DUBLIN — Federal officials announced plans Monday to close the troubled FCI Dublin women’s prison, signaling the end to a facility that saw numerous jail officers imprisoned for a reputed “rape club” while inmates alleged years of abuse and retaliation for speaking up about misconduct there.
The surprise move by the Federal Bureau of Prisons came just a week after a special master assumed control of the facility, which was raided by the FBI last month. Attorneys representing inmates immediately raised questions about the agency’s motives, suggesting that the move was an attempt to avoid such oversight.
Prison officials gave no timeline for the closure and few details for how they planned to shut down a facility that a federal judge recently derided as “a dysfunctional mess” in need of unprecedented oversight.
In a statement, Director of the Federal Prison System Colette S. Peters said the prison “is not meeting expected standards,” despite the agency having taken “unprecedented steps and provided a tremendous amount of resources to address culture, recruitment and retention, aging infrastructure — and most critical — employee misconduct.” The bureau framed its planning for the move as “ongoing.”
Still, other details about the expected closure remained unclear Monday. Peters said “the closure of the institution may be temporary but certainly will result in a mission change.”
No employees will lose their jobs as a result of the planned closure, the agency said, but it is possible they would have to move.
Attorneys for the inmates voiced confusion, concern and shock at learning of the prison’s closure. Just a week ago, Wendy Still — a former Alameda County probations chief — began working as a court-ordered special master, the first time in the nation’s history that such oversight been mandated at a federal prison.
The timing suggests the bureau wants “to evade that kind of outside accountability and transparency,” said Susan Beaty, an attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which represents many inmates in Dublin. She said she and other attorneys were “inundated” with calls from inmates Monday, many of whom said they were only told of the closure that morning. They were then given trash bags and told to remove their belongings from their cells, attorneys said.
Beaty described reports of a “chaotic” and “upsetting” scene within the prison, with word of the closure proving “traumatizing to a group of people who have already been so traumatized.”
“This happened extremely suddenly and without much care for the wellbeing of the people inside the prison,” Beaty said.
Of particular concern is the fact that few other federal women’s prisons exist in the western U.S., said Oren Nimni, legal director for Rights Behind Bars, a nonprofit that joined several groups in suing the federal agency last year.
Women at the sprawling prison Dublin complex — which includes 501 inmates at the main FCI Dublin prison and 104 inmates in a minimum security camp on the property — will be transferred to other facilities, the agency said. Each inmate’s “programming needs will be taken into account,” and they will be sent to places that are “as close to their release locations as possible,” the bureau’s statement added.
Even so, Nimni warned against sending inmates who had spent much of their lives in California out of state, calling any such move “additional punishment after they’ve suffered all of this abuse.” He instead suggested every inmate at the facility should instead be evaluated for release or a transfer to home confinement.
“Closure is appropriate, but the question now is: what’s going to happen to everyone on the inside?” Nimni said.
A Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson, Emery Nelson, declined to comment further when asked about the attorneys’ concerns.
U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, called on the federal prison system to protect inmates’ rights during the closure.
“The fact that we got to this point is deeply troubling,” the congressman said in a statement, adding that it “does not right the wrongs that occurred at the facility, which is why it is imperative that federal investigations continue.”
The move comes after years of allegations that corrections officers at FCI Dublin engaged in a reputed “rape club,” sexually abusing multiple inmates while guards allegedly retaliated against anyone who spoke up about the misdeeds. At least eight staff members at all levels of the prison — including jail guards and a chaplain — were charged in recent years with sexually assaulting and harassing inmates. Most have either pled guilty or been convicted, including former Warden Ray J. Garcia, who was sentenced in early 2023 to nearly six years in prison for sexually assaulting women.
The alleged abuse led prison inmate advocates to file a sprawling lawsuit in August accusing prison managers of ignoring decades of warning signs and providing insufficient mental and physical health care. It recently received class-action status after more than 60 other lawsuits were filed against the Bureau of Prisons.
Still, concerns at the prison persisted. In March, the FBI raided the facility, leading the agency to sack its latest warden after less than three months on the job. And U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers later ruled that conditions there “can no longer be tolerated,” citing a rare in-person visit she made earlier this year.
Inmate advocates and others voiced concerns Monday that current prison guards — many of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct and retaliation in recent court hearings — would simply be transferred to other facilities, none of which have the same type of court-ordered oversight as FCI Dublin.
Doing so threatens to “spread that cancer throughout other parts of the Bureau of Prisons,” said Bob Hood, former chief of the Bureau of Prisons’ internal affairs unit and a former warden of the Colorado-based ADX Florence, also known as “Supermax.” He called the decision to close the prison so soon after the special master took charge “pathetic.”
“My concern is the timing of it,” Hood said. “To me it’s dodging accountability and liability.”
