California prisons repeatedly and knowingly violated female prisoners’ civil rights by failing to prevent systemic sexual abuse, a two-year federal investigation revealed.
The state now has 49 days to address the issues outlined in a report released Thursday summarizing the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation, after which the federal government can sue the state to force changes within the system.
“The findings in this report are unacceptable,” U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli said at a news conference announcing the investigation’s findings Thursday morning. “They’re unconscionable, and should serve as a turning point in California’s failed state prison system, and the way they handle these types of allegations.”
The investigation revealed “systemic deficiencies” that violated prisoners’ 8th and 14th amendment rights, Essayli said, and found that California’s prison system has failed to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
In a statement, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Will Matthews said the agency has already undertaken reforms, including “many” that began before the federal investigation. Those changes, Matthews wrote, reflect the agency’s “sustained commitment to safe and constitutional operations.”
Matthews also pointed to recent independent audits that concluded that both women’s prisons had met all standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, as well as the fact that the agency’s own proactive actions led to criminal prosecutions under that act.
“Sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and retaliation against individuals in our care are unacceptable. CDCR takes every allegation seriously,” Matthews wrote.
Robert Chalfant, a lawyer who has represented women who’ve accused prison staff of sexual assault and retaliation for reporting the abuse, said the federal findings were a “huge deal” and corroborated severe problems he has been litigating for years.
Chalfant represented 13 women who sued the state following a Central California Women’s Facility staff operation on Aug. 2, 2024, in which women claimed they were subjected to “war zone” level violence for filing sexual misconduct complaints.
The case was settled for $1.9 million earlier this year.
The DOJ’s investigation followed years of lawsuits, complaints and prosecutions alleging that prison staff at the Central California Women’s Facility, in Chowchilla, and the California Institution for Women, in Chino, repeatedly sexually assaulted inmates, and that the state’s prison system had done little to stop or prevent the abuse.
In their report, federal investigators said the California Department of Corrections has been aware of sexual assault complaints since as long ago as 2000.
The two women’s prisons and the corrections system as a whole “knowingly expose” inmates to risk of sexual assault by failing to detect and prevent assaults, failing to provide prisoners with a way to report assaults confidentially, failing to report abuse and failing to hold staff accountable, the federal government concluded.
“The foregoing failures constitute deliberate indifference to the unconstitutional conditions that exist in the prisons,” investigators wrote.
The federal government listed 11 steps the state must take to correct the issues investigators found, including ensuring that staff use their body-worn cameras, installing more fixed cameras, investigating accusations of retaliation for reporting sexual abuse and creating a system for prisoners to report abuse confidentially and independently of the prison system.
“I’m hopeful that (the Central California Women’s Facility) is going to read that report, make the changes that have been identified, and that things are going to change for the people in custody,” Chalfant said. “I mean, that’s the goal here.”
