DUBLIN, Calif. – 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.
Bus loads of women began shipping out from the minimum-security all-women’s prison last week, after BOP Director Colette Peters said she was closing FCI Dublin, since spending resources to fix all the problems there wasn’t working.
The problems include a rampant culture of sexual abuse where eight officers have been charged with sex crimes since 2022 – seven so far have already been found guilty and sent to prison themselves.
The women got brief breaks to make phone calls when they were in a detention center in Pahrump, Nevada.
KTVU is not naming any of the women because they report they are already being retaliated against on the cross-country bus trips, and they don’t want to be harassed when they end up at other prisons in Florida, Texas and West Virginia, for example.
A mother named Esther said her daughter was put on a bus Thursday night. They drove all night to Nevada, where the driver was driving “crazy” and “erratically.”
“The girls were all screaming thinking the bus was going to off off the road,” Esther wrote.
Her daughter told the driver she was having trouble breathing because the shackles and belly chains were so tight, according to Esther.
They were booked at the detention center and then taken to Las Vegas to board ConAir.
Women complained of being dehydrated and some were getting sick. Some have had panic attacks. The women were flown to Atlanta and then were put on a bus again, according to their reports.
When they asked where they were going, Esther wrote: “They were told none of your business, or SFTU, see, this is why Dublin is closing, you all need to learn to keep your mouths shut. I gave up my Saturday off to move you girls. The other CO said, ‘I came out of retirement to help move you bitches.’”
Esther then said the bus driver played a children’s recording of the Wheels on the Bus over and over again at full volume, and then played loud rap music with sexually explicit language about sex acts.
“He told them the more they fussed, the louder it was going to be,” Esther wrote. “All thru the 12 hours they were called bitches. They were told they were the reason for the closing of Dublin. They should have kept their mouths shut.”
Her daughter’s group ended up being taken to the Miami Detention Center, a high-rise prison with no video visits.
When her daughter arrived there, her blood pressure was 159/120, according to Esther, which she said is considered a cardiac emergency.
A husband of one of the incarcerated women named Paul said the bus driver called his wife and other women “whining bitches,” and blamed the women for why FCI Dublin was being shut down. His wife was then flown to Georgia and bussed to Miami. On the flight, the women were “tied down very tightly,” according to Paul.
Many of the family members said the women had to throw away all of their personal hygiene products and were only allowed to travel with the clothes on their backs. Some women soiled themselves on the bus and had to sit in their own excrement.
One woman, Jazzmin Bell, said that her incarcerated mother’s treatment has been so poor that she is preparing a petition to demand that Peters step down as BOP director.
“This woman has shown no compassion, empathy or sympathy” to the women who spoke out against sexual abuse or the honest staff who tried to protect the women, Bell said.
Bell noted that Peters sent in about 100 people to shut down the prison and move the women out but “did not lift a finger when they needed help the most. These women have been suffering for years…. Colette Peters must be stopped.”
The BOP didn’t immediately respond to KTVU’s request for comment on Monday.
But in an email last week when KTVU inquired about poor treatment allegations the women said they were experiencing while packing up to move, spokesperson Scott Taylor said it is the mission of the BOP to “operate facilities that are safe, secure, and humane.” Anyone who has a complaint about treatment, he said, can file a formal complaint.
The women’s stories were corroborated in part by a group of attorneys who have been helping them. The California Coalition of Women Prisoners sued the BOP last summer to reform FCI Dublin.
As a result of that lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered a special master to oversee that those reforms were met. The BOP announced its closure on April 11, ten days after the judge named Wendy Still to be that special master.
Gonzalez Rogers also ordered a halt in the transfers so that Still could review the process and paperwork to make sure the women were being treated fairly and humanely. The BOP argued in court filings that the judge had exceeded their legal authority.
Last week, the judge held several private court hearings on the matter, a strange departure from her usual practice of allowing the public to attend and understand what is going on. It’s not clear why she kept those matters private.
The BOP won’t say just how many women are left at FCI Dublin. Sources told KTVU that the prison was to have shut down by Friday. But other sources said there are still women present there this week.
Shanna Rifkin, deputy general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, told KTVU, that FCI Dublin closed because the BOP “fundamentally failed” to protect people in their custody. And that the BOP is failing these very same people in overseeing a “chaotic transfer” to other facilities.
“The Department of Justice and BOP say the right things about protecting survivors of sexual abuse,” Rifkin said. “But now is the time for them to act and ask for their early release from prison.”
In a statement to KTVU, Congressman Mark Desaulnier, who represents the district the prison is located in, condemned the women’s treatment.
“I am deeply concerned about the allegations raised about violations of individual constitutional rights of the FCI Dublin inmates being transferred, including lack of proper medical clearances and access to sanitary conditions,” he wrote via email. “The closure of the prison should stop the mistreatment, not perpetuate it. I am in continued conversation with the Bureau of Prison about bringing an end to this culture of abuse once and for all.”
