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THE COST OF PRISON RAPE
We got a glimpse last week at how serious the Dept of Justice is about enforcing the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The answer, as though anyone is surprised, is “not much.”
PREA requires that federal, state, and local correctional facilities maintain and enforce a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault for both inmate-on-inmate and staff-on-inmate misconduct. Unsurprisingly, while the DOJ talks a good game, it seems much more interested in inmate-on-inmate than it is in staff-in-inmate sexual abuse. Four cases in point:
(1) Phillip Golightly, a former BOP correctional officer at FCI Marianna and FCI Tallahassee, was sentenced to 24 months last week for “sexually assaulting female inmates who were then under his custodial, supervisory and disciplinary authority” (as the DOJ drily put it).
What did he really do? The lurid statement of facts in the case states that Golightly did not go lightly on female inmates. Instead, he forced female inmates to perform oral sex on him, and to endure him forcing it on them, on multiple occasions. Read the statement (just not immediately before dinner).
For this – in a sentencing regime in which a poor black drug peddler gets a mandatory 10 years for possessing with intent to sell crack that weighs no more than a Big Mac (including bun) – the former corrections officer will serve 20 months and a couple weeks (after factoring in good-conduct time). Golightly isn’t just his name… it’s how the Court sentenced him.
That’s the cost of rape if you’re a BOP perp (that is, if you are prosecuted at all, as noted below).
(2) Carleane Berman, a former FCI Coleman inmate who was one of 15 women to share a $2 million settlement with the BOP over their abuse at the hands of a group of FCI Coleman camp COs, died of a drug overdose last month.
The Miami Herald reported last week that “Carleane returned from the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Sumter County a shattered woman.” Her father, Ron Berman, who had fought to keep her drug-free since her release, said he “could do little to help her quell her nerves, ease her insomnia, or stop recoiling at the sound of voices in hallways. The voices, Carleane said, reminded her of being behind bars with the prison officers who raped her.
Miranda Flowers, another victim, told the Herald she and Berman were raped together at least 11 times in various parts of the facility. “We’d walk back to the units and grab our stuff and go straight to the showers and not talk about it,” she recalled.
“The people that were supposed to be in charge were not doing what they were supposed to do,” former inmate Andrea DiMuro said. “Coleman was hell on earth.”
“I blame everything on Coleman. I want them held accountable,” Ron Berman said. “She was never the same after Coleman.”
(3) Miranda Flowers said a prison investigator told her the officers had been allowed to resign in exchange for their admissions and no charges. As it stands today, none of the rapes occurring prior to August 31, 2016, is prosecutable, falling as they do beyond the statute of limitations.
Joe Rojas, the southeast regional vice president for the workers union, AFGE Council of Prisons, said the Coleman case was a black eye for the BOP. “I’m just sad because honestly those officers got away with a crime,” Rojas told the Tampa Bay Times last May.
(4) Want to read about the PREA violations at Coleman? Don’t bother going to the FCI Coleman Low PREA Audit results (last updated April 2018). The report, but for the boilerplate, is significantly redacted, but it maintained that “There were no substantiated sexual abuse or harassment allegations at FCC Coleman over the period…” studied by the audit. According to the Report, “[f]acility staff conducted 36 investigations into sexual abuse/harassment allegations. There were 34 unsubstantiated cases, and two cases were deemed unfounded.”
Yet the wholesale abuse of inmates dated from 2012, “in some cases, spanning five to six years,” the Times said, with specific allegations dating from as late as December 31, 2017.
With such detailed and unstinting investigation, it’s little wonder that so little staff-to-inmate rape is detected, and that so little is done about it.
DOJ Press Release, Former Bureau of Prisons Correctional Officer Sentenced to 24 Months In Federal Prison For Sexually Abusing Inmates (August 27, 2021)
Statement of Facts, R.23, United States v. Golightly, Case No 4:20cr32 (N.D. Florida, October 16, 2020)
Miami Herald, She was raped by Florida prison officers. After her drug death, supporters want justice (August 24, 2021)
– Thomas L. Root