The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The 1,200 inmates at FCI, which became a women's prison in 1996, aren't there because they went on a shooting spree after being rejected by the Junior League. They aren't "in" for insider trading like Martha.

FCI is the only women's prison in the Southeast and one of the few in the nation, and the women who wind up there are serving an average of 11-year sentences for felonies often related to drugs. In a good many cases, I learned, they'd been caught up in the drug trade, serving as "mules" in smuggling operations. Many, maybe most, had lived abusive, unwholesome and wild existences on the outside and had become rough and desperate.

With last week's shooting at FCI, when federal agents went in to arrest six corrections officers for allegedly coercing women inmates into sex, I realized it was very possible that the women I met on that day of achievement were already living with the dirty little secret that has now been blown wide open.

Two men are dead. One was a guard who was about to be arrested, the other victim a federal agent who had come to arrest him and the other five guards indicted on the same mix of crimes: conspiring to commit bribery, witness tampering, mail fraud, interstate transportation in aid of racketeering.

According to the timeline coming out in the aftermath of the shooting, allegations of sex were first documented in March of 2002.

That is more than four years ago.

Four long years of what, if these charges remotely true, appears to be a field day for men put in charge of guarding a henhouse.

In general, it is absurdly bad judgment to put men in charge of guarding women inmates who are almost 100-percent powerless in the first place.

And the fact that it has taken more than four years to bring about an indictment suggests to me the low priority given to indications of improper sex with women inmates.

It would be hard to keep such behaviors hush-hush. FCI inmates don't live in cells; they live in large dormitories where four women are closeted in half-walled cubicles. The lights are on 24/7, and there is a pervasive lack of not only liberty but privacy. The women are together almost constantly.

It's impossible that fellow inmates who sleep four feet away from each other would be wholly unaware of sexual acts in progress behind a half-wall or in the laundry nook. Or that, in such an environment, no one would have noticed when unexpected bits of money or cigarettes or amenities were showing up or wondered why and how and from whom.

The FBI has spent years apparently trying to make its case for conspiracy and bribery, mail fraud witness tampering and racketeering - big fancy charges that suggest that Al Capone was at work.

Yet what we're really talking about is apparent tolerance of outrageous employee behavior and a rule-bending management culture that appears to be stuck in the 1950s.

Every office place in America of any size is so on top of sexual harassment that it doesn't go unnoticed, or unpunished, for long. Practically every office in America tests even the most junior newcomer assistant to the assistant for drug use. Yet a federal prison doesn't check its guards for weapons or drugs or, apparently, even cigarettes or taboo trinkets when they walk through the door to go to work.

You don't have to be a woman who has been knocked around by life to be outraged by the serious possibility of what happens to women in prison. Now that two men have been killed, perhaps changes will be made.

http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060625/COLUMNIST05/6
06250302/1006/OPINION

Originally published June 25, 2006