The sun had barely come up at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, but the prisoners knew something was about to happen.
Prisoners had still not turned up for their jobs that morning, and there were extra guards at the troubled federal facility in Northern California.
“We could tell these were not new officers,” Rhonda Fleming, a woman imprisoned in Dublin, told The Times in an email. “We knew they came from a men’s prison.”
But the women could only guess what was happening – and that left them stressed.
After years of controversy, lawsuits and sex abuse scandals, on Monday the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced plans to close the facility. But rather than bringing relief, for many prisoners the news created fear and confusion as the women worried about being taken away from their families.
This facility in Dublin has been making headlines for years, and usually for nothing good. Prisoners and their advocates cited problems in medical care, mold And overcrowding. But the prison was most notorious for the sexual abuse scandal that earned it the reputation as the “Rape Club”.
Eight FCI Dublin employees – after the FBI began making arrests in 2021 Including a former warden -Prisoners were accused of sexual abuse. Several women sued the prison, and this year a federal judge appointed a special master to oversee the facility. Last month, federal authorities raided the facility, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons removed several top managers.
Fleming said, in view of all this, several top officials of the jail entered his housing unit around 7:30 am on Monday. “FCI-Dublin is closing, you will all be transferred by Friday,” Fleming remembered hearing the interim warden say. “That’s all the information I have at this time.”
Federal officials in Washington publicly announced the news, saying, “FCI Dublin is not meeting expected standards and the best course of action is to close the facility.” Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters said the decision was made “following ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of those unprecedented steps and additional resources.”
Soon, the women’s lawyers began receiving calls as reporters told them about Peters’ announcement. Michael Bien, whose law firm is handling the class-action lawsuit, said that was the first he heard about the closure. It’s unclear what will happen to the prison, although officials said Monday that the closure “may be temporary but will certainly lead to a change in mission.”
Meanwhile, panic spread in Dublin.
Several jailed women – who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution – described a chaotic scene. They did not know where they were going or when, and they watched as staff moved from one cell to another and reported who was leaving. One woman said guards told people the transfers were only happening so officers could “take care of the asbestos”.
In addition to the uncertainty, the women also worried about losing their belongings: Fleming said guards told everyone they could only take one bag of property. She watched the women around her try to eat any food they had left, and began to throw out anything they felt would not be suitable.
“You look around and pick and choose,” said one woman, as she watched people trying to figure out whether they should use the limited packing space for photos of their kids or for soap and shampoo. . “I cried the whole time,” she said.
Despite the chaos, Fleming said most of the women around her seemed happy to leave the crowded lockup of 600 people. Several current and former inmates said that sometimes the facility was packed so tightly that women were placed in quarters ranging from one cell to four, so tight that some had to turn sideways to fit between the bunks. Is.
“There was asbestos and mold and paint peeling off our beds and ceilings,” former Dublin prisoner Maria Ledesma told The Times this week. She said she was “surprised” the closure was not announced sooner.
Fleming agreed.
“Personally, I’m very happy the prison is closing,” he wrote. “It’s environmentally unsafe.”
Still, some women were not happy with the news of the transfer. For many of them in Dublin, that is A transfer to another federal women’s prison, about 20 miles east of Oakland, would mean hundreds of miles from home.
“I lost my entire family to the pandemic,” a woman with family in California told The Times. “I don’t want to move away from the family I have left.”
Experts shared their concerns. Michelle Deitch, director of the Jail and Prison Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said that even though the facility was “inconvenient”, separating women from their families could be problematic.
“Closures will create challenges because these women will end up in facilities that may be very, very far from their homes,” she said. “This will strain family relationships and make it difficult for these women to re-enter their communities.”
Since the 1970s, studies have shown that prison visits can reduce recidivism Prison Policy Initiative Research Round-up Published in 2021.
Following the official announcement on Monday, the jurist overseeing the class-action case – U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers – immediately scheduled a mid-morning status conference.
According to Amaris Montes, director of West Coast Litigation and Advocacy for Rights Behind Bars, Gonzalez Rogers told lawyers at the conference that she would issue an order to stop the prisoner transfers.
“The Court is aware that the Bureau of Prisons has announced the closure of FCI Dublin,” sequence startedIt said that given the agency’s “significant inadequacies”, officials would need to find out whether prisoners were eligible for home confinement, a halfway house or compassionate release before being moved to another prison.
At about 4 p.m., Fleming said, Officer Gonzalez came to the unit with a copy of Rogers’ order.
“The jail is still being closed, but jail officials had to change buses and return about 75 inmates back to the jail,” Fleming wrote. Those who came back had neither any luggage nor clean clothes, he said.
“BOP employees lied,” Fleming continued, “we were told that inmates were being returned because they had not been medically cleared, when in fact, the prison is under a court order requiring each transfer to be a special There is a need to put it in front of the master.”
On Tuesday, federal prison officials declined to answer questions about how many inmates were transferred, or how many were returned.
Amid Monday’s chaos, prisoner advocates and criminal justice experts said that regardless of the facility’s closure, long-standing problems at the facility are evidence of the need for outside oversight of the federal system.
“Closing the facility in Dublin does nothing to change the underlying culture that has contributed to rampant sexual abuse in the prison,” said Shanna Rifkin, deputy general counsel for prisoner advocacy organization FAMM. “Independent federal oversight could help resolve the underlying issues.”
