We don’t know how many women have been transferred out of the scandal-ravaged and soon-to-be-shuttered FCI Dublin women’s prison, but attorneys for the inmates have filed an emergency restraining order to halt the clearly haphazard and rushed transfer process.
In the shocking Monday morning announcement that the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin (FCI Dublin) would be suddenly closing after years of sexual misconduct and assault scandals, the US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) said they’d hoped to ship all of the prisoners out by Friday. Well, it is now Friday, and it seems the effort may be just resulting in more prisoner abuse of a different kind.
KTVU reports on the chaotic and hurried transfer process of the estimated 605 women there. Some are reportedly not medically able to be transferred at the time, but are being chained up and shipped out anyway. Others are apparently not being told where they’re going, and are simply being thrown on a bus. There are even reports of strip searches and menstruating women being denied tampons, left to simply bleed on themselves, which indicates this response to the sexual assault scandal is only forcing more trauma on the inmates.
The husband of one prisoner told KTVU his wife “was told she had 15 minutes to pack," and given no information where she was being taken. There are only six other low-security federal women’s prisons elsewhere in the US, none of them in California.
It may be a more important aspect to that KTVU story that attorneys for the prisoners have filed a restraining order to immediately halt the transfers. Or it may prove totally unimportant, as KTVU notes that “most, if not all, of the women have already been hastily shipped out of the prison.”
The restraining order motion says that "While the Court may not prevent BOP from closing a prison in due course, it has the authority, jurisdiction and duty to ensure that the process is carried out in compliance with relevant federal laws and in accordance with constitutional standards."
The FCI Dublin prison guards and their union are also fighting the move. While the BOP has said that none of them will lose their jobs, that likely means that they will have to upend their lives and transfer, probably out of state.
"My officers are not the abusers," union president Edward Canales told KTVU. "They are the officers that maintained safety and security and prevented abuse."
There are some nicely resolved cases where Dublin inmates were released early if their sentences were already nearly complete. But it is odd that the BOP has been completely silent on how many women are still there, and where the others have been shipped to. And it’s possible they will complete all the transfers today in secret, with no accountability.
KTVU spoke with some families, and got the information that “One father said maybe 100 women were left early Friday morning. Another mother said ‘everyone is gone.’”
Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons
