( AP )
It was after midnight when she crept down the narrow, dimly lit stairs carrying a bag of dirty laundry. She crossed under a patchwork of pipes and ducts to the far back corner of the basement, as she had done many times before. That, she said, is where correctional officer James Widen was waiting for her.
He had just called her name over the intercom, telling her to report to the work release center’s laundry room. So April Youst rose from her bunk, careful not to wake the other incarcerated women sleeping in the dorm.
When she got downstairs, she said Widen offered to save her some money by opening “the cage,” a little room with free washers and dryers reserved for new prisoners who hadn’t yet started their jobs.
She gratefully stepped inside. And then, she said, everything changed.
“He’s rubbing himself,” she said, while reminding her of all the little favors he’d done for her. “He was like … ‘It’s time to pay.’”
Her account of that night to The Associated Press mirrors, almost word for word, the complaint she filed with police eight years ago. Widen was charged two years later and pleaded not guilty, but the case continues to crawl through the criminal court system. He vehemently denied the allegations to the AP, contending he was set up.
Youst is part of the fastest-growing population behind bars — women, most of whom are locked up for nonviolent crimes that often are drug-related. Though female prisoners long have been victims of sexual violence, the number of reports against correctional staff has exploded nationwide in recent years. Many complaints follow a similar pattern: Accusers are retaliated against, while those accused face little or no punishment.
In all 50 states, the AP found cases where staff allegedly used inmate work assignments to lure women to isolated spots, out of view of security cameras. The prisoners said they were attacked while doing jobs like kitchen or laundry duty inside correctional facilities or in work-release programs that placed them at private businesses like national fast-food restaurants and hotel chains.
“The only thing you’re thinking about when you’re coming into intake is, ‘How am I going to stay safe?’” said Johanna Mills of Just Detention International, a nonprofit organization working to end sexual violence behind bars. When she was incarcerated, she said her boss smashed her in the head and raped her after bringing her to an empty gym one night to do electrical work. “It never occurred to me to watch my back from the supervisor,” she said.
As part of a two-year investigation that has exposed everything from multinational companies benefiting from prison labor to incarcerated workers’ lack of rights and protections, AP reporters spoke to more than 100 current and former prisoners nationwide, including women who said they were sexually abused by correctional staff.
The AP also scoured thousands of pages of court filings, police reports, audits and other documents that detailed graphic stories of systemic sexual violence and cover-ups from New York to Florida to California.
Those cases prompted a bipartisan Senate investigation two years ago that found prisoners were sexually abused by wardens, guards, chaplains or other staff in at least two-thirds of all women’s federal prisons over the past decade. But a backlog of thousands of cases has impeded the Bureau of Prison’s ability to hold employees accountable, government investigators said.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed more than 20 years ago, created a channel for filing reports that resulted in a threefold increase in the number of allegations of staff sexual misconduct involving male, female and transgender inmates from 2010 to 2020 at jails and prisons nationwide.
Just over a month ago, U.S. lawmakers held a hearing to discuss how to better safeguard inmates. One woman, Bonnie Hernandez, testified that she was raped repeatedly and violently by officer Lenton Hatten in a Florida federal prison after he made her clean the recreation area as part of her work detail.
“It got to the point where I feared for my life and had no choice but to report him, even though I was terrified to do so,” she said. In response, she said she was sent to isolation, then transferred to a facility with greater restrictions and no access to video calls with her daughters. Still, it was one of the rare cases that led to prosecution, boosted by DNA evidence. Hatten faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. He received only three months last year after pleading guilty to sexual abuse of a ward.
“What you allow is what will continue,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said after her testimony. “Three months for rape is absurd. … That’s not justice.”
Sometimes, even a confession isn’t enough to lead to punishment. At another federal facility in Florida, a guard who had sex with women on landscape duty was among at least six men who were not prosecuted even though they admitted to the misconduct during an internal investigation, according to the Senate report. That was in part because, by law, government employees cannot be criminally charged if they are compelled to make statements.
Internationally, prison rape is recognized as a form of torture. While it is illegal in the U.S, correctional officers have argued in some states that – despite the clear power imbalance – inmates gave their consent. Laws vary widely. For example, sexual abuse of an inmate can be a misdemeanor in Kentucky with a maximum sentence of 12 months, but prison rape is a felony in Pennsylvania, carrying up to seven years behind bars.
Correctional staff often quit or retire before internal investigations are complete, sometimes retaining pensions and other benefits, experts say. With no paper trail and severe staff shortages, some are simply transferred or hired at other facilities or they land positions overseeing vulnerable populations like juveniles, the AP found.
Officer Widen took a job in West Virginia after resigning from a women’s prison in neighboring Ohio. According to an internal investigation submitted as part of civil court filings, he had delivered a ring from an inmate to a former prisoner. He told the AP there was no sexual contact and that he quit after upsetting prison officials by launching his own investigation into heroin smuggling at the facility, transporting the ring in exchange for information from the inmate.
Youst said she had no concerns about Widen when she first arrived at the Huntington Work Release Center. In fact, she said he was a favorite among many of the men and women living there, sometimes sneaking them cigarettes or warning them about shakedowns. She said he also helped make a write-up against her go away after she was caught with a contraband cellphone – an incident that could have gotten her sent back to prison and farther away from her young daughter, who was living just down the street.
As a guard, Widen held incredible power over the women. They had earned their places at the program, allowing them to dip a toe back into the free world. Though work assignments inside prisons may pay only pennies an hour, outside opportunities — which easily can be taken away — allow women to earn a little more money before their release.
Youst had been in and out of the system for years for crimes stemming from her addiction. She was working days at a local mattress company when she was called down to the laundry room that night in early 2016. She told police — and the AP — that Widen started touching himself over his pants. Then, she said, he told her the cameras couldn’t see what he was about to do.
“He’s already pulling his pants down,” she said. “You can hear his belt.”
She said she desperately tried to reason with him, stressing that someone could walk in on them and that the women upstairs in the dorm might miss her if she was gone too long.
And then, echoing the account she gave police, she said, “He just pretty much bent me over the washing machine.”
Youst said she is baffled by how the case has dragged on.
Widen has been free since posting bond after his arrest in 2018. He told the AP that all allegations of sexual misconduct at the work release center are untrue, labeled Youst “a career criminal” and said the police were unjustly after him.
“My rights have been violated every which way,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide. I didn’t do anything I was accused of. West Virginia is crooked.”
Comments