DUBLIN — The women who used to live behind the bars at the notorious Federal Correctional Institute of Dublin all are in other places, federal officials said Thursday.
“All women have been successfully transferred to other . . . locations, released, or transferred to community placement,” Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Donald Murphy said via email Thursday. “Each individual underwent a thorough assessment to determine the best placement for them with a goal to keep everyone as close as possible to their expected release locations.”
Collette Peters, the BOP’s director, ordered the prison shut down on April 15 after U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers concluded in March that “Dublin is a dysfunctional mess. The situation no longer can be tolerated.”
In his statement, Murphy categorized the closure of the prison as “temporary.” He said no employees will lose their job as a result of the closure.
Eight jail officers at the prison have faced criminal charges for sexually abusing prisoners at FCI Dublin. Seven of them have been sentenced.
Rogers in March also noted there was ongoing retaliation for the convictions and sentencing of prison officials guilty of criminal sexual abuse and sexual contact and said a special master would be appointed to provide unprecedented oversight.
A month later, federal officials announced they were closing the facility.
The inmates have said the abuse hasn’t stopped. Inmates told the Bay Area New Group that the hurried transfer of the more than 600 inmates to prisons as far away as Miami and Minnesota brought grueling cross-country bus trips and flights without any sense of destination. Some prisoners said they had to travel without medical prescriptions or sanitary products.
“People were crying. I had anxiety the whole time,” inmate Sara Victoria, 47, told the Bay Area News Group last month after she was stuck on the parked bus. “We just didn’t know where we were going and what we were doing.”
Some inmates languished for upwards of five hours on buses in the Dublin prison parking lot before returning to their cells without explanation. Their only meal was frozen sandwiches, they said. Toilet paper on the bus ran out.
Staff writer Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this story.