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| Lawsuit: Female Inmates Routinely Subjected to Sexual Abuse |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 01/30/2003 |
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Some male officers at New York prisons rape or sexually harass female prisoners in a system that does little to prevent the attacks or encourage them to be reported, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday on behalf of 15 women. Three of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by the Legal Aid Society became impregnated as a result of the attacks, the lawsuit alleges. James Flateau, a state Department of Correctional Services spokesman, said broad allegations that the state lets sexual misconduct continue virtually unabated were nonsense. ''This administration has taken more steps than any prior administration to safeguard inmates against the fewer than one percent of officers who engage in what is now felonious conduct,'' Flateau said. He said Gov. George Pataki proposed legislation and signed it in 1996, making sexual contact between staff and inmates a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. ''The state has always had a very tough line on relations between inmates and staff and will continue to do so,'' Flateau said. The lawsuit said the state receives more than 200 complaints of sexual misconduct annually and refers about 10 incidents of sexual misconduct for criminal prosecution. The state has about 3,000 female prisoners at a time in its prisons. But many more incidents go unreported at the Albion, Bayview, Bedford Hills, Camp Beacon, Lakeview and Taconic correctional facilities and the Willard Drug Treatment Center, the lawsuit said. It sought unspecified damages on behalf of the individual plaintiffs and sought to change a system that it said fails to protect the inmates or to punish the men who commit the offenses. Punishing the officers should not be so difficult, in part because female prisoners cannot consent to sexual activity with correctional staff due to the coercive nature of the prison setting, the lawsuit said. Yet, it said, the women are subjected to rape, sexual intercourse, anal intercourse, oral sexual acts, sexual touching, voyeurism, invasion of personal privacy, demeaning sexual comments and intimidation. The lawsuit alleged that female prisoners are impregnated by male staff in state prisons ''with regularity.'' It said the state is aware that assigning men to guard female prisoners ''creates obvious risks of sexual activity'' but continues to assign men to posts in which they have the opportunity for unmonitored contact with inmates. Flateau said the majority of the 1,834 female officers in the state's prison system choose to work in male prisons, leaving just 416 female correction officers for the 1,420 officer positions in female prisons. He also challenged the lawsuit's claim that the state fails to screen its staff to prevent sexual misconduct. ''We have psychological screening prior to the hiring of every single correctional officer in the state of New York,'' he said. ''And we do background checks on every candidate.'' |
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