By Cristine Soto DeBerry

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced findings that show reasonable cause to believe California’s two women’s prisons are violating the Constitution by failing to protect incarcerated women and trans people from sexual abuse and harassment by staff. 

The DOJ found not only repeated sexual abuse and harassment, but also that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) knew of the misconduct and failed to adequately protect the people in its care. 

These findings should end any debate about whether sexual abuse in California’s women’s prisons can be dismissed as the misconduct of a few individuals. Correctional officers hold extraordinary power over incarcerated women and trans people. When they abuse that power, our system too often fails to protect the people who report it from retaliation or hold officers accountable.

It should not take a federal report for California to act. Incarcerated individuals and advocates have documented years of systemic abuse in the state’s women’s prisons. We know that for an incarcerated woman or trans person, reporting can put them in significant danger. Their abuser and other officers decide where they sleep, what they eat, whether they can leave their cell, whether they can have visitors, and what privileges they receive. 

As Elizabeth Lozano, a survivor of sexual abuse while incarcerated, wrote, “There is no safety behind bars. When a prison guard is the person who sexually assaults, you are at their mercy as an incarcerated person.”

That imbalance of power is precisely why ordinary accountability mechanisms are insufficient.

In prison, incarcerated individuals cannot simply leave, seek help elsewhere or avoid the officials they fear. The state controls nearly every aspect of their daily lives, which means the state also bears an extraordinary responsibility to make reporting safe and accountability real.

 As the former chief of staff of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the executive director of an organization that supports prosecutors across California, I know that accountability depends on more than having a law on the books. It requires a system in which people can report wrongdoing safely, evidence is taken seriously and those with power cannot retaliate against the people who accuse them of unlawful conduct.  

That is why prohibiting sexual abuse, while essential, is not enough. The law must also account for what happens to a survivor after they report it.

Majority Leader Aguiar-Curry’s bill AB 464, the Prevent Sexual Assault and Retaliation in Prisons Act, begins to build those protections into law, and on the same day the DOJ’s findings were released, the California Senate Appropriations Committee sent the bill to the Senate floor for a final vote….