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The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California announced Thursday that 34-year-old Jeffrey Wilson pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a ward and for making false statements to government agency. Lawrence Gacad, 33, pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact.
Read more from CBS San Francisco here.
Sam Levin in Los Angeles
Thu 14 Aug 2025
A former California correctional officer convicted of dozens of sexual abuse charges at a women’s prison was sentenced to 224 years in prison on Thursday.
Gregory Rodriguez, 57, worked as a guard at the Central California women’s facility (CCWF), the state’s largest women’s prison, and was found guilty in January of more than 60 charges of abusing nine women in his custody, including rape and battery.
Rodriguez’s case became a huge scandal for the state, exposing a longstanding crisis of sexual misconduct and abuse behind bars. The officer was found to have targeted incarcerated women over the span of nearly a decade before he retired in 2022 while under investigation.
A Guardian investigation published in 2023 revealed the prison received a report of Rodriguez’s abuse in 2014, but did not terminate him and instead punished the victim. That survivor spoke of being sent to solitary confinement while authorities investigated claims of her abuse.
It is rare for prison officers to be criminally charged and convicted for on-duty sexual misconduct, despite data suggesting abuse by guards is a systemic problem in California and across the US. Misconduct records disclosed by the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) showed that from 2014 to 2023, hundreds of incarcerated women filed complaints of staff sexual abuse, but only four officers were terminated for sexual misconduct in that timeframe.
Rodriguez, who worked for the CDCR for 27 years, isolated victims in areas without cameras and coerced them into sex by offering items such as gum or tobacco and threatening to “make prison very difficult” if they did not comply, according to prison investigators’ and victims’ lawsuits. The majority of rapes charged by prosecutors occurred in 2021 and 2022 in the board of parole hearings area, where incarcerated residents have confidential attorney meetings and appear before commissioners to plead for their freedom.
One woman struggling with substance use disorder said Rodriguez coerced her into sex by offering to get her addiction medication, but instead of getting her a prescription, he gave her heroin, which led her to overdose.
In announcing the sentence, Judge Katherine Rigby recounted how Rodriguez lured his victims and tried to hide his assaults, saying the survivors would suffer “lifelong impacts”. She said: “These victims were put in unfathomable and untenable positions, and they could not leave as they were incarcerated.”
Rodriguez had pleaded not guilty and his attorney sought to cast doubt on victims’ accounts at trial. He was convicted on a majority of the more than 90 charges prosecutors brought on behalf of 13 women, though for some counts the jury was hung or found him not guilty. His lawyers had asked for a 56-year sentence, and Rodriguez told the judge his daughter was sick and needed support. His family also testified on his behalf.
After his conviction, his attorney, Roger Wilson, said: “The jury clearly believed some inmates and disbelieved others.” Wilson did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Some survivors testified in court last month in front of Rodriguez, including Nikki, who spoke out to the Guardian in 2023 from behind bars and has since been released. She has been referred to by her first name in court proceedings.
“For over a decade, I have lived in the aftermath of what you did to me,” she said in court, according to a copy of her statement she shared with the Guardian. “I was an incarcerated woman – vulnerable, alone, stripped of dignity, humanity and power … You used that moment to feed on me. You hunted me … What you did was predatory, manipulative and evil. You violated me under the cloak of authority … You raped me when I had no freedom to run, no rights to call upon, no one I could tell without fear of retaliation. You didn’t just hurt me, you shattered something sacred inside me. I’m still trying to crawl out of the hole you put me in.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
The Razor Wire, is a quarterly newsletter from CIW.
Launched in 2023, it is dedicated to sharing the stories of the community at California Institution for Women (CIW) and is written by currently incarcerated people.
Check out all of the issues here.
Six women unveiled a quilt earlier this year they called “Together We Rise! Together We Heal!” honoring the nearly 600 survivors of forced sterilization in California state prisons.
One of those women—Kelli Dillon—was herself sterilized without her knowledge by a prison doctor and began to experience menopause in 2001, while in her early 20s. She shared this with individuals at the unveiling ceremony, speaking to the pain this medical violence caused her.
The quilt, created with fabric scraps inside and outside of prisons and coordinated by activist Linda Evans of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, visualizes the intense violence that many incarcerated women, especially incarcerated women of color, faced and continue to face. It connects to a much longer history of how forced sterilization is and was used to sterilize disabled women and women of color across the United States over the past century.
In many ways, the institutionalization and pathologization of disability in the U.S. mirrors how incarcerated individuals are and were stripped of their reproductive rights.
As the country grapples with the deadly aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, these six women remind people that medical violence is and has been permissible in this country. The quilt’s message also serves as a reminder of the continuation of early 20th century efforts to sterilize women, whether that’s because of disability, race, religion or ethnicity, and to ultimately serve white supremacist ends.
During the Social Purity and Eugenics Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists sought to preserve and uplift a pure white, Protestant race by “protecting” white women’s virginity and encouraging them to have children. (Pronatalists got their start during this time as well.) At the same time, they were forcibly sterilizing women of color, especially Black and Native women, poor women and disabled individuals.
Alongside social campaigns that outlawed alcohol consumption, sex work and the distribution of contraception and “pornographic” materials through the mail—as well as xenophobic, paternalistic laws against a flood of Southern and Eastern European and Asian immigrants to the United States—these social purists fought for the passage of laws enabling doctors and institutions to forcibly sterilize people.
These laws took off in the early 20th century, around the same time that these purists campaigned for unsightly beggar ordinances that restricted disabled people from appearing in public.
This social experimentation and implementation of eugenics on a massive scale is perhaps best immortalized by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s official opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell. The 1927 case upheld the legality of state institutions forcibly sterilizing anyone “afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility.” Central to the case was Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, who was sterilized at about the same age as Dillon. Holmes argued that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” referring to Carrie’s mother Emma, Carrie herself, and her child Vivian.
Buck was not alone. Between the 1920s and the 1980s, thousands of women were forcibly sterilized, often without their knowledge, in an effort to reduce the population of people of color. The slang term “Mississippi appendectomy” refers to the forced sterilization of poor Black women, including civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, as a reflection of wider racial medical violence.
In 2020, these histories were revisited as immigrants detained in the U.S. accused the facilities they were held in of forcibly sterilizing them.
Just last month, another case of forcible sterilization—which highlights one of thousands of Indigenous women and poor women in Peru under Alberto Fujimori’s government—was heard before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Guatemala City.
It wasn’t until 2013 that the practice of sterilizing incarcerated women as a form of birth control was outlawed in California.
In 2021, another law required the state to pay reparations; however, to this day, women are still denied access to their medical records and compensation on the claim that endometrial ablation procedures are not a form of birth control.
California is currently only one of three states that has created processes and has begun to pay reparations to people who have been forcibly sterilized. A group of researchers in Utah are pushing to become the next state to compensate people who were forcibly sterilized. At one time, Utah was the leading state for forced sterilization in the country, according to Axios‘ Erin Alberty.
However, the fight and the practice of forced or coerced sterilization of incarcerated women continues in the U.S. While the case Relf v. Weinberger outlawed the use of federal funding for involuntary sterilization, forced sterilization is still exercised in some correctional facilities. The true number of these cases and extent of this medical violence is difficult to quantify, as is the question of whether incarcerated individuals can and are providing informed consent to these procedures. Reparations are still difficult to access as some reparations committees do not consider reproductive procedures with fertility-reducing implications a form of intentional sterilization.
For disabled individuals, who still face exploitative systems of institutionalization and are denied marriage equality in the U.S., forced sterilization remains legal in some states where this is permissible in specific situations. As Julia Métraux wrote for Mother Jones earlier this year, most states still have laws on the books that permit doctors and institutions to sterilize disabled individuals where disabled individuals are held, sometimes against their will.
Just two months ago, Maria Elena Figueroa—a woman who fought against forced sterilization and one of 10 Mexican American plaintiffs to sue the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for forced sterilization—died. The case Madrigal v. Quilligan highlighted the impact of racism, medical abuse and language barriers on reproductive justice within the healthcare system. Figueroa gave birth to her daughter in 1971 and had her fallopian tubes tied without consent to the procedure. Instead, her husband gave consent and signed the form without her knowledge.
Although not incarcerated, Figueroa stood as an advocate for thousands of women grappling with this history of medical violence and for the growing awareness of these long-standing ramifications.
At the same time, many others have in the last three years turned to voluntary sterilization in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned to protect their health and reproductive rights.
July 3, 2025
OAKLAND, Calif. – In a sweeping and damning first report issued under the federal Consent Decree in California Coalition for Women Prisoners et al. v. United States Bureau of Prisons et al., Senior Monitor Wendy Still found that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has failed to fully comply with most of the decree’s provisions.
The 123-page report, released on June 30 and covering the first month of monitoring activity, confirms widespread and ongoing systemic failures across the federal prison system, well beyond the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.
The Consent Decree, which became effective on March 31, 2025, was designed to provide relief to hundreds of survivors of decades of rampant staff sexual abuse, retaliation, medical neglect, and due process violations at FCI Dublin. But while Dublin has closed, the decree’s protections follow class members—more than 300 formerly incarcerated at Dublin—across 16 other federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities nationwide.
Senior Monitor Still was granted authority to access staff, records, and class members to evaluate BOP’s compliance with the decree and to issue public reports on their findings. This first monthly report found the Bureau to be in either partial or noncompliance with nearly every provision reviewed.
According to the report, during the month of April 2025 alone, class members lodged 13 formal complaints of sexual abuse and three complaints of physical assault. The monitor documented that “some Class Members reported submitting allegations of sexual abuse to BOP staff, with no follow up action taken by BOP.”
Furthermore, the BOP failed to inform complainants of the status of investigations into their allegations, despite being required to do so both by its own policy and the Consent Decree.
The report also found that “staff were not properly trained on what constitutes sexually abusive behavior” and that “staff are not equipped to provide trauma-informed care to sexual abuse survivors.”
The report found ongoing, widespread retaliation against class members. During the reporting period, there were 17 complaints of staff retaliation. In a troubling pattern, the report noted a “noticeable trend of Class Member complaints regarding staff member retaliation and subsequent receipt of disciplinary incident reports, followed by extremely harsh penalties.”
It further found that many individuals who reported misconduct faced harsh discipline in return, with little transparency or due process. Some of the harshest consequences included isolation, loss of good time credit, and transfers far from family and legal support.
Class members also continued to face serious barriers to accessing medical and mental health care. The monitor reported that “Class Members experienced significant delays in accessing care, in part due to systemic understaffing,” and that “BOP also has no system currently for recording, tracking, and auditing the requests for medical care, or for monitoring the provision and quality of care, leaving Class Members extremely vulnerable.”
Among the findings were delays in treatment for chronic illnesses, failures to follow up on changes to prescriptions, limited access to specialty care, and an “overreliance on commissary medications and unwillingness to utilize prescription medications.” For indigent individuals, this meant going without basic over-the-counter medications, such as pain relievers, if they could not afford them.
In several cases, the report identified retaliatory and discriminatory behavior by medical providers. Class members reported being told by healthcare staff that they “should feel lucky they are getting care since they are illegal aliens or criminals,” or that they “should not expect special care because they are from Dublin, and no amount of ‘whining to lawyers’ will get them care.”
In assessing this issue, the Monitor found that “it is not clear that front line providers have retained professional independence, and there appear to be instances when facility protocols or directives outweigh clinical professional judgment.”
The report described “widespread, long wait times for essential medical devices, including, but not limited to prescription glasses and dentures,” with an average wait time of nine to ten months for glasses—“which is both unacceptable and does not meet community standards.”
Mental health care services were similarly deficient. Although the report acknowledged “substantial compliance” with initial mental health screening alerts, it noted that those screenings often failed to result in effective or timely care.
In particular, class members in need of individual therapy “are not receiving this care and instead are in group programming even when clinically indicated,” which the Monitor noted “can be threatening and re-traumatizing” for survivors of sexual abuse or those with serious mental illness.
Translation services are also rarely utilized, resulting in inadequate care for class members who do not speak English. The report observed that “mental healthcare is not consistently performed in the patient’s primary language.”
In an especially troubling practice, the report noted that BOP uses incarcerated people to monitor other incarcerated individuals on suicide watch. The Monitor found this “problematic due to the lack of confidentiality,” a concern long raised by advocates and mental health professionals.
The Bureau also failed to fully comply with requirements surrounding the use of solitary confinement, known as Special Housing Units (SHU). The report found that in April alone, ten class members were placed in isolation, many of them in violation of the Consent Decree’s due process safeguards.
In multiple cases, individuals were placed in SHU without proper medical or mental health screenings, and without being given necessary medication or assistive devices. In several instances, their charges were later expunged. The Monitor’s team was often unable to evaluate compliance because BOP failed to provide required documentation.
Disciplinary practices were a particular area of concern. The monitoring team reviewed 965 disciplinary incident reports issued at FCI Dublin between January 2020 and May 2024. Of those, 571—or 59 percent—were found to have such serious errors that they had to be expunged.
“Class Members were subjected to disciplinary segregation, credit losses, and loss of privileges,” the report found, all of which affected their security classifications and eligibility for early release. “There appears to be a systemic failure, by BOP, to ensure that imposed discipline is applied consistent with BOP policy and within constitutional mandates.”
The consequences of these erroneous reports have been significant. As one advocate from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners noted in a statement, “In addition to unwarranted punishments and solitary confinements, these expunged charges represent weeks and months of improperly extended incarceration for each affected person. In the aggregate this adds up to more than 10 years of freedom stolen from the class members by prison staff.”
The Monitor also found that BOP had failed to comply with key provisions of the Consent Decree related to the release and transfer of class members. Many individuals continue to be held far from their families.
One class member was kept at a transfer center for over a month, despite federal statutes and decree provisions requiring timely placement. Other class members lost time credits due to transfers from Dublin—credits that BOP was required to restore. The report noted that “BOP staff inappropriately den[ied]” community placements for noncitizen class members with immigration detainers, in clear violation of federal law and the Consent Decree.
The findings confirm what many advocates and survivors have long insisted: that the abuse at FCI Dublin was not an isolated breakdown, but a symptom of broader institutional dysfunction and neglect. The report makes clear that the Bureau of Prisons continues to fall short of meeting even basic constitutional and statutory obligations toward the people in its custody.
Senior Monitor Wendy Still is expected to issue additional monthly and quarterly reports over the next two years, until the Consent Decree’s enforcement period expires. The full April 2025 report is available to the public and can be accessed on the court docket in California Coalition for Women Prisoners et al. v. United States Bureau of Prisons et al., Case No. 4:23-cv-04155-YGR.