By Taylor Tinsley, OAN Staff
Thursday, July 11, 2024 6:14 PM
The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to increase oversight of federal prisons.
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Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, led the study with Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, and first introduced the bill in 2022, saying it made clear a fundamental overhaul of federal prison oversight was urgently needed.
“The human rights crisis unfolding behind closed doors in America’s prisons is a stain on America’s conscience,” Ossoff said.
Subsequent investigations revealed that two-thirds of women in federal prisons had been sexually assaulted by staff.
Sexual assaults and abuse of inmates are said to be perpetuated by severe understaffing and overcrowding in prisons across the country.
The legislation would require the Department of Justice’s inspector general to conduct risk-based inspections of 122 Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities, which together administer 160,000 inmates, provide recommendations for addressing problems, and give them a risk score. Higher-risk facilities would be inspected more frequently.
The Inspector General must report all findings to Congress and the public, and the BOP must respond with a corrective action plan within 60 days.
The bill would also set up a secure hotline and online form, and an independent ombudsman would collect and investigate complaints and report to the attorney general and Parliament.
Hopefully, this will help ease the pain of women coming forward from the retaliation that continues to be complained about by women incarcerated at a closed facility in Dublin, California.
After eight corrections officers and the prison warden were convicted on federal charges of having sexual contact with dozens of female inmates, 605 women were transferred or released from FCI in Dublin, California, to facilities across the country.
One inmate transferred from Dublin to the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where he has already faced allegations of sexual assault by staff, claimed two staff members made it clear their lives did not matter.
Another inmate transferred from Dublin FCI to Hazelton FCI in West Virginia, with similar allegations of abuse, was told he should not expect to hear back from jobs he had applied for.
In another case, inmates in Dublin were held at gunpoint during a bus ride to Hazelton after one of the women allegedly tried to escape handcuffs, said Katherine Sevchenko of the National Council of Prisoner and Formerly Prisoner Women and Girls.
“The driver pulled over to the side of the road and the guards said, ‘Come on, let’s solve Dublin’s problem right now,’ and they grabbed their rifles and said, ‘Let’s shoot you all,'” Sevchenko said. “They actually cocked the rifles and terrified the women into thinking they were really going to die.”
As senators seek to hold federal prisons accountable for lack of oversight, the bill now goes to President Biden and will be sent to his desk for his signature.
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