8/10/18
For nearly two decades, the inmates inside Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama were raped, sodomized, forced to engage in oral sex and fondled by corrections officers as state corrections officials looked the other way. In 2013, the prison was considered among the 10 worst prisons in the nation. At least one third of its staff was suspected of sexual misconduct, and inmates who dared to report the abuse were punished by being locked in confinement, a more restrictive form of incarceration. Under-staffing, poor medical care, inadequate sanitary supplies, overcrowding and poor security fostered an environment where sexual violence and abuse thrived, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which began a civil rights investigation at the prison in 2013. The Tutwiler investigation in Alabama mirrors what the Justice Department is now doing at Lowell Correctional Institution, in Central Florida, where female inmates have complained for years about sexual, physical and mental abuse inflicted by corrections officers. “It appears that Lowell has a huge problem with sexual abuse of prisoners. Normally, at womens’ prisons, you get one or two bad actors, but it seems that Lowell has a real cultural problem, and the Florida Department of Corrections, in general, has a huge cultural problem in the way they handle sexual abuse,’’ said Julia Abbate, the former deputy chief in charge of corrections in DOJ’s civil rights division.
The Lowell investigation comes after years of complaints by inmates and activists, who organized in the aftermath of a 2015 Miami Herald investigation, “Beyond Punishment.’’ The series included interviews with more than three dozen former and current inmates at Lowell who described being forced to have sex with officers just to obtain basic necessities such as soap, toilet paper and sanitary napkins. Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the DOJ involvement overdue. “This is indicative of the fact that there must be serious concerns about the facility because the DOJ does not undertake investigations lightly or based on scant evidence. They must think the allegations they are aware of are severe and enough to take this step.’’ The Florida Department of Corrections, in a statement issued Wednesday, said it is committed to assisting the DOJ with the probe. Corrections officers often forced the inmates to have sex in places out of the view of surveillance cameras, such as in closets and showers, the Herald found. Inmates often agreed to have sex in order to receive better treatment or basic necessities such as sanitary napkins, soap and toilet paper. After the series was published, the FDC said it had installed additional cameras in the prison, that it had beefed up staffing and that it was more aggressively monitoring and investigating complaints of abuse.
