-faceted scandal at BCF prompted Wyoming to remove its 38 prisoners from BCF.
We just feel that it would be in the best interest of the inmates to move them out of Colorado," said Wyoming Department of Corrections spokesperson Melinda Brazzale. The prisoners will be moved back to Wyoming or to another private prison in Texas.
Hawaii has no plans to withdraw its 80 BCF prisoners at present, although the two who were sexually assaulted were returned to the islands and placed in protective custody.
Incidents like this happen at facilities," said Richard Bissen, interim director of the Hawaii Department of Public Safety (DPS), speaking about the sexual assaults at Brush. But that place is being more closely monitored than ever and the women themselves say they are safe.
Well, not all the women. Robin Darbyshire, a Brush prisoner who is on the board of the prisoners' rights group Stop Prison Rape, wrote the Denver newspaper Westword in February 2005. In her letter, she said that there have been many women who have been sexually violated," and many of them defend the man that sexually violates them for favors." The DOC refused media requests to interview Darbyshire. Instead, BCF trotted out hand-picked prisoner Carol Balderi Lopez, who claimed that the Hawaiian prisoners initiated the sexual encounter with the guard to retaliate against him and that they were prostitutes and drug addicts who were having a homosexual relationship who routinely manipulated guards. Wow! Not only did GRW blame the victims, it slandered them as well. It also ignored the other victims and other misconduct by other guards.
Hawaiian legislators are not so dismissive. On April 6, 2005, the 21-member women's caucus sent a letter to Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle expressing deep concern about reports from the prisoners at BCF and requesting increased state monitoring of the prison. House Judiciary Chair Sylvia Luke, D-Pacific Heights-Punchbowel, expressed concern about the reports of guards retaliating against Hawaiian prisoners. Rep. Cynthia Thielen, R-Kailua-Mokapu, believes that Hawaii should follow Wyoming's lead and withdraw its prisoners from Brush. Kat Brady, coordinator of the Community Alliance on Prisons, said that the complaints from BCF prisoners include confiscation of legal materials and unfair disciplinary actions being used as a form of retaliation.
Hawaiian prison officials deny any knowledge of retaliation at BCF, according to DPS spokesperson Michael Gaede. He also said that the state had no plans to immediately withdraw its prisoners from BCF. However, alternative possibilities are being explored as the GRW contract expired on July 31, 2005. Hawaii currently pays $30 million a year to incarcerate over 1,600 prisoners in private prisons on the mainland.
What's Walkers take on Wyoming (and possibly Hawaii) withdrawing their prisoners? He's convinced that Colorado will just send more of its prisoners to fill the void.
I don't think it will hurt us at all," said Walker.
Therein lies the evil of private prisons. The bottom line is the only concern. Women are raped at a prison that has lots of convicted felons working as guards and a guard-operated smuggling ring. This leads to a loss of confidence so that states withdraw their prisoners. And the reaction of the prison's owner: it won't hurt us at all because some other state will step in and provide us profits. Reputation be damned, prisoners be damned, profits are all that matter. Whatever happened to doing good and doing well?
Dominion Settles Another Crowley Sexual Misconduct/Assault Suit
In 1997, Dominion Correctional Services, an Edmond, Oklahoma, company, built the private Crowley County Correctional Facility (CCCF) in Olney Springs, Colorado. It ran the prison until it left the private prison management business April 31, 2003, about three months after it sold CCCF to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for $47 million.
In 2004, Dominion settled three lawsuits filed by three female former CCCF guards, alleging sexual misconduct and assault by the chief of prison security, Ronald McCall. Those lawsuits sought more than $10 million. On September 29, 2004, the EEOC alleged that McCall had forced a female sergeant to engage in telephone sex and oral sex starting in 2002 by threatening her with firing and subjected another female sergeant to offensive, gender-based harassment." Dominion failed to respond to an EEOC subpoena regarding sexual misconduct allegations by two other women. The EEOC also found that one of the women was subject to retaliatory termination.
After that settlement and EEOC ruling, former guard Mandy Bravo filed suit in federal court alleging that she suffered from severe and pervasive" offensive sexual remarks by her superiors from June 2001 until October 2002. She sought hospital treatment because a company official who was supposed to be investigating the allegations, instead allegedly physically confronted her and injured her hand. She filed a police report on that incident. She also alleged wrongful retaliatory termination and sought over $40,000 in back pay and other unspecified damages and benefit losses. Dominion settled the suit in February, 2005. Denver lawyer Charlotte Sweeny, who represented Bravo, said she-could not reveal details of the settlement due to a confidentiality agreement with Dominion. CCCF is well known to PLN readers due to the recent major riot caused by CCA's ineptitude. [PLN, Jan. 2005, pp. 26, 31].
Even DOC Prisons Troubled
In March 2005, Craig Shepard, inspector general's investigator for the DOC arrested AVCF guard lieutenant and former Crowley County Sheriff Perfecto Hijar, 51, for felony sexual assault of a prisoner. AVCF houses male prisoners and Hijar allegedly used his supervisory position to coerce a prisoner into sexual contact. Hijar has worked for the DOC since leaving the sheriff's office in 1987.
Sources: Pueblo Chieftain, newsok.com, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Associated Press, Fortune Small Business, Honolulu Advertiser, Fort, Morgan Times, krcc.org, thedenverchannel.com.
There are new troubles at several prisons in Colorado. At a 250-bed GRW-run private prison in Brush, a tiny town 91 miles northwest of Denver, the newly-resigned ex-warden and two guards have been indicted in relation to felony sexual contact with eight female prisoners. A guard lieutenant at a state prison has been arrested for sexually assaulting a male prisoner. Another nine people have been charged with smuggling contraband into the Brush Correctional Facility (BCF). Background checks also revealed that five of the guards at BCF had felony convictions and three others had questionable criminal backgrounds. The U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stated in federal court that a high-ranking employee of Dominion Correctional Services of Edmond, Oklahoma, forced a female subordinate to engage in sexual activities at Crowley County Correctional Facility (CCCF) when that company was running that prison. The female guard filed suit in federal court alleging outrageous sexual conduct by the superior, retaliation and gender discrimination. Dominion settled the suit for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, a guard at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility (AVCF) has been arrested for allegedly raping a male state prisoner.
GRW Doing Good and
Doing Well at Brush?
In a November 27, 2001, article, Fortune Small Business (FSB) hailed Brush as a model private prison and GRW, which manages six other prisons in Texas, Missouri, and Illinois, and owns a youthful-offender program in Kansas, as a private prison company that really cares about its charges. The FSB article compares BCF to a college campus and lauded GRW's owner Gil Walker for his personal involvement with prisoners. Of course, the article glossed over the fact that no college campus really looks like a medium-security prison or locks its students into six-bunk cells every night. The article also missed the fact that, although Walker's personal business philosophy is doing good and doing well--which he explained as making a tidy profit for positively influencing, people's lives--when dealing with a prison, you must screen potential employees carefully, train them well and supervise them properly if you want the personal philosophy to become a corporate philosophy that trickles down to the individual prisoners.
Guards Allegedly Sexually Assault Eight Prisoners at Brush
Just how good GRW is at running prisons is questionable. After two BCF prisoners complained of having been raped by a male guard, Walker used the oldest trick in the book to deflect heat from his company--he blamed the victims. He said that the two female inmates wanted to get back to Hawaii and also an opportunity to sue our company." Walker doesn't seem to get it. It is a felony for guards to have sex with prisoners in Colorado. Consent is not an issue. Intent is not an issue. Like statutory rape, it is a felony--no excuses.
Former BCF guard Fredrick Henry Woller, 32, was indicted for the class-five felony of sexual assault in a penal institution on March 9, 2005. The same day, former BCF warden Richard Rick" Soares, 57, was charged with the class-five felony of hindering the investigation into Woller's criminal conduct. The previous week, former BCF guard Russel Rollinson, 31, had been indicted on two counts of sexual assault in a penal institution. Those charges involved two Hawaiian prisoners. Allison Morgan, Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) spokesperson, revealed that a total of three BCF guards had sex with a total of eight prisoners--two from Hawaii, two from Colorado, and four from Wyoming. Morgan said two of the guards had been fired and the other placed on administrative leave. Morgan also blamed the victims claiming that some Hawaiian and Wyoming prisoners had sex with the guards because they believed they would be returned to their home states and be close to their families.
The charges against Rollison involved sexual activity in the prison law library that took place in January 2005 with the two Hawaiian prisoners ages 23 and 35. Rollison admitted to the sexual contact, but claimed it was consensual." The women alleged they were raped. Their lawyer, Myles Breiner of Honolulu, said Rollinson forced the women to perform a sex act. If convicted, Rollison could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
Woller allegedly had sex with a prisoner on October 1, 2004, and received help from Soares in covering it up on November 22, 2004. Soares delayed reporting the allegations against Woller to the DOC until January 11, 2005. The DOC then sent a team to Brush to investigate the allegations. Soares resigned at GRW's request on February 18, 2005. Soares was a 29-year DOC veteran who started as a guard and served as warden of Arkansas Valley Corrections Facility (AVCF), Limon Correctional Facility and Sterling Correctional Facility before retiring in 2003.
Bad Employee Background
Checks at Brush
Responding to the scandal, Walker said, that his company does extensive background checks prior to hiring guards and Rollison, who had been a police officer for many years, passed the check. Be that as it may, the investigation of BCF's guards that resulted from the sexual assault allegations revealed that several did not and could not have passed a background check. According to Morgan, five BCF guards were convicted felons and three had questionable criminal backgrounds requiring further investigation. All but one of the eight have been fired or resigned. In each case, the fingerprints submitted to the DOC for background checks were smudged or unreadable and returned to BCF for redoing. However, BCF never submitted new fingerprints. The eight include: Angela Gallegos, 28, who was arrested for a felony but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment in 2002; Heather Henry, 24, whose arrest record included harassment, domestic violence-assault, violating protective orders, and child abuse; and Richard Fairchild, 42, who was convicted of domestic violence and violating a restraining order.
Walker's reaction was to admit that these are the type of people who should not be working at a prison.
We don't hire questionable people, and that's the embarrassing part," said Walker.
To the contrary, GRW did hire questionable people. Left on its own, GRW would never have fired them because, as GRW admitted, none of the eight were involved in any known misconduct at the prison (other than presumably lying on their job applications regarding their criminal histories).
That was a failure of leadership," said. Morgan.
That should be the embarrassing part: that the Brush administration didn't perform the background checks properly and didn't report the allegations of sexual assault by a guard promptly. Had the alleged sexual assault by Woller been reported and investigated promptly, the sexual assault by Rollinson, which occurred over two months later, might never have occurred at all. Thus, GRW is in large part to blame for the subsequent sexual assaults by its guards.
Smuggling Ring at Brush
Another problem uncovered by the investigation into the sexual assaults was a tobacco smuggling ring at Brush involving two guards, five Hawaiian prisoners and two Hawaiian visitors. Tobacco has been banned in Colorado prisons since 1999 and smuggling it into a prison is a felony. The seven were charged with the class-six felonies of introduction of contraband and conspiracy to introduce contraband. They include guards Gail Guerrero and Maria Ramirez, 46; prisoners Pamala Akopian, 31, Pisa Tuvale, 35, Annette Cummings, 38, Janice Crokett, 47, Jeanette Dillion, 38; and visitors Charmayne Kalama, 28, and Stannie T. Muramoto, 46.
Wyoming Withdraws Its Prisoners From BCF
The multi-faceted scandal at BCF prompted Wyoming to remove its 38 prisoners from BCF.
We just feel that it would be in the best interest of the inmates to move them out of Colorado," said Wyoming Department of Corrections spokesperson Melinda Brazzale. The prisoners will be moved back to Wyoming or to another private prison in Texas.
Hawaii has no plans to withdraw its 80 BCF prisoners at present, although the two who were sexually assaulted were returned to the islands and placed in protective custody.
Incidents like this happen at facilities," said Richard Bissen, interim director of the Hawaii Department of Public Safety (DPS), speaking about the sexual assaults at Brush. But that place is being more closely monitored than ever and the women themselves say they are safe.
Well, not all the women. Robin Darbyshire, a Brush prisoner who is on the board of the prisoners' rights group Stop Prison Rape, wrote the Denver newspaper Westword in February 2005. In her letter, she said that there have been many women who have been sexually violated," and many of them defend the man that sexually violates them for favors." The DOC refused media requests to interview Darbyshire. Instead, BCF trotted out hand-picked prisoner Carol Balderi Lopez, who claimed that the Hawaiian prisoners initiated the sexual encounter with the guard to retaliate against him and that they were prostitutes and drug addicts who were having a homosexual relationship who routinely manipulated guards. Wow! Not only did GRW blame the victims, it slandered them as well. It also ignored the other victims and other misconduct by other guards.
Hawaiian legislators are not so dismissive. On April 6, 2005, the 21-member women's caucus sent a letter to Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle expressing deep concern about reports from the prisoners at BCF and requesting increased state monitoring of the prison. House Judiciary Chair Sylvia Luke, D-Pacific Heights-Punchbowel, expressed concern about the reports of guards retaliating against Hawaiian prisoners. Rep. Cynthia Thielen, R-Kailua-Mokapu, believes that Hawaii should follow Wyoming's lead and withdraw its prisoners from Brush. Kat Brady, coordinator of the Community Alliance on Prisons, said that the complaints from BCF prisoners include confiscation of legal materials and unfair disciplinary actions being used as a form of retaliation.
Hawaiian prison officials deny any knowledge of retaliation at BCF, according to DPS spokesperson Michael Gaede. He also said that the state had no plans to immediately withdraw its prisoners from BCF. However, alternative possibilities are being explored as the GRW contract expired on July 31, 2005. Hawaii currently pays $30 million a year to incarcerate over 1,600 prisoners in private prisons on the mainland.
What's Walkers take on Wyoming (and possibly Hawaii) withdrawing their prisoners? He's convinced that Colorado will just send more of its prisoners to fill the void.
I don't think it will hurt us at all," said Walker.
Therein lies the evil of private prisons. The bottom line is the only concern. Women are raped at a prison that has lots of convicted felons working as guards and a guard-operated smuggling ring. This leads to a loss of confidence so that states withdraw their prisoners. And the reaction of the prison's owner: it won't hurt us at all because some other state will step in and provide us profits. Reputation be damned, prisoners be damned, profits are all that matter. Whatever happened to doing good and doing well?
Dominion Settles Another Crowley Sexual Misconduct/Assault Suit
In 1997, Dominion Correctional Services, an Edmond, Oklahoma, company, built the private Crowley County Correctional Facility (CCCF) in Olney Springs, Colorado. It ran the prison until it left the private prison management business April 31, 2003, about three months after it sold CCCF to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for $47 million.
In 2004, Dominion settled three lawsuits filed by three female former CCCF guards, alleging sexual misconduct and assault by the chief of prison security, Ronald McCall. Those lawsuits sought more than $10 million. On September 29, 2004, the EEOC alleged that McCall had forced a female sergeant to engage in telephone sex and oral sex starting in 2002 by threatening her with firing and subjected another female sergeant to offensive, gender-based harassment." Dominion failed to respond to an EEOC subpoena regarding sexual misconduct allegations by two other women. The EEOC also found that one of the women was subject to retaliatory termination.
After that settlement and EEOC ruling, former guard Mandy Bravo filed suit in federal court alleging that she suffered from severe and pervasive" offensive sexual remarks by her superiors from June 2001 until October 2002. She sought hospital treatment because a company official who was supposed to be investigating the allegations, instead allegedly physically confronted her and injured her hand. She filed a police report on that incident. She also alleged wrongful retaliatory termination and sought over $40,000 in back pay and other unspecified damages and benefit losses. Dominion settled the suit in February, 2005. Denver lawyer Charlotte Sweeny, who represented Bravo, said she-could not reveal details of the settlement due to a confidentiality agreement with Dominion. CCCF is well known to PLN readers due to the recent major riot caused by CCA's ineptitude. [PLN, Jan. 2005, pp. 26, 31].
Even DOC Prisons Troubled
In March 2005, Craig Shepard, inspector general's investigator for the DOC arrested AVCF guard lieutenant and former Crowley County Sheriff Perfecto Hijar, 51, for felony sexual assault of a prisoner. AVCF houses male prisoners and Hijar allegedly used his supervisory position to coerce a prisoner into sexual contact. Hijar has worked for the DOC since leaving the sheriff's office in 1987.
Sources: Pueblo Chieftain, newsok.com, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Associated Press, Fortune Small Business, Honolulu Advertiser, Fort, Morgan Times, krcc.org, thedenverchannel.com.
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login