From the Editor
Over the years Prison Legal News has reported extensively on the rape of prisoners around the country. In 35 years of publishing, about every 4- or 5-years prison systems have a major scandal at their local women’s prison where it comes to light that dozens of guards have raped or are raping scores or hundreds of women prisoners. For the past several years we have been reporting on the ongoing rapes, criminal prosecutions and civil litigation surrounding the massive rape of prisoners at the federal women’s prison in Dublin, California. This issue of PLN is a few days late because just as we were wrapping it up a few more guards were indicted and we updated the story with the details.
The Dublin rapes are unique in some respects. It has led to the biggest damages payout in the history of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). PLN has filed a FOIA request for a breakdown on the individual settlements and we will report it at a later date. Dozens of guards and staff, including the warden and chaplain have been charged and convicted of the rapes and dozens more investigations are still underway with more indictments coming. The biggest and historic development was for the first time a federal prison was placed under the supervision of a special master. And predictably, the BOP closed the prison rather than have any type of oversight.
The sheer scale and commonality of the rapes shows the lack of any accountability within the BOP in particular and prisons in general. If leadership starts at the top and the warden is raping prisoners and filming it on his government cellphone, and the chaplain is as well, it all goes downhill from there. Reading through the indictments and the civil complaints, guards were going to work and raping multiple prisoners on a single shift. Which begs the question, are they doing anything approximating work while they are cashing that taxpayer funded paycheck of theirs? Like most prison rape rings, this one went on for years if not decades.
In response to the litigation and closing the prison, all of the prisoners at Dublin, including the plaintiffs, were scattered to other BOP facilities around the country. Sadly, conditions there are not much better.
The BOP has been a troubled, decaying, poorly run and managed prison system for decades. Long ignored by the attorney general who is nominally in charge and by congress, it has lacked competent leadership for a long time. As we report in this issue of PLN, for the first time in its history, the BOP now has a former prisoner, Joshua Smith, appointed as the deputy director. So far, PLN appears to be the first news outlet to report that he acted as an informant who reduced his own drug sentence by testifying against his codefendants. Since he was released from prison he has shilled for Corecivic, the for profit private prison company FKA Corrections Corporation of America. I had the impression that President Trump was anti informant given his own experiences, but apparently not. Hopefully some long needed positive change results from this but the odds are long against it.
This issue reports HRDC censorship victories against the Milwaukee jail in Wisconsin and the Baxter County jail in Arkansas. We also recently settled a censorship suit against the Sonoma County jail in California and the Pacific County jail in Washington state. We will report the details in upcoming issues of PLN. Ensuring that prisoners can receive publications in general and HRDC publications in particular is a critical part of the work we do.
We continue to receive reports of censorship of PLN and the books we distribute. If you are a prisoner subscriber to PLN and anything we send you is censored or not delivered by prison and jail officials please contact us and let us know as prison officials often do not inform us of the censorship. We are currently suing prison systems in Missouri, New Mexico and Illinois for censoring our materials.
If you are a prisoner in Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho or Tennessee and publications from HRDC have been censored please contact us and let us know as we have received sporadic reports of censorship issues we are investigating.
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