Good riddance

It's great to learn that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to close the Federal Corrections Institution at Dublin, California. This minimum security women's prison has been a sexual abuse hellhole for a couple of decades. The last few male wardens have ended up charged and convicted for assaulting and raping inmates. 

... “It is a remarkable admission,” said attorney Michael Bien, whose law firm represents inmates in a class-action lawsuit over conditions at the prison. Prison authorities are “saying they can’t operate this prison safely.” He said closure doesn’t address the underlying issue. “How does this solve the problems? The same policy and procedures are in place at other prisons. It is not the building that did anything wrong.” ... “It is an unprecedented move to opt for closure,” said Amaris Montes, director of West Coast litigation and advocacy for Right Behind Bars. “It has been a long time coming for Dublin.”  

... Maria Ledesma, a former inmate released from Dublin after two years in 2022, said she was surprised the closure took so long. “I wish it would have happened sooner,” the 52-year-old Salt Lake City woman said . During her time there, she saw frequent sexual abuse. “Girls were getting raped on the daily there,” she said.

Ledesma recalled walking back from her prison job when she heard some shuffling and spotted two people between the buildings. “There was the warden, zipping up his pants,” she said. “He looked at me, I looked at him, and I knew in that moment I needed to put my head down and keep walking.”

It may or may not be relevant that the current head of the Bureau of Prisons is a woman.

• • •

The article from the LA Times I've quoted here describes the culture of abuse at the Dublin facility as going back to the 1990s. I have reason to believe it is even older.

In 1978-9, I regularly visited a very young Native American woman who was doing a couple of years in there as part of a plea agreement. She claimed she had been waiting in a car while some guys she was with charged into a bank and apparently attempted an armed heist. Hence, there was a federal crime, as bank robbery was then usually prosecuted by the feds. She copped to a guilty plea for a short sentence just to be done with this; somehow the guys got off altogether, but she didn't much understand any of it except that she ended up locked up in a federal prison in another state. I met her through friends who had befriended her in the Seattle King County jail when she was awaiting trial; my friends were in jail for pouring blood on signature petitions for a county anti-gay rights initiative. (Those were the days.)

FCI Dublin was a dreary place. The visiting area was an open space with plastic chairs and tables that looked like a school lunchroom. Each group jostled for its own space amid the hubbub. Many visitors came with children; as I understood it, the younger kids had to be left in a prison day care pen, but older ones did join the visiting. I'm sure that, despite all the searches of inmates and scanning of their visitors, a lot of contraband came in through that room, though I never knew how it worked.

My friend did assure me that some women could get anything they wanted through "relationships" with male guards. She never clarified to me how she fit in the economy of the place and I was too ignorant to know how to ask.

The curiosity of the era was that Patty Heart, the newspaper heiress turned terrorist, was locked up there. She was always in the visiting room with a couple tables of visitors, very much a queen bee for the moment. In February 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted her bank robbery sentence.

One evening the prison put on a dance to which the inmates were allowed to invite a guest. This was a challenge to me; not only didn't I dance, but I looked like a proper '70s lesbian, a schlub. I took as much care as I could with what I wore, wanting not to embarrass my young friend. I am sure I didn't enhance her status any. 

There was a rumor (later true for awhile) that FCI Dublin was about to be made coed. My friend belonged to a set that hated the idea: they were sure that whatever privileges were available would go to the guys. They were proved right when the experiment happened.

Eventually my friend got out and returned to the Northwest. I lost touch with her. She'd be 65-ish today. I wonder if she has made it alive ...