Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced findings that show reasonable cause to believe California’s two women’s prisons are violating the Constitution by failing to protect incarcerated women and trans people from sexual abuse and harassment by staff.
The DOJ found not only repeated sexual abuse and harassment, but also that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) knew of the misconduct and failed to adequately protect the people in its care.
These findings should end any debate about whether sexual abuse in California’s women’s prisons can be dismissed as the misconduct of a few individuals. Correctional officers hold extraordinary power over incarcerated women and trans people. When they abuse that power, our system too often fails to protect the people who report it from retaliation or hold officers accountable.
It should not take a federal report for California to act. Incarcerated individuals and advocates have documented years of systemic abuse in the state’s women’s prisons. We know that for an incarcerated woman or trans person, reporting can put them in significant danger. Their abuser and other officers decide where they sleep, what they eat, whether they can leave their cell, whether they can have visitors, and what privileges they receive.
As Elizabeth Lozano, a survivor of sexual abuse while incarcerated, wrote, “There is no safety behind bars. When a prison guard is the person who sexually assaults, you are at their mercy as an incarcerated person.”
That imbalance of power is precisely why ordinary accountability mechanisms are insufficient.
In prison, incarcerated individuals cannot simply leave, seek help elsewhere or avoid the officials they fear. The state controls nearly every aspect of their daily lives, which means the state also bears an extraordinary responsibility to make reporting safe and accountability real.
As the former chief of staff of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the executive director of an organization that supports prosecutors across California, I know that accountability depends on more than having a law on the books. It requires a system in which people can report wrongdoing safely, evidence is taken seriously and those with power cannot retaliate against the people who accuse them of unlawful conduct.
That is why prohibiting sexual abuse, while essential, is not enough. The law must also account for what happens to a survivor after they report it.
Majority Leader Aguiar-Curry’s bill AB 464, the Prevent Sexual Assault and Retaliation in Prisons Act, begins to build those protections into law, and on the same day the DOJ’s findings were released, the California Senate Appropriations Committee sent the bill to the Senate floor for a final vote.
The legislation provides 90 days of monitoring for retaliation after a report of abuse, expands survivors’ ability to bring civil claims after incarceration, bars employees terminated for substantiated sexual abuse from future CDCR employment, and prevents certain involuntary transfers.
These protections matter because retaliation does not always look like an overt threat. It can mean being moved away from supportive relationships, losing privileges, facing increased scrutiny or simply knowing that the people who control your daily life are aware that you made an allegation against one of their colleagues. A reporting system cannot work if the cost of using it puts a survivor in greater danger.
My organization, Prosecutors Alliance Action, is a proud co-sponsor of AB 464 because we believe meaningful accountability requires protecting the people who report abuse, not merely punishing misconduct after it is uncovered.
Of course, AB 464 will not, by itself, solve the institutional failures the Justice Department identified. But it addresses several of the reasons abuse can remain hidden and unaccountable: fear of retaliation, isolation, and barriers to seeking justice.
A prison sentence may deprive someone of their liberty, but it should never strip away the right to personal safety or give government employees license to abuse the extraordinary authority entrusted to them. We cannot accept sexual abuse as an inevitable feature of incarceration.
California should not wait for another investigation, another lawsuit or another survivor to risk retaliation before acting. The Senate should pass AB 464, Gov. Gavin Newsom should sign it and state leaders should pursue the broader reforms necessary to address the failures the DOJ identified.
The more power the government exercises over a person, the stronger the guardrails on that power must be. Nowhere is that principle more important than behind prison walls.
Cristine Soto DeBerry is the executive director of Prosecutors Alliance Action, a co-sponsor of AB 464.