HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) \u2014 It was after midnight when she crept down the narrow, dimly lit stairs carrying a bag of dirty laundry. She crossed under a patchwork of pipes and ducts to the far back corner of the basement, as she had done many times before. That, she said, is where correctional officer James Widen was waiting for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had just called her name over the intercom, telling her to report to the work release center\u2019s laundry room. So April Youst rose from her bunk, careful not to wake the other incarcerated women sleeping in the dorm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When she got downstairs, she said Widen offered to save her some money by opening \u201cthe cage,\u201d a little room with free washers and dryers reserved for new prisoners who hadn\u2019t yet started their jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She gratefully stepped inside. And then, she said, everything changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe\u2019s rubbing himself,\u201d she said, while reminding her of all the little favors he\u2019d done for her. \u201cHe was like \u2026 \u2018It\u2019s time to pay.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her account of that night to The Associated Press mirrors, almost word for word, the complaint she filed with police eight years ago. Widen was charged two years later and pleaded not guilty, but the case continues to crawl through the criminal court system. He vehemently denied the allegations to the AP, contending he was set up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Youst is part of the fastest-growing population behind bars \u2014 women, most of whom are locked up for nonviolent crimes that often are drug-related. Though female prisoners long have been victims of sexual violence, the number of reports against correctional staff has exploded nationwide in recent years. Many complaints follow a similar pattern: Accusers are retaliated against, while those accused face little or no punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all 50 states, the AP found cases<\/u><\/a> where staff allegedly used inmate work assignments to lure women to isolated spots, out of view of security cameras. The prisoners said they were attacked while doing jobs like kitchen or laundry duty inside correctional facilities or in work-release programs that placed them at private businesses like national fast-food restaurants and hotel chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe only thing you\u2019re thinking about when you\u2019re coming into intake is, \u2018How am I going to stay safe?\u2019\u201d said Johanna Mills of Just Detention International, a nonprofit organization working to end sexual violence behind bars. When she was incarcerated, she said her boss smashed her in the head and raped her after bringing her to an empty gym one night to do electrical work. \u201cIt never occurred to me to watch my back from the supervisor,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of a two-year investigation<\/u><\/a> that has exposed everything from multinational companies benefiting from prison labor to incarcerated workers\u2019 lack of rights and protections, AP reporters spoke to more than 100 current and former prisoners nationwide, including women who said they were sexually abused by correctional staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The AP also scoured thousands of pages of court filings, police reports, audits and other documents that detailed graphic stories of systemic sexual violence and cover-ups from New York to Florida to California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those cases prompted a bipartisan Senate investigation<\/u><\/a> two years ago that found prisoners were sexually abused by wardens, guards, chaplains or other staff in at least two-thirds of all women\u2019s federal prisons over the past decade. But a backlog of thousands of cases has impeded the Bureau of Prison\u2019s ability to hold employees accountable, government investigators said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed more than 20 years ago, created a channel for filing reports that resulted in a threefold increase in the number of allegations of staff sexual misconduct involving male, female and transgender inmates from 2010 to 2020 at jails and prisons nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just over a month ago, U.S. lawmakers held a hearing to discuss how to better safeguard inmates. One woman, Bonnie Hernandez, testified that she was raped repeatedly and violently by officer Lenton Hatten in a Florida federal prison after he made her clean the recreation area as part of her work detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt got to the point where I feared for my life and had no choice but to report him, even though I was terrified to do so,\u201d she said. In response, she said she was sent to isolation, then transferred to a facility with greater restrictions and no access to video calls with her daughters. Still, it was one of the rare cases that led to prosecution, boosted by DNA evidence. Hatten faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. He received only three months last year after pleading guilty<\/u><\/a> to sexual abuse of a ward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat you allow is what will continue,\u201d Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said after her testimony. \u201cThree months for rape is absurd. \u2026 That\u2019s not justice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, even a confession isn\u2019t enough to lead to punishment. At another federal facility in Florida, a guard who had sex with women on landscape duty was among at least six men who were not prosecuted even though they admitted to the misconduct during an internal investigation, according to the Senate report<\/u><\/a>. That was in part because, by law, government employees cannot be criminally charged if they are compelled to make statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internationally, prison rape is recognized as a form of torture. While it is illegal in the U.S, correctional officers have argued in some states that \u2013 despite the clear power imbalance \u2013 inmates gave their consent. Laws vary widely. For example, sexual abuse of an inmate can be a misdemeanor in Kentucky with a maximum sentence of 12 months, but prison rape is a felony in Pennsylvania, carrying up to seven years behind bars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Correctional staff often quit or retire before internal investigations are complete, sometimes retaining pensions and other benefits, experts say. With no paper trail and severe staff shortages, some are simply transferred or hired at other facilities or they land positions overseeing vulnerable populations like juveniles, the AP found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Officer Widen took a job in West Virginia after resigning from a women\u2019s prison in neighboring Ohio. According to an internal investigation submitted as part of civil court filings, he had delivered a ring from an inmate to a former prisoner. He told the AP there was no sexual contact and that he quit after upsetting prison officials by launching his own investigation into heroin smuggling at the facility, transporting the ring in exchange for information from the inmate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Youst said she had no concerns about Widen when she first arrived at the Huntington Work Release Center. In fact, she said he was a favorite among many of the men and women living there, sometimes sneaking them cigarettes or warning them about shakedowns. She said he also helped make a write-up against her go away after she was caught with a contraband cellphone \u2013 an incident that could have gotten her sent back to prison and farther away from her young daughter, who was living just down the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a guard, Widen held incredible power over the women. They had earned their places at the program, allowing them to dip a toe back into the free world. Though work assignments inside prisons may pay only pennies an hour, outside opportunities \u2014 which easily can be taken away \u2014 allow women to earn a little more money before their release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Youst had been in and out of the system for years for crimes stemming from her addiction. She was working days at a local mattress company when she was called down to the laundry room that night in early 2016. She told police \u2014 and the AP \u2014 that Widen started touching himself over his pants. Then, she said, he told her the cameras couldn\u2019t see what he was about to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019s already pulling his pants down,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can hear his belt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She said she desperately tried to reason with him, stressing that someone could walk in on them and that the women upstairs in the dorm might miss her if she was gone too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, echoing the account she gave police, she said, \u201cHe just pretty much bent me over the washing machine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Youst said she is baffled by how the case has dragged on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Widen has been free since posting bond after his arrest in 2018. He told the AP that all allegations of sexual misconduct at the work release center are untrue, labeled Youst \u201ca career criminal\u201d and said the police were unjustly after him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy rights have been violated every which way,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got nothing to hide. I didn\u2019t do anything I was accused of. West Virginia is crooked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n West Virginia, a rugged swath of Appalachia that has been home to the country\u2019s highest overdose death rate for a decade, has experienced one of America\u2019s sharpest spikes in female incarceration rates, with a more than 200 percent increase in state prisons between 2000 and 2016 \u2014 which is precisely when lawyers started fielding sexual abuse complaints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AP reporters met with current and former prisoners inside correctional facilities and at their homes in mountain communities, some of whom said staff members often started out being nice \u2014 bringing them fast food or makeup \u2014 and then raped them, peeped at them in showers or forced them to strip and perform sex acts on other prisoners while the guards watched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most female victims locked up nationwide were abused before being incarcerated, research shows. They rarely report assaults, fearing they won\u2019t be believed or will be punished, ranging from losing their jobs to being placed in solitary confinement or denied contact with their children. And many on work release have only a short time left to serve and are wary of doing anything that could send them back to prison or add time to their sentences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In most cases nationwide, internal investigations determine that allegations are \u201cunsubstantiated.\u201d And in the cases that have enough evidence to wind their way through the legal system, only 6% of the nearly 1,000 staff who reportedly engaged in sexual misconduct with male and female inmates in 2019 and 2020 were convicted, according to the latest Department of Justice figures. Without prosecution, perpetrators also can avoid placement on sex offender registries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In West Virginia, Amanda McGrew, the state\u2019s compliance director for the Prison Rape Elimination Act, said some prisoners use the act to file complaints unrelated to sexual abuse because they know it will trigger the removal of an officer until an investigation is completed. Police are alerted when accusations are substantiated and it\u2019s up to prosecutors to take a case forward, she said. And even when staff resign, she added, investigations continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there is another route: Huntington-based attorney Michael Woelfel has sought restitution through a stream of civil suits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Woelfel, who also is a Democratic state senator, said he has settled 127 cases in which women accused guards of abuse in the past 15 years, forcing the state\u2019s insurance carrier to pay out millions of dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said he first started receiving calls from women jailed for crimes linked to their addiction after judges took a hard line, locking them up to try to straighten them out. He had known some of them since they were girls, appearing before him when he oversaw preliminary juvenile delinquency cases that sometimes involved sexual or physical abuse at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most lawyers wouldn\u2019t touch their prison rape claims, and not just because they are hard to win due to qualified immunity \u2014 a high bar that helps protects people in law enforcement from liability resulting from misconduct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere is a certain element of people that think if you go to prison, you sort of get whatever you get in there,\u201d Woelfel said, adding that while he is still contacted by women alleging sexual misconduct, the slew of lawsuits has helped pressure the state to crack down. \u201cThat taboo of rape or sexual assault \u2026 it\u2019s so commonplace that people still joke about that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Women have been targeted from their days on slave plantations, when they were raped by their owners, to the decades-long period that followed emancipation and involved leasing convicts out to private companies. Widespread reports of abuse eventually led to the creation of reformatories, where women no longer were overseen by men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That began to change in the 1970s after anti-discrimination laws opened the door for cross-gender supervision, just as the number of women being locked up started to rise. Though they now represent only about 10 percent of the nation\u2019s overall prison population, female incarceration rates have jumped from about 26,000 in 1980 to nearly 200,000 today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some guards believe women with substance abuse issues are accustomed to using sex as a commodity on the streets, seeing them as partly responsible for their own victimization, said Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University and one of the country\u2019s top experts on prison rape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey\u2019re viewed as sort of the lowest of the low,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re not really women \u2014 they\u2019re just other things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Youst said her case appears to bear that out. She\u2019s out of prison and said she\u2019s working to stay clean, holding down a busy job while building a new life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even before the languishing criminal case, Youst and three others from the Huntington work release center came forward to file civil suits against Widen. The cases were settled by the state\u2019s insurance carrier for $240,000 in 2019, with no admission of any wrongdoing, Woelfel said. The AP interviewed three of the women. The fourth died of an overdose before the agreement was reached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Widen contended the women were driven by a payday and plotted together, saying, \u201cMe, too! Me, too! Me, too!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Alesha Canfield, who was among the four women filing suit, said she talked to no one about Widen at the center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She said she was worn out from working morning and afternoon shifts at two major restaurant chains, but still struggled to sleep at night, worried that Widen would tap her on the shoulder in the dorm and summon her to the center\u2019s basement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was terrified. I did what I was told,\u201d she said to the AP, noting that she waited to file a rape report until after leaving the facility because she feared retaliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m the criminal,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s the cop. So why are they going to believe me anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Canfield, who related the same story in civil court filings, said it\u2019s hard to understand why abuse behind bars isn\u2019t taken more seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re all women,\u201d she said. \u201cJust because we made a mistake and got caught once in our lives doesn\u2019t mean that we should be treated any different than any other woman in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A recent spike in scandals, cover-ups and lawsuits linked to women\u2019s facilities nationwide has prompted congressional investigations and scathing Department of Justice reports that cited a \u201cculture of abuse.\u201d Experts say powerful unions sometimes work to shield staff from allegations of misconduct. And in some cases, correctional officers who speak out are retaliated against.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2018We\u2019re all women\u2019<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Culture of abuse\u2019<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n