California Let Prison Guards Read the Abuse Complaints Filed Against Them

The Department of Justice just finished a civil rights investigation into two California women’s prisons and what it found would make a banana republic blush. Guards at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and the California Institution for Women in Chino spent years sexually abusing the women they were sworn to protect. One guard was convicted of a decade of rampant abuse and got 224 years. The sergeant whose job was to investigate misconduct pleaded guilty to receiving child sexual abuse images on the job and got 15.

But here is the detail that should make your blood boil. Women who wanted to report being assaulted were told to use an online system. That system was not confidential. The accused officers had access to it. The women knew this. The guards knew this. Everybody knew this. So the reporting system designed to catch abusers was, in practice, a list of names handed directly to the abusers. Ask yourself what kind of person builds a system like that and then sleeps at night.

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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who announced the findings in Los Angeles on Thursday, put it plainly: the women are “fully aware of this gap in confidentiality, and this serves as a deterrent from women reporting this misconduct.” A deterrent. The reporting system deterred reporting. That is not a bug. That is the feature. You do not accidentally build a complaint box that the people you are complaining about can open. Somebody designed that. Somebody approved it. Somebody maintained it for years while hundreds of lawsuits piled up alleging forcible rape, groping, and guards trading sexual favors for contraband.

California, of course, is the state that never stops lecturing the rest of the country about human rights. Sacramento politicians trip over each other to condemn conditions in foreign prisons while women in their own facilities were being told to file their rape complaints on a system their rapists could read. The state Legislature had a working group report in March identifying “longstanding cultural deficiencies” in addressing staff sexual abuse. They had a report. They always have a report. The AP already exposed the same pattern at the federal prison in Dublin, nicknamed the “rape club,” which was shut down. And somehow the state prisons kept running the same playbook right next door.

ErezS on Jetphotos (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Now the federal government has given California 49 days to fix this. Forty-nine days. Funny how the establishment always gives itself a deadline just far enough away that nobody remembers it when it passes. The fixes are the obvious ones: cameras, confidential reporting, investigators who are not themselves collecting child abuse material. Things that should have existed from day one. Things any private employer would have been sued into oblivion for lacking. But when the government runs the prison and the government investigates the prison and the government sets the deadline for fixing the prison, nobody is ever actually accountable. The guard got 224 years. The system that produced him will get a 49-day timeout and a sternly worded letter.

The investigation started under Biden. The findings came out under Trump. Dhillon is a Trump appointee. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, also Trump’s, said the state “must confront the persistent failure of its own employees.” Good. But do not tell me this is a partisan win. This is the federal government investigating the state government for running a system that the federal government’s own prison in Dublin was also running. The swamp does not have a party. It has a payroll. And the people on that payroll were abusing women behind locked doors while the people above them made sure the complaint box stayed wide open.

Forty-nine days. Ask yourself who benefits from a number that small and a memory that short.