Prison guard beatings of women are ‘rampant,’ experts say. Push underway to free some
Convicted of vehicular manslaughter more than 15 years ago, Amika Mota understood she would be separated from her three children as their primary caregiver.
But the rampant abuse she said she experienced — and witnessed — behind bars remains with her to this day, pushing the California woman to advocate for the women still imprisoned.
That includes an initiative in the Golden State to reconsider the sentences of many incarcerated women.
In the time away from her son and daughters — time she said left her family scattered — Mota was incarcerated in two California women’s prisons: the California Institution for Women in Chino, and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.
Both are the subject of a 255-page lawsuit in which more than 130 formerly incarcerated women are suing over extensive abuse.
Mota was 30 when a judge sentenced her to seven years in prison after a “horrific car accident” that left one dead, she recalled.
With a year spent at the prison in Chino, and the majority of her sentence served at the Chowchilla facility, she told McClatchy News the abuse detailed in multiple lawsuits and news reports is “unfortunately rampant.”
Before leaving the Chowchilla prison in 2015, Mota directly experienced intense disrespect, harassment and sexual assault from staff — as have hundreds of others, many of whom are mothers, and survivors, like her, according to Mota.
“This is something that has very much been normalized on the inside,” Mota said.
A former Chowchilla prison guard, Greg Rodriguez, is believed to have attacked more than a dozen women as a correctional officer and was charged with 96 counts, including rape, sodomy and sexual battery, The Sacramento Bee previously reported.
Mota, now 46 and living in the East Bay Area, has returned to California’s prisons dozens of times since her release to visit women on the inside as one of the executive founders of Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition. The organization made up of formerly incarcerated people advocates for prison policy changes.
After her incarceration, Mota began sharing stories of the people she met on the inside, those serving sentences she felt were worth a second look and wanted to help return home, given the “oppressive” nature of living in prison, she said.
Now her organization is working with national nonprofit For The People. The group has launched a new initiative, Together Home, that calls attention to the challenges incarcerated women face and focuses on efforts to safely bring them home under California’s prosecutor-initiated resentencing law.
Several California district attorney’s office are also involved in the initiative.
The law was passed in 2018 with the help of For The People’s founder Hillary Blout, a former prosecutor with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office who met Mota soon after she was released from prison
Though women comprise about 7% of incarcerated people in prisons, they make up 33% “of all staff-on-inmate sexual victimizations,” according to a Justice Department study cited by For The People.
Given what women face in prison, Blout told McClatchy News it “really drives home the urgency about why we need an initiative to prioritize finding women in prison and evaluating those cases.”
‘Officers beating people up on the daily’
One thing has become apparent to Mota: Violence is the biggest issue women face from prison staff, followed by sexual assault, she said.
Last year, she and her organization spoke with over 700 incarcerated people. Some spoke of facing or witnessing sexual assault — but everyone “had experienced extreme violence,” she said.
“We’re talking about broken jaws,” she said. “Severe, severe violence.”
Mota recounted how several incarcerated survivors said many prison guards are “big men” and that “when they detained somebody or they’re struggling with somebody … they just tend to overpower people very quickly and inflict a lot of injury.”
“We’re watching people, you know, officers, beating people up on the daily,” Mota said.
The 255-page lawsuit, filed in December by people formerly incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women’s Facility, details harrowing accounts of physical and sexual abuse.
A plaintiff, who said she was repeatedly sexually abused by two guards at both facilities in 2018, would regularly wear her hair in a mohawk, which she styled using jail soap.
One guard “always gave (her) a hard time” about the mohawk, would call it “outlandish” and refused to let her eat in the kitchen because of it, the lawsuit said.
One day, that guard took her to the bathroom to wash the soap from her hair, according to the lawsuit.
That’s when he grabbed her neck, “forced (her) head in the sink” and shoved her face in the water while “spanking (her),” according to the lawsuit.
The suit names the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and those accused of abuse as defendants.
Terri Hardy, a spokesperson for the department, told McClatchy News on June 13 that “While CDCR cannot comment on specific cases or accusations that may be in litigation, CDCR is fully committed to protecting victims of sexual assault and ensuring avenues are available for both the incarcerated population and staff to safely report misconduct.”
“CDCR enforces a zero-tolerance policy to staff sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment,” Hardy said, and that “Individuals who violate the policy are subject to discipline, up to and including termination.”
Hardy also said the department “has taken steps to increased staff training specific to women’s issues and trauma while increasing communication and awareness with the incarcerated population” and that “we have implemented body worn cameras and audio surveillance systems at both CIW and CCWF, expanded trauma-focused programming and services; and currently in the process of creating full-time Prison Rape Elimination Act Compliance Manager at institutions.”
Officer pushed one woman against oven, burning her
Several lawsuits have also been filed over staff-on-inmate abuse at FCI Dublin, a prison where abuse became so “pervasive” that it became known as the “rape club,” according to a federal lawsuit reported on by McClatchy News.
In another lawsuit, filed March 7, one woman faced physical and verbal abuse from three officers in retaliation for witnessing them having sex with other incarcerated people at FCI Dublin.
She knew one guard, Andrew Jones, was having sex with her cellmate, according to the lawsuit.
“After (he) stopped having sex with Plaintiff’s cellmate, he began acting cruel and abusive towards plaintiff,” including by pushing her against a hot oven and burning her, the lawsuit said.
Jones, who supervised the women working in the kitchen, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison on Nov. 16 on accusations of sexually abusing inmates and making false statements, McClatchy News previously reported.
One woman Jones abused, according to federal prosecutors, feared rebuffing his sexual advances as he “would become angry and would treat the prisoners in the kitchen poorly” if “he did not get his way,” court documents say.
In April, FCI Dublin closed down, The Associated Press reported. A trial is scheduled for next June over the widespread alleged abuse.
Blout told McClatchy News that hearing of Mota’s daily experiences while imprisoned “really struck” her.
“With what we’re seeing with the closure of FCI Dublin,” Blout said “everybody knew all these women who were in prison…or women who had family members…that they were subjected to incredible amounts of trauma, through physical and sexual abuse.”
Second chances and the Together Home Initiative
From 1980 to 2020, the number of women in U.S. prisons has increased by more than 525%, making women “the fastest growing prison population” according to For The People.
Blout said she learned as a prosecutor that U.S. laws “are really designed to give people pretty extensive sentences,” some of which are worth reviewing.
In the U.S., more than 1,000 people have been resentenced under a prosecutor-initiated initiative, according to Blout’s organization. However, not many people who have been resentenced are women.
In San Diego County, 51 people have been resentenced, according to District Attorney Summer Stephan. Two of them were women, she told McClatchy News.
“We have a duty as prosecutors to keep the community safe and to safeguard the rights of victims,” Stephan said.
Stephan explained that her office considers several factors when reviewing a case for resentencing, including the person’s criminal history, their trauma, the circumstances of the crime, efforts made to seek rehabilitative services and input from the victims, as well as “the long-term impact of harm.”.
One of the women resentenced in San Diego County was initially given 40 years to life in connection with an attempted murder, Stephan said. With resentencing, she was released after serving 15 years in prison.
“It looked like she had a lot of trauma that she was being exploited in prostitution, where this incident had arisen with a criminal buyer,” Stephan said.
She emphasized that while it’s never okay to commit crimes, her office wants to make sure they evaluate an individual “as a human being … and really look at whether the time that they served already is sufficient for that particular crime.”
The majority of women incarcerated in prison are survivors of abuse, including physical or sexual abuse in childhood and domestic violence, according to For The People.
This “primes them for being vulnerable while in a prison” if targeted by abusive correctional officers or other people, Stephan said.
“I know many correctional officers that are extremely decent and would never abuse anybody,” she said, “but there, of course, have been proven cases and reports of corrupt systems and corrupt people.”
‘Prisons just are not safe’
When asked how she felt about the length of her own sentence after she was convicted of vehicular manslaughter, Mota said, “I had taken someone’s life. It’s hard to equate a sentence with that, especially like, I had a date, I was coming home, it was less than 10 years. “
She recalls her judge saying her sentence was about punishment, not her rehabilitation.
“What was really hard to hear in that, was that … the will to punish was stronger than the will to have a healed human coming back into the world. “
Like Mota, the majority of women in prison are also mothers, according to the For The People.
“Every person that is released or has the opportunity to be reconnected with family like that is public safety to me, keeping families connected,” Mota said.
Though resentencing efforts focusing on women may not solve the pervasive abuse many face while incarcerated, she said “every step that we can take in that direction is a positive one.”
“Prisons just are not safe,” Mota said. “They are inherently not safe places for women to be, period.”
This story was originally published June 13, 2024 at 3:29 PM with the headline "Prison guard beatings of women are ‘rampant,’ experts say. Push underway to free some."
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