by Chuck Sharman

On March 13, 2026, lawmakers sitting on Idaho’s Joint Legislative Oversight Committee (JLOC) ordered the state Office of Performance Evaluation (OPE) to assess state prison officials’ response to allegations of staff sexual misconduct. The move came on the heels of a damning report by Investigate West that found widespread sexual abuse by staffers in the three women’s prisons operated by the state Department of Correction (DOC)—the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center, the South Idaho Correctional Institution and the South Boise Women’s Correctional Center. The report also documented high-level efforts to undermine the investigation and downplay its findings.

Published as a five-part series in October 2025, the report described a prison system in which guards get away with assault and the prisoners who are their victims are blamed. Some of those victims also accused the Idaho State Police of conducting shoddy investigations that ignored evidence. The report named 37 DOC staffers accused of sexually abusing prisoners since 2015, including 59 allegations lodged since 2020. While eight of those accused were fired from the DOC, at least 18 others were allowed to resign. Only three were criminally charged, and just one was sentenced to prison—though he avoided any time behind bars by a serving a nine-month “rider” of intensive rehabilitation, which was offered him as an alternative to incarceration. See: Guarded by Predators, InvestigateWest (Oct. 2025).

A letter signed on March 5, 2026, by five lawmakers—state Sens. James Ruchti (D-Pocatello) and Jim Guthrie (R-McCammon), along with Reps. Rick Cheatum (R-Pocatello), Dan Garner (R-Clifton) and Mike Veile (R-Soda Springs)—asked JLOC co-chairs Sen. Melissa Winthrow (D-Boise) and Rep. Jordan Redman (R-Coeur d’Alene) to have the OPE evaluate the DOC’s “processes for preventing, reporting, investigating, and responding to staff sexual misconduct” in women’s lockups.

As the five legislators also noted, Idaho locks up 152 women out of every 100,000 in the state, an incarceration rate three times the national average of 51 per 100,000. It was also more than 25 times the rate of the lowest state, Rhode Island, which imprisoned or jailed just six of every 100,000 women, according to a study by the nonprofit Sentencing Project. See: Fact Sheet – Incarcerated Women and Girls, Sentencing Project (Dec. 2025).

Some Leaders More Outraged
than Others

Publication of the Investigate West report left some of Ruchti’s constituents “very alarmed,” he said. His own response was more measured. “Let’s just make sure we don’t have a problem with our reporting, with how we train people, all the things we’re supposed to be doing because it is a vulnerable population,” he said. “If we’re not doing it right, we need to know it.”

Ruchti was one of several lawmakers emailed by DOC Director Bree Derrick just days before the report was published, making sure that they were not “blindsided” by it and were “armed with talking points should constituents reach out.” Derrick also claimed that the “gist” of the reporting was untrue, but the DOC to date has not identified any factual errors.

More troubling was GOP Gov. Brad Little’s response to the investigation. Though he told journalists that “transparency and the public’s confidence in state government are top priorities,” his office advised state police to begin withholding information about investigations into prison guard misconduct.

Investigate West also found inconsistencies in the DOC’s records—including records missing from victims the news outlet interviewed or that were obtained via public records requests. But when the discrepancies were pointed out, the DOC’s response was to stop sharing information about guards’ employment histories beginning in February 2026, a move that was also taken by the state Peace Officer Standards and Training Council.

Little and Derrick defended the move, insisting it was consistent with the state’s public records law, 2015 Ida. ALS 140. But that statute is silent as to sharing the employment history of state employees, and the state had routinely shared it before.

“The whole point of transparency is so that there is some accountability,” civil rights attorney Deborah Ferguson told Investigate West. “And if they’re under the cover of darkness and no one can review what these actions are from our public agencies, it really convolutes the purpose of the Public Records Act and the transparency in government.”

In rolling back access to public employees’ job history, Idaho joins just a handful of states, including Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana and Virginia. Most others, such as neighboring states Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, have increased this transparency.

Much Abuse Slips Through
Legal Loophole

One of the problems that the report identified is the state’s definition of “sexual contact with a prisoner.” Passed in 1993, long before the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), the law that criminalizes such contact currently requires touching the prisoner’s genitals. That leaves a big loophole through which a corrupt guard can, for example, grope a prisoner’s breasts or buttocks.

The Investigate West report highlighted a grimly comic courtroom exchange between one accused guard’s defense attorney and a prosecutor over the meaning of the word “genitals” in the state law criminalizing sexual contact: Did that include the prisoner’s vagina, which was what the guard had admitted touching? In the end, an abashed judge was forced to concede that the law was unclear. In that moment, the seemingly airtight case against guard Kim Rogers fell apart, and the state was left with little choice but to strike a plea deal that included no prison time.

In those situations where a prisoner’s genitals were not touched, the state’s sexual battery statute currently provides the only mechanism for bringing charges. But the law has never been updated to align with the PREA, which criminalizes such contact regardless of consent. As a result, prosecutors rarely bring sexual battery charges on a prisoner’s behalf against a prison guard because of the difficulty in convincing jurors that she didn’t consent.

To close that loophole, state Rep. Marco Erickson (R-Idaho Falls) introduced H.B. 696, which would expand the definition of “sexual contact with a prisoner” to include “any willful physical contact, over or under the clothing, when the physical contact is done with the intent of arousing, appealing to, or gratifying the lust, passion, or sexual desires of the actor or any other person.” The bill was passed by the state Senate on March 24, 2026. It has now gone to the House for finalization before being sent to Little for his signature.

“In my mind, these guys, or girls, are predators,” Erickson said to InvestigateWest regarding guards accused of sexual misconduct. “I don’t want to put more people in prison, but I want to deter them from doing this, and I think this is how we have to do that.”

Indeed, there is almost no other job to which workers show up so often expecting to have sex, outside of sex work itself. Derrick has not addressed the pending law, but her employee, DOC Government Relations Advisor Tina Transue, told InvestigateWest that department officials are “excited that it gives us more teeth” and “brings us more in line with (the PREA).”

However, in April 2025, just as the investigation and its report were being finalized, the administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) shuttered the National PREA Resource Center, ending federal training in conducting sexual assault investigations behind bars. In December 2025, at their first meeting after the InvestigateWest report was published, the PREA Resource Center cuts left Derrick and the state prison board floundering to find $50,000 to $75,000 that she estimated would be needed to conduct a “full-blown cultural assessment” sufficient to respond to the problems identified by the investigation. 

Additional Source: East Idaho News

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