The U.S. government has agreed to pay nearly $116 million to settle lawsuits brought by over 100 women who allege they were sexually abused or mistreated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, a facility infamously known as the “rape club” due to widespread staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct.
Under the settlements approved on Tuesday, each of the 103 women involved in the lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons will receive an average of about $1.1 million. This financial resolution follows a separate class-action lawsuit settled just last week, which mandates the Bureau of Prisons to subject some of its facilities to a court-appointed monitor and publicly acknowledge the pervasive abuse that took place at FCI Dublin.
Aimee Chavira, a former inmate at the prison and one of the lawsuit plaintiffs, stated, “We were sentenced to prison, we were not sentenced to be assaulted and abused. I hope this settlement will help survivors, like me, as they begin to heal – but money will not repair the harm that BOP did to us, or free survivors who continue to suffer in prison, or bring back survivors who were deported and separated from their families.”
The Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin was permanently shut down on December 5, following a security and infrastructure assessment after its temporary closure in April. The decision to close the prison was not directly tied to the settlement agreement, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Deborah Golden, an attorney for the plaintiffs, commented on the situation, saying, “It was impossible for survivors to escape the culture of abuse that permeated FCI Dublin. No one was safe. Even those who weren’t assaulted lived in daily terror that it might happen to them at any moment.” She described the trauma suffered by the victims as a “searing indictment of our entire prison system’s failure to confront its longstanding abuse crisis.”
