More than 130 women have sued the State of California and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over sexual abuse by prison staff at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino and the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla. Filed in Sacramento Superior Court as Jane Roe et al. v. State of California, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation et al. (Case No. 23CV013894), the complaint describes abuse that was not isolated to one officer or one unit, but widespread across the facilities — the product of a power dynamic in which staff controlled every part of an incarcerated woman's day and faced almost no check on how they used it.
The complaint alleges CIW and CCWF lacked hiring policies capable of keeping sexual predators out of positions of total control over inmates; gave staff unrestricted, unsupervised intimate access to the women in their custody; failed to train security staff to protect people in custody from sexual abuse; and met known misconduct with willful ignorance and absent supervision. The accounts include women subjected to more than 40 separate instances of rape or sexual misconduct by the same guard, forced oral copulation and digital penetration, assaults inside and outside cells, groping, and relentless lewd comments and harassment. These claims do not depend on the officer ever having been arrested, charged, or convicted.
If you were sexually abused by staff while incarcerated in a California women's prison, you may be able to seek accountability from the state that put you there — and recognition of what was done to you.
