Sexual abuse in America's federal prisons must be rooted out, Monaco insisted at a recent Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) gathering at a training facility in Aurora, Colorado.
“It’s incumbent upon us as leaders to call that out and make those changes and really be vigilant about it,” the US Justice Department's second-highest-ranking official said at the meeting which was the first gathering of prison wardens held to address and give training on the issue.
“This is urgent, urgent work,” Monaco told the 122 federal prisons wardens who had been gathered from across the country.
Most wardens are dedicated leaders who can preside over a culture that “does not tolerate even one instance of sexual abuse,” she said, seemingly encouraging the prison chiefs to act dutifully.
The Colorado gathering is the first conference of US federal prison warden since the AP news agency released an investigative report revealing the deep, previously unreported flaws within the federal Bureau of Prisons, the US Justice Department’s largest law enforcement agency.
Quotes about wellness from famous American Muslim, Malcolm X, who had spent years in US prisons and converted to Islam in one of them before rising to fame and being assassinated in an alleged government black op, were spotted at the training facility, according to AP.
To tackle the issue, teams of experts and officials will soon be deployed to women’s prisons across America to follow up on the changes made in the inhumane penitentiary system in the United States last fall.
The teams will interview both prison staff and inmates, Monaco said at the warden's gathering at the training facility outside Denver.
Employees at prisons have total control over the inmates, and there is no scenario in which an inmate can give their consent for sexual activity because prison law bans any sort of sexual activity between a prison worker and an inmate convicted to jail.
The AP revealed that at California’s Dublin prison, predatory officials and employees preyed on hapless prisoners and the cover-ups of their misconduct by their co-workers had only aggravated the situation.
The report said unlawful sexual activity at this penitentiary facility, which was largely kept out of the public eye for years, had made the cruel situation worse.
In this regard, Dublin prison’s former warden was convicted of forcing prisoners to pose naked in their cells and molesting them. The warden was one of several employees charged with sexual abuse of Dublin prison’s inmates. The prison's chaplain was also convicted.
Meanwhile, the new director of the BOP announced on Tuesday that fundamental changes were underway in the US penitentiary system as part of its new mission statement.
Colette Peters, who was hired last year after her predecessor resigned amid mounting pressure from Congress lawmakers following public awareness about the prison atrocities after the AP investigations exposed widespread corruption and misconduct, said the Justice Department’s on-the-ground approach is an extension and refinement of its response to the Dublin prison scandal.
Michael Carvajal, Peters’ predecessor, had led a BOP task force during a weeklong inspection of Dublin prison last year. During the visit, they met with staff and inmates, some of whom shared graphic details of the sex abuses the prisoners were forced to do by prison employees.
In the meantime, US media reports have disclosed rampant sexual abuse in the US federal prison system, which has been plagued by staffing shortages, suicides and security breaches after struggling to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There have been numerous reports revealing the misconduct of prison employees, according to Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department Inspector General.
Horowitz, who led the investigation in the Dublin prison case, said sexual abuse complaints are a recurrent issue in US federal prisons.
“One of the challenges the BOP faces is making sure that when you have cancer in your institution, you get it out right away. Because if you don’t take steps to stop it, it spreads and grows,” he warned.
Horowitz admitted that making changes in the US prison system will not be easy, claiming any major institutional shift will take time.
“It takes several years. It takes a commitment over months and years to have an effective change of culture,” he said. “The key is sustaining it.”
The United States, which claims to be championing human rights in the world, jails more people per capita than any other country across the globe.
The number of US inmates, according to PrisonPolicy.org, reaches a staggering rate of 565 people in prison per 100,000 Americans.
To make matters worse, when the US criminal justice data is broken down by race and ethnicity, you see disproportionality for Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native American populations.
They are being incarcerated and abused more often.
Meanwhile, according to a report, US military personnel have to sometimes worry more when they're among friends than in actual combat. In the past decades, hundreds of thousands of military personnel have been sexually assaulted in the US military.
A staggering one hundred thousand of those assaulted have been men.
A Pentagon report in September last year on sexual military assault estimates that about 35,800 service members experienced some type of sexual assault in a year.
Commanders often ignore reports and punish the victims instead. The army is worried that these reports will slow the already low rate of recruitment even more.
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