The U.S. Department of Justice will scale back its oversight into the operations of Julia Tutwiler Women’s Correctional Facility stemming from a consent decree..
The Alabama Department of Corrections announced in a news release sent Thursday that the state, along with the DOJ, moved to terminate 38 of the 44 provisions listed within the 2015 agreement, reached after the department issued a scathing report that said women in the prison in Wetumpka were subject to the “high risk and threat of sexual abuse by staff.”
A spokesperson for the DOJ declined comment Thursday. The news release did not state which provisions that the parties agreed to eliminate.
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The release went on to state that the DOC continues to evaluate how it manages the site and “remedy” the problems that the DOJ identified, but that the department added there was no need for the DOJ to interfere or oversee the daily activities of the facility.
“I am thankful for the men and women who are dedicated to our mission at Tutwiler,” ADOC Commissioner John Hamm stated in the news release. “This joint motion to terminate most of the requirements on this consent decree is a credit to our entire team and their dedication to our department and our state. We look forward to ending all court oversight of Tutwiler in the near future.”
The state entered the consent agreement to prevent a lawsuit from DOJ over allegations of sexual assault and abuse of women in the prison. DOJ, which investigated the prison in 2013, cited reports of sexual abuse at Tutwiler that went back years.
The lawsuit, filed just before the consent agreement, alleged abuse and mistreatment of people incarcerated at Tutwiler by staff working at the site.
“Women prisoners at Tutwiler suffer serious harm from sexual abuse and sexual harassment by staff, including rape, fondling, voyeurism, and sexually explicit verbal abuse,” DOJ wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit also stated that the NIC (National Institute of Corrections), an agency within the DOJ Federal Bureau of Prisons, issued a letter to the DOC listing the assortment of issues that contributed to the sexual mistreatment and harm of individuals incarcerated at the facility. It also referred to a report published by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2012, which alleged that staff at Tutwiler were sexually assaulting inmates there.
“The most visible and striking evidence of Tutwiler staff members’ illegal sexual contact with incarcerated women is the resulting pregnancies,” the report states. “In 2010, a woman in custody gave birth to a baby after being raped by a correctional officer at Tutwiler Prison.”
DOJ said in a 2014 letter to then-Gov. Robert Bentley that a woman at the prison gave birth to a child in 2011 after being assaulted by an officer the previous year. But it said an inadequate investigative process meant there could be others.
The report went on to state that complaints pertaining to the sexual assaults were met with scorn.
“Women who report sexual abuse at Tutwiler are routinely placed in segregation by the warden,” the report states. “While in segregation, these women are treated no differently from women held there for punitive reasons: they are deprived of telephone, mail, and visit privileges and have no access to recreation, programs, or work assignments.”
The incidents then became grounds for the lawsuit filed by the DOJ, which alleged that constitutional violations caused grief and harm to those incarcerated at the facility.
“ADOC and Tutwiler have demonstrated a clear deliberate indifference to the harm and substantial risk of harm to women prisoners,” DOJ wrote in its 2014 letter to Bentley. “They have failed to take reasonable steps to protect people in their custody from the known and readily apparent threat of sexual abuse and sexual harassment. Officials have been on notice for over eighteen years of the risks to women prisoners and, for over eighteen years, have chosen to ignore them.”
Under the consent decree, DOC was required to train the corrections officers who have contact people in their custody that is has a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse and sexual harassment.”
The state was also required to keep a person on site to ensure that the facility complies with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and that the DOC would be subject to oversight by the DOC when creating policies and procedures for the facility and providing updates to the agency on its operations.
About 587 people were incarcerated in close security at Tutwiler at the end of July, with another 250 held in medium security at Tutwiler Annex. The prison, built in 1942, is the oldest state correctional facility currently in operation.
DOJ sued Alabama in 2020 over rampant violence and overcrowding in the men’s prisons in the state. That suit is ongoing.
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