Women suing Indiana jail for staff-facilitated rape.

[NitroNine]

So far 28 women have filed federal suits against Clark County Jail in Indiana (more are expected to file) after they were raped by male inmates who paid a (male) member of staff to gain access to the women’s section.

You can read more about what happened, including the full text of the filings here.

Some media coverage:
Newsweek
Daily Mail
New York Post
If you’re in the US or use a VPN there are various other outlets covering it.

The US has a serious problem with sexual violence in its prison system; some background:
• Smith, Brenda V., Sexual Abuse Against Women in Prison, 16 Criminal Justice 31, 2001
• Report from 2022 about Massachusetts’ Women’s Prisons
• Human Rights Watch’s 1996 All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons

Presumably ACLU are supporting his right to do that?

This is horrific.

What have I just read.

Reading this shocked and sickened me more than anything I've read for a while. Sometimes I think we humans don't deserve to live on this planet 😡😰

Absolutely horrendous.

"Lowe, the 'rogue officer', has been charged with trafficking with an inmate, aiding escape and official misconduct, with his trial set for November this year"

I've watched '60 days in' which was filmed here and at other prisons after becoming ingested in the privatisation of US prisons.

I don't think people can imagine how bad they are. There are hardly any officers at all and they pretty much never enter the pods where the inmates are. They sit in a central location and watch what is going on on a screen.

There are no visitors and there is no time outside at all. That way they don't need as many staff.

'The sheriff's detective division has continue to interview female inmates who were present in the pod that evening and these interviews have yielded information that is in direct opposition to the allegations made in the civil suit,' the department said in a statement.

That's from towards the end of the DM version, the other two don't carry that interview. So it seems they're saying the women are making it up? I don't get it. The New York Post details physical injuries and STDs suffered by the women. How did they occur? Utterly ridiculous.

And the women had bedding and personal hygiene items confiscated afterwards with lights on all the time for 72 hours. If you've heard how hard personal hygiene items are to come by in US prisons plus the fact that some of them were bleeding (aside from menstruation) the prison's treatment of them afterwards is at least as bad as the male prisoners' treatment of them.

I hope these women are awarded BIG payouts.

• I hope they're awarded big payouts because money is the only thing that the system cares about here. If it's made extremely expensive for the system/it's insurance it'll be more likely to change. If it's "affordable" nothing at all will change.

I think America is going down the toilet at a rate that frankly scares me.

I'm imagining that you can bribe the guards as to which female inmate you want to be housed with - would anyone like to (try to) convince me I'm wrong?

I would imagine (soon if not yet) they'll be prison guards having sex with inmates under the threat of I'll house a rapist with you if you don't.

It isn't possible to say if a single particular man will abuse any power he's given over women - but for a large enough group you can sure it'll happen if it can happen.

Can you imagine how depraved those guards must be if they did, as alleged, watch everything on the cctv? Apparently, not one guard or staff member went into the women’s section while this occurred over hours and hours - and then to strip the bedding, clothes and leave lights on for 72 hours straight - if true it is sadistic, evil and unfathomable. Those poor women.

The brutality of the prison-industrial complex in the States is both horrifying & almost impossible to comprehend the scale [& scope] of.

There are enough prisoners with disabilities in America that they are effectively enacting mass incarceration of their disabled citizens - there are more people with mental health conditions in prison than in hospital. Problems HWR wrote about in the 1990s article linked in my OP are ongoing; ditto those raised in their Report from 2001 about men being raped in US prisons. Women & girls are still giving birth wearing shackles; & BIPOC people, particularly black people, are so dramatically over-represented in the prison population it’s staggering.

If the system encourages Corrections Officers to see prisoners as devoid of even the most basic rights - in some institutions to the point of effective subhumanity - is it really so shocking (while it remains sickening) to see abuses of power of such magnitude?

Desperately hope that all those involved see justice (for the women, to include enormous sums money, not that there can ever really be compensation for something like this) meted out.

This goes back further than the 90s. Long, long ago, when i watched "Bionic Woman" and "Charlie's Angels" there were story lines dealing with this sort of stuff. Which I did not believe. But it was happening, and it was known about, and it was being put out to the public gaze, and obviously no-one did anything.

Not that I'm aware of. Neither are WoLF and Family Policy Alliance supporting these women or their lawsuit in any way. Funny how some people only care about women when there is an axe to grind about trans issues.

This jail is in Indiana, the state whose Attorney General who opened an investigation into and threatened the license of the female doctor who performed the abortion for the little ten year old girl.

That is disgusting. That poor lesbian too. I can only imagine that must have been devastating for her to experience as well as for the other inmates. It was difficult to read.

Those poor women. To be totally trapped with sexual predators. And then to be punished for having been assaulted.

JFC.

I mean, JFC in heaven above.

This is the most abhorrent thing I've read recently.

Unbelievable.

This is horrific but like so many horrific things that openly happen in US prisons it's a long shot that anything will be fundamentally changed. I hope I'm wrong and they win massive compensation as well as an inquiry into what happened.

Someone mentioned WoLF. Went to have a look.

If you think it's appalling that men can bribe guards to be put in women's prisons, wait til you read about this!

WoLF are working on males who are transferred to women's prisons merely by declaring themselves 'women'.

This is not only happening and has resulted in assaults, it's fully state sanctioned.

www.womensliberationfront.org/news/condom-purchases-and-sexual-assault

www.womensliberationfront.org/womens-prisons

This is so barbaric I’m struggling to say what I want without being deleted

I'm sure you think you're being clever.

What you are showing me, is that you cannot feel a scintilla of horror and sympathy for rape victims for even a moment, without bouncing back onto your usual soapbox of sniping at feminists-who-talk-to-people-you-don't-like. Ironically, it's a very common disorder, to the point that WoLF might choose not to involve themselves in women's causes that don't need their support, simply because trans activists and other people of your mind set dismiss anything that has had the involvement of the Wrong Kind of Feminist.

For example, earlier this month, some French trans activists ripped down the memorial art dedicated to murdered children, put up by those children's grieving mothers, because a GC radfem group had supported the mothers to make it.

At some point, you need to grow up.

Good grief. Utterly appalling.
People may ask:
If this is true, why isn't it being covered by Washington Post or the Guardian or any of the media that normally cover human rights?

A rhetorical question of course. And the flip side is, conveniently, that if it isn't covered by any of the regular leftish media then it must be another rightwing invented story to perpetuate the gender wars.

But of course it isn't.

Appalling as it is, I don't find it so hard to believe, since violence in US prisons is a longstanding problem to which the answer is all too often a shrug and 'if you don't like the time, don't do the crime'. As if sexual assault is all part of what's to be expected in prison. And that's when it happens to men.
See here for a brief summary and links to the excellent NYRB series of essays in 2010:
prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/03/nyrb-series-on-prison-rape.html