LISA publishes a free newsletter intended for inmate subscribers in the Federal system and interested readers in the outside world.

Edited by Thomas L Root, MA JD

Vol 12, No 19

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Sex, Lies and Lousy Videotape

Let’s Make A Deal

Singing From the Same Sheet of Music

Prison for Sale

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SEX, LIES AND LOUSY VIDEOTAPE

Sexual abuse complaints against Bureau of Prisons staff and inmates remain largely unresolved because of BOP investigative deficiencies, the Government Accountability Office found in a report issued last week.

Allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against BOP employees and inmates have spiked in recent years, with 2,956 Prison Rape Elimination Act complaints from 2020 through 2024 with the inmate as the perpetrator and 3,029 complaints naming a BOP staffer as the perp. The GAO found that the Bureau is in many ways failing to implement PREA “in the way Congress intended,” Government Executive reported.

From 2014 through 2022 (the period studied), investigations of 77 pct of staff-on-inmate complaints were inconclusive. Only 9 pct of those were substantiated by BOP. The staff suspect was cleared in just six cases, or about 1/10 of 1 pct. Complaints against inmates were closed without result in 81 pct of cases.

A similar trend emerged from sexual abuse allegedly committed by incarcerated individuals, with 81% of those cases reaching inconclusive findings.

BOP correctional officers faced around 3,000 allegations of sexual abuse from 2020 through 2024, a doubling from prior years. From 2014 through 2022, BOP averaged 433 allegations against its staff per year. In 2023 and 2024, that spiked to 857 per year.

The champion facility, unsurprisingly, was the now-closed FCI Dublin, with 260 complaints from 2020 through 2024. Next highest were USP Lee (94), USP Thomson (88) and USP Canaan (79). At the other end, Mendota, Lompoc and Victorville each had only one complaint during the 5-year period.

BOP employee misconduct complaints proceed through the system at a snail’s pace, the GAO found. BOP’s Office of Internal Affairs had 12,153 open employee misconduct allegations last year (although most were not PREA complaints). Over a third of the cases had been open for at least three years.

“The number of abuse allegations may seem startling,” GAO said in a companion blog. “But they only show the reported sexual abuses. Some abuse may be going unreported. We spoke with incarcerated people about obstacles they’ve encountered when trying to report sexual abuse allegations… Some people told us they were unaware of options that do not require reporting abuse directly to a prison employee. Some people told us they feared retaliation from prison employees. There was also fear of being stigmatized by fellow incarcerated people. Because of the lack of privacy in prisons, it’s often difficult to report abuse without others finding out.”

Under BOP Director William K. Marshall III, the BOP in the last year has increased OIA resources to address the backlog, including by sending teams of investigators to focus on facilities with particularly large caseloads. Still, the GAO reported that BOP employees complained that they have insufficient staffing to respond to PREA complaints.  The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer, included $3 billion for BOP staffing, but a year ago, DOJ“abruptly canceled” an estimated $16 million in funding, “decimating” infrastructure intended to help prisons comply with PREA, according to a Brennan Center report.

GAO reported that some enforcement problems lie with clever abusers. Perpetrators lie. Others deceive. The video evidence stinks. “Most of the corrections officers with whom GAO spoke said abusers know where they can go to evade cameras, and some said the video quality is poor or not retained for a sufficient amount of time,” Government Executive reported. “Employees also said investigations against staff can take time, often years, to complete. Corrections officers told GAO that false allegations of sexual abuse are prevalent and waste resources and tarnish the credibility of those reporting real incidents. Incarcerated individuals told the auditors that their fellow inmates make false accusations against prison staff as a form of retribution.”

PREA sought to establish a “zero-tolerance policy” for rape in U.S. prisons while tasking the Justice Department with instituting national standards for preventing, investigating and tracking such incidents. GAO noted sexual abuse “remains a significant problem” in federal prisons despite some progress under the law.

GAO, Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse (May 5, 2026)

Brennan Center, Federal Funding Cuts Target Efforts to Reduce Sexual Abuse in Prisons (Jan 26, 2026)

GAO Watchblog, The Heinous Crimes Haunting Federal Prisons—Rape and Sexual Abuse (May 6, 2026)

Government Executive, More than 3-in-4 allegations of sexual assault against federal prison staff are going unresolved (May 6, 2026)

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LET’S MAKE A DEAL

After completing a child pornography sentence, Clarence Barton began his supervised release by violating a couple of the conditions, such as leaving the jurisdiction without permission and checking out adult porn on a computer he wasn’t supposed to have.

His judge made a deal with him:

You’ve got two options here. You can do 6 months, or I can keep you on supervision with additional conditions and if you do one thing wrong, I mean one thing, I will max you, 2 years. 2 years. 6 months now or keep you on supervision and you don’t spit on the sidewalk. If you do, I will send you for 2 years… Because you made the choice. You’re wearing the robe. You understand me?

Clarence understood. He took curtain two, continuing on supervised release. But it didn’t last: he got caught with an iPad and got slapped with the promised sentence.

Last week, the 6^th Circuit reversed the sentence as both procedurally and substantively unreasonable.  A district court is always supposed to calculate the right Guidelines range first. Then, it applies the 18 USC 3553(a) sentencing factors to create an individualized sentence. Here, the Circuit said, “the sentence-in-advance method inherently results in non-individualized terms of imprisonment… [T]here is no way that the district court could have known at the first violation hearing that any future violation, regardless of the circumstances, would warrant a specific term of imprisonment, let alone the statutory maximum… While it is true that Article III cloaks federal judges with considerable powers, clairvoyance is not one of them. Barton‘s term of imprisonment, therefore, did not result from consideration of the relevant 3553(a) factors—it was simply a product of the district court’s promise.

The 6^th said that it was not suggesting “that district courts cannot pair leniency towards supervisees with admonishments that future violations will not be tolerated. When a district court chooses to continue supervision rather than revoke it, the district court places trust in the defendant. A future violation breaches that trust, and that breach of trust may serve as one factor that the district court uses to calibrate an appropriate sanction for the defendant’s violation conduct… What a district court may not do is what the district court did here—rely solely on a previous promise to impose a specified sentence to go ahead and impose that sentence.”

US v Barton, Case No 25-3364, 2026 USAppLEXIS 13153 (6th Cir. May 6, 2026)

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SINGING FROM THE SAME SHEET OF MUSIC

Everyone knows that a decision by one circuit’s court of appeals does not bind other circuits. In fact, differences among the circuits – known as a “circuit split” – is one way issues get to the Supreme Court. Still, the decision of one circuit may influence another circuit that has not yet addressed the issue. For this reason, decisions of other circuits are referred to as “persuasive authority.”

But how persuasive? In a Southern California Law Review article being published soon, Georgetown University Law Center professor Amy Griffin questioned how much deference circuit judges give “peer circuit precedent” – that is, decisions by circuit judges in other circuits – despite not being bound by it. 

Professor Griffin analyzed roughly 800 cases across federal appeals courts in 2022 and 2023 in addressing issues of first impression in that circuit. She tracked whether existing sister circuit precedent existed and whether the deciding court agreed with it or not. When only one prior circuit had ruled on a first-impression issue, the new, deciding circuit agreed with that peer precedent 84 pct of the time. But once two circuits ruled the same way, agreement jumped to 97 pct. And once three or more circuits had taken the same position, the new court agreed essentially 100 pct of the time.

The lesson, Professor Griffin observed, is that the first circuit to decide a question had an outsized impact on how future courts decided the issue and its long-term resolution across the country.  The results also raise questions about  “percolation,” the Supreme Court’s practice of allowing multiple lower courts to develop reasoning on an issue before it takes it up. “One of my takeaways is that what some people might be thinking is happening as percolation is not really happening if they are just very quickly falling in line,” Griffin told the National Law Journal.

Professor Griffin also found variation in how often respective circuits’ first-impression rulings were later followed by other appeals courts. The 10^th Circuit was followed most often, 75 pct of the time.

The circuit with the lowest “win rate” was the 2^nd. Out of 41 times the Second Circuit appeared on either side of a split, the later, considering court chose the 2nd Circuit’s position 49% of the time, Prof Griffin found.

National Law Journal, Appellate Judges Put a Lot of Weight on Sister Circuit Precedent, Study Finds (Apr 20, 2026)

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PRISON FOR SALE

The BOP has issued an environmental assessment of the now-closed FCI Dubin, marking the first step in transferring it to the General Services Administration, a federal agency that manages government-owned assets, spurring concern by advocates that GSA may give the prison to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a detention facility.

The GSA will make a final determination on what to do with the Dublin site — including whether to hand it over to another interested federal agency.

Dublin’s City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors have also both passed resolutions opposing reopening or repurposing the site for any detention or correctional use in the future, citing staff misconduct and dangerous infrastructure issues.

“There can be no doubt about the will of the people. We do not want an ICE detention facility in our community,” said the Rev. Kelly Miller-Sanchez, the pastor of Resurrection Lutheran Church in Dublin. “FCI Dublin is a site where horrific human rights abuses occurred. It is stained with the blood of its survivors, and it is a blot upon the history of our beautiful city. Turning this site into an ICE detention facility would compound the injuries, both physical and moral, that this site has already caused.”

Former FCI Dublin prisoner Aimee Chavera was one of the plaintiffs who got $116 million from the BOP in a suit over their treatment at the “Dublin Rape Club,” as the prison was known among staff. She told KQED that when she worked in the prison safety department, staff forced her and others to paint over mold and rust before inspections. She also worked in Health Services mopping up blood and washing the rags in the same machines as clothing for the other women, with no bleach or disinfectant. She recalled women trying to kill themselves, saying, “It went through my mind. Why? Because you cannot live under these conditions.”

“I’m a U.S. citizen and my rights were violated and I was abused,” Chavira said. “What does it tell you? That these immigrants are going to be abused, which is not right.”

KQED, Advocates Urge Demolition of FCI Dublin, Raising Worries It Could Become ICE Jail (May 5, 2026)

American Prospect, ICE Wants to Reopen the Crumbling Federal Prison Dubbed ‘Rape Club’ (May 7, 2026)

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The LISA Newsletter is copyright 2026, LISA Foundation, PO Box 636, Norwalk OH 44857.

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