WASHINGTON — The epidemic of sexual assaults against female prisoners in federal custody has prompted the Justice Department to expand the use of a program to provide early releases to women abused behind bars, according to people familiar with the situation.
In recent weeks, the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, has pressed top officials at the Bureau of Prisons, a division of the department, to encourage inmates who have been assaulted by prison employees, and might qualify for the department’s underused compassionate release program, to apply.
The push comes amid new revelations about the extent of abuse of women, and the unwillingness of many prison officials, over decades and at all levels in the system, to address a crisis that has long been an open secret in government.
On Tuesday, a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee released the results of a bipartisan investigation that provided the starkest picture to date of a crisis that the Justice Department has identified as a top policy priority.
“I was sentenced and put in prison for choices I made — I was not sent to prison to be raped and abused,” said Briane Moore, who was repeatedly assaulted by an official at a women’s prison in West Virginia who threatened to block a transfer to a facility closer to her family if she resisted.
Ms. Moore was one of several women to provide firsthand testimony before the committee to accompany the release of the report, which was based on interviews with dozens of whistle-blowers, current and former prison officials, and survivors of sexual abuse.
Among the findings made public: Bureau employees abused female prisoners in at least 19 of the 29 federal facilities that have held women over the past decade; in at least four prisons, managers failed to apply the federal law intended to detect and reduce sexual assault; and hundreds of sexual abuse charges are among a backlog of 8,000 internal affairs misconduct cases yet to be investigated.
A committee analysis of court filings and prison records over the past decade found that male and female inmates had made 5,415 allegations of sexual abuse against prison employees, of which 586 were later substantiated by investigators.
“Our findings are deeply disturbing and demonstrate, in my view, that the B.O.P. is failing systemically to prevent, detect and address sexual abuse of prisoners by its own employees,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat who leads the subcommittee.
The issue of sexual assault at the 160,000-inmate Bureau of Prisons, an agency hamstrung by labor shortages, budget shortfalls and mismanagement, has become increasingly evident in recent years. The perpetrators have included male employees at every level of the prison hierarchy: warden, pastor, guard.
For Lauren Reynolds, who served at Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Central Florida, it was the warehouse manager at the facility who targeted her during the final year of a 12-year sentence.
In 2019, Ms. Reynolds took the lonely, terrifying risk of identifying the officer who pressured her for sex — and quickly discovered she was one of at least 10 women who had been abused by officers and workers at the facility.
“There’s a lack of accountability, a secrecy, if nobody gets out there and talks about it,” said Ms. Reynolds, whose decision to speak to investigators prompted other women to expose yearslong sexual abuse.
The committee’s report sharply criticized the Justice Department’s leaders for failing to bring charges against many of those accused of abusing inmates at the now-shuttered women’s unit at Coleman. It also singled out the department’s Office of the Inspector General, assigned to review such allegations, for declining to investigate six male officers at Coleman accused of abuse.
All six officers “already had admitted to sexually abusing female prisoners under their supervision,” the report said. “None of these six officers was ever prosecuted.”
Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general, told the committee he was committed to streamlining and strengthening investigations, in line with the recommendations of a working group convened by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to address the problem.
But committee investigators documented a culture that contributed to an environment in which male prison officials knew that what they were doing was illegal, but believed they would never be held accountable.
Under federal law, any sexual contact between a prison employee and a prisoner is illegal, even if it would be considered consensual outside the system. Guards at Coleman, when confronted with evidence that they had sex with female inmates, admitted that they were worried about being charged with a crime in affidavits made public by the subcommittee on Tuesday.
In May 2021, the federal government paid 15 women who had served at Coleman at least $1.25 million to settle a case cited extensively in the report. That included Ms. Reynolds, who received a college degree after leaving prison and now works for a construction company.
“If you sweep it under the rug,” she said, “nothing will change.”
Investigators identified three other prisons where abusers targeted female inmates with relative impunity: the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn and the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin, near Oakland, Calif.
A former warden at Dublin, Ray Garcia, was found guilty of seven charges of sexual abuse this month after molesting female inmates and forcing them to pose for nude photographs.
As of May, 17 current or former employees at Dublin, including the former pastor, were under investigation for sexual abuse.
The situation at Dublin, which prompted Mr. Ossoff to embark on his panel’s broader investigation last spring, has also spurred the Justice Department to consider overhauling its policies governing compassionate release for inmates who have been abused.
For years, prisoners’ rights groups have complained that Bureau of Prisons officials have been reluctant to grant compassionate discharges, even when inmates can provide evidence of a terminal illness or of abuse at the hands of an official entrusted with their welfare.
But that seems to be changing, albeit slowly.
In September, Ms. Monaco wrote a letter to the prisoners’ rights group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, saying that she had ordered the bureau’s new director, Colette S. Peters, to “review whether B.O.P.’s policy regarding compassionate release should be modified” to accommodate female prisoners who had been assaulted by federal employees.
Ms. Peters has said she has begun to consider requests from inmates who have been abused and are not deemed to be threats to the community if they are granted their release.
But some groups do not think that goes far enough and are pushing the U.S. Sentencing Commission to give inmates the right to directly request a compassionate release ruling from trial judges rather than rely on the bureau. The agency releases only a fraction of inmates eligible to be freed early under federal laws.
“The B.O.P. failed to recognize female prisoners being sexually assaulted and elderly prisoners being threatened by a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic as reasons to even consider a sentence reduction,” said Kevin Ring, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “In our view, they’ve forfeited the right to have a monopoly over compassionate release.”
