Report criticizes federal prison leaders for ‘unconscionable’ conditions at shuttered FCI Dublin

By Jakob Rodgers
Bay Area News Group

DUBLIN, Calif. — A blistering report found an “unconscionable” pattern of derelict care and oversight at the FCI Dublin federal women’s prison and raised the alarm that similar problems may be plaguing other federal prisons across the nation.

The report — penned by the first special master ever appointed to oversee a federal prison — found FCI Dublin’s leaders failed at nearly every turn to keep inmates safe and ensure that their claims of sexual abuse were investigated properly. It tied many of those shortcomings to staffing woes that often resulted from so many prison employees facing allegations of misconduct, the report found.

“It is unconscionable that any correctional agency could allow incarcerated individuals under their control and responsibility to be subject to the conditions that existed at FCI Dublin for such an extended period of time without correction,” wrote the special master, Wendy Still, a former Alameda County chief probation officer. She stressed how her findings “are likely an indication of systemwide issues” throughout the country’s Bureau of Prisons, including facilities that now house former Dublin inmates, transferred there when the prison closed earlier this year.

The report ranks among the most searing repudiations of the facility that had been rocked for years by criminal charges against staff members at all levels of the prison. At least eight employees have been federally charged with sexual assault or misconduct, including its former chaplain and a one-time warden, Ray J. Garcia; 7 of those 8 people, including Garcia, have been sentenced to prison after convictions or plea deals.

A federal judge in March ordered the prison to be overseen by a special master, marking the first time in the nation’s history that any such independent oversight had been ordered for a federal prison. The move was framed as a way to protect inmates ahead of a planned 2025 trial for a sprawling class-action lawsuit accusing prison managers of ignoring decades of warning signs and providing insufficient mental and physical health care.

Weeks later, the federal Bureau of Prisons announced plans to close the facility, saying the prison was “not meeting expected standards” despite “unprecedented steps” to turn it around. The surprise move was panned by inmate advocates, who voiced concerns that inmates would be transferred to prisons elsewhere without the same robust oversight.

The special master’s conclusions offered a sense of justification for former inmates, said Sabrina Taylor, 43, who was released from the facility roughly two weeks before its closure in April after serving about a year there for wire fraud. She said she was sexually assaulted earlier this year by a guard there and saw many other inmates go without needed medical care at the 600-person prison.

“I feel a sense of relief and a sense of being seen,” Taylor said. “The things we were crying out and screaming at the top of our lungs to be changed in that prison have been validated and seen by an independent source.”

It also suggested a need for sprawling reforms at the highest levels of the federal Bureau of Prisons, said Kara Janssen, an attorney helping to oversee the class-action lawsuit.

“What happened at Dublin did not happen in a vacuum — it was extremely open and obvious what the warden and others were doing at the time,” Janssen said. “Until they fix the broken system, we’re just waiting for the next Dublin. They’re being caused by the failures at the top” of the federal Bureau of Prisons.

In an email, the Bureau of Prisons said it “welcomes the additional oversight” of the prison it closed more than three months ago. The agency also “looks forward to working with the Special Master on the findings and recommendations in the report,” its statement said.

The report was unsparing in its criticism.

Rarely was the prison adequately staffed. FCI Dublin’s staff vacancy rate hit 51 percent when factoring in the 27 employees on administrative leave, the report found. As a result, it suffered from “system failures in almost every area within FCI Dublin.”

Nurses and doctors at the prison often failed to adequately examine inmates “even when the patients presented with symptoms of serious medical conditions,” the report said. Patients simply weren’t provided timely access to care, be it for physical aliments or mental illness, and the special master found “serious deficiencies” in the prison’s specialty care medical records.

The prison did not have a standardized process in place to adhere to the Prison Rape Elimination Act — the main mechanism for keeping inmates safe from abuse, the special master said. The facility didn’t even have a comprehensive listing of all cases filed under the act, nor were they being sufficiently monitored to make sure prison leaders were following up on them.

There also was “no sense of release” concerning requests for compassionate release, meaning they were “oftentimes received and ignored,” the report found. Prison leaders didn’t adequately track those requests.

Even the prison’s closure was “unnecessarily rushed” with a lack of “methodical, planned and thoughtful” practices leading to “mass chaos,” the special master wrote.

Advocates say inmates transferred away from the prison continue to report abuses elsewhere, where they are labeled as “Dublin women” and singled out for retaliatory strip searches and stints in solitary confinement at “alarming rates,” said Susan Beaty , an attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.

“(Prison officials have) proven again and again that they are unwilling or incapable of keeping people in their custody safe,” Beaty said.

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the report released Friday at a hearing where attorneys for the prisons system argued for the dismissal of the class-action lawsuit. Gonzalez Rogers has yet to issue a ruling on that request.

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