Category: Updates on Prisons

Updates on Prisons

FCI Dublin ‘special master’ authorized to ensure women cared for at other prisons: judge

ktvu.com 

Lisa Fernandez
5/21/24
Updated  May 21, 2024 

OAKLAND, Calif. – The special master appointed to oversee that reforms were made at the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institute at Dublin also has the authority to ensure that the women who were once incarcerated there receive the proper care at their new prisons across the country, a federal judge ruled. 

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued her order on Monday, expanding Special Master Wendy Still’s initial role, which she took on April 5. 

Still is now charged with making sure that the 605 women once housed at FCI Dublin get the “appropriate follow up care and support in their new facilities.”

Read the full story from KTUV here. 

Updates on Prisons

More FCI Dublin women complain of retaliation, including having rifles pointed at them

BOP buses were at FCI Dublin to take women away ahead of a sudden shutdown. April 17, 2024

By Lisa Fernandez
Published  May 15, 2024

The complaints were sent to Catherine Sevcenko, senior counsel at the National Council for Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls in New Jersey, a group led by formerly incarcerated Black women.  

On Wednesday, Sevcenko shared the emails with KTVU, which has also received similar complaints from FCI Dublin transfers about thief treatment at prisons in SeaTac in Seattle and Kentucky, where women said they were fed inferior meals and denied soap, pillows and clean laundry. 

Read the full story from KTUV here.

Updates on Prisons

US senators demand answers on closure plan for California women’s prison where inmates were sexually abused

foxnews.com 

Associated Press
April 25, 2024

  • Nearly all inmates from the troubled women’s prison in California have been transferred out as it is set to be closed down.
  • The closure plan prompted U.S. senators to demand explanations due to reports of chaotic transfers and mistreatment during transport.
  • The Bureau of Prisons claimed to address inmates’ needs with compassion but faced criticism over the handling of the closure.

Nearly all inmates have been transferred out of a troubled women’s prison set to be shut down in California, and U.S. senators on Wednesday demanded an accounting of the rapid closure plan for the facility where sexual abuse by guards was rampant.

As of Tuesday only “a small group” of women were still being held at FCI Dublin, with the majority of its 605 inmates having been sent this week to other federal facilities, said Donald Murphy, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, or BOP. The unspecified number who remained at the minimum security prison near Oakland were pending release or transfer to halfway houses, he said.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the BOP expressing concern over claims of a chaotic transfer process during which inmates on buses and planes didn’t receive proper medical care and were reportedly subjected to “mistreatment, harassment, neglect, and abuse while in transit.”

Read full story here at Fox News here. 

Read the letter from U.S. Senator’s here. 

Updates on Prisons

Chaotic Dublin prison closure leads to fighting, crying, cutting, inmates say

mercurynews.com

By JULIA PRODIS SULEK | jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: April 23, 2024 at 12:58 p.m. | UPDATED: April 24, 2024 at 8:40 a.m.

Closing the women’s federal prison in Dublin was supposed to put a swift end to the abuse and dysfunction of the troubled facility. But inmates say the chaotic and hurried transfer of 600 inmates this past week to prisons as far as Minnesota and Miami has wrought suffering all its own.

Prisoners have been sent on grueling cross-country bus trips and flights — some without medical prescriptions or sanitary products, prisoners say — with little sense of their destination.

“We were all bruised up on our wrists because of the fact that they put the handcuffs on so tight and so long,” inmate Vaudencia Hamilton told the Bay Area News Group in a phone call Tuesday from the Miami prison after a three-day journey by bus and plane. She went without her diabetes medication throughout the trip, she said, and felt “dizzy and sick and nauseated.”

Read more at the Mercury News Group here.

 

Updates on Prisons

FCI Dublin prison closure: Women describe horrific journey across U.S.

 
Published  April 22, 2024 
 
By 
 

Dozens of women have shared horrific-sounding bus rides to prisons across the country as the Bureau of Prisons abruptly shut down FCI Dublin last week. Many are reporting that they are getting blamed for the closure because they used their voice to complain about sexual abuse at the East Bay facility. 

The women shared their stories over the weekend through loved ones, who either wrote or called KTVU, to relay their accounts. 

Read full story from Fox KTUV here.