Women at FMC Carswell – long a focus of sexual abuse investigations – say prison officials have turned a blind eye

Eleven women incarcerated at a federal prison in Texas allege they have been subjected to rampant sexual abuse by staff members in the past seven years. The allegations are the latest accusations of abuse within a federal prison system rife with claims of inhumane conditions.

The allegations at FMC Carswell, a federal medical women’s prison in Fort Worth, Texas, are particularly troubling because the facility has been the focus of sexual abuse investigations for years, with 13 staff members convicted of abuse and misconduct since 1997 and promises of reform at various times.

Now, 11 women have filed fresh lawsuits alleging they have been sexually assaulted by prison staff in recent years.

The lawsuits have been filed since 1 May in federal District of Columbia court and list Beth Reese, the chief of the office of internal affairs for the BoP, and the United States as defendants. The suits each lodge 10 civil claims against the US, including negligence, sexual battery and trafficking victims.

In the lawsuits, the women identify six staff members at the facility as perpetrators, including a doctor, chaplain and three officers. Several women say they have been assaulted by the head of the BioMed office.

Over the past months, the Guardian spoke with six women alleging abuse. They say sexual assault is common at FMC Carswell, and an issue that staff and administrators turn a blind eye to.

“Coming into the system, whether you’re guilty or not, it’s like you’re punished over and over again,” said Priscilla Ellis, an army veteran incarcerated at Carswell who said she was abused for more than a year by a Carswell staff member. “It’s like human trafficking behind prison walls.”

Benjamin Cole with the BoP’s office of public affairs told the Guardian that “the Federal Bureau of Prisons takes all allegations of sexual abuse seriously and investigates credible allegations thoroughly. Beyond this, we have no further comment.”

The US has sought to transfer the cases from DC to the northern district of Texas. In July, a judge approved the transfer in one of the cases. The government has not addressed the merits of the allegations.

Sexual assault is a widespread and longstanding problem in federal prisons. The isolation of those incarcerated and the imbalance of power between staff and their wards make it difficult for people on the inside to speak up.

“This is a national problem in the United States prison system. There have to be proactive steps to change the culture and the system so it stops happening,” said attorney Deborah Golden, who represents several of the women who’ve filed abuse allegations.

But Carswell in particular has a history of systemic sexual abuse. A state representative for the area called for a congressional inquiry into how the prison investigates sexual assault claims in 2022. Two months later, a Senate report found that 22 women were sexually assaulted at the prison from 2012 to 2022 – the most of any federal women’s prison for that time period. In response to the report, then BoP director Colette Peters said the agency was “committed to enhancing the prevention of sexual misconduct by bureau employees,” starting with “changing the culture and environment in bureau facilities.” In 2024, two women spoke out about being repeatedly raped at the prison and called once again for changes at Carswell and across the BoP.

In the most recent suits, women and their representatives say administrators at Carswell and the BoP were slow to investigate their reports and that some of the staff members accused of sexual assault had been reported before but were not thoroughly investigated.

A Guardian analysis of facility internal violations records, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that sexual assault allegations at the facility have rarely resulted in disciplinary action, and that some accused assaulters are allowed to retire or resign in lieu of a complete investigation.

Vulnerable prisoners

Carswell houses incarcerated women with severe mental health and physical ailments; a particularly vulnerable population.

Justina, who asked to be identified by her first name to shield her family from the alleged abuse, arrived there in 2021. Before her arrest and incarceration, she had a stroke that left her paralyzed on the right side of her body. She used a wheelchair and needed help with everyday tasks such as buttoning her clothes and brushing her hair.

While at Carswell, Justina started a Bible study group, and an officer who worked on the medical floor frequently joined. One day in September 2022, Justina recalled, she was getting ready to shower in her cell – her roommate had helped her get into the shower chair and had left the bathroom – when the shower curtain suddenly opened and the officer came into the shower. He yanked her out of the chair and raped her, she said.

Seven months later, when she saw the officer again for the first time since the attack, she broke down and called her husband to tell him what happened. He called the prison to report the officer and a lieutenant at the prison interviewed her about the sexual assault, her suit says.

As per policy, prison staff sent Justina to the nurse’s station for an examination and Justina told the nurse on duty about the alleged sexual assault. The nurse knew the officer Justina was talking about, Justina recalled. The nurse told Justina she herself had reported him before for inappropriate contact with other incarcerated women, Justina said: “She said he shouldn’t have still been here, and this shouldn’t have happened to me.”

The next week, an investigator with the office of the inspector general (OIG), a federal department that investigates some BoP sexual assault allegations, met with Justina and other women at the prison about the officer, Justina’s lawsuit says. Since that interview in 2022, Justina said, she has not heard any updates about the investigation.

The BoP and the OIG declined to comment on specific cases.

It’s difficult to track sexual assault investigations in federal prisons, or even confirm whether or not an accused staff member still works for the BoP. The department typically does not release detailed information about sexual abuse investigations unless the accused is convicted. bex kolins, an attorney representing several of the women, said their team has requested abuse reports and investigations from BoP, but the agency has not provided that information. BoP will also not confirm if a person works for the agency or not, citing safety and security concerns for staff.

The Guardian has requested employment and investigative records for the six staff members accused of sexual abuse. The agency declined to provide those records.

When Justina’s suit was filed in February, her attorneys argued the case should be heard in DC because Reese – the BoP official named as a defendant and accused of sex trafficking – is based there. But in July, a judge approved the US’ motion to transfer the lawsuit to the northern district of Texas, arguing that the claim of sex trafficking against Reese was “a stretch, to put it mildly”, because the official was “at worst, derelict in her official duties to investigate and respond to prison conditions”.

The judge wrote that “upon transfer, there is nothing stopping the northern district of Texas from considering whether and how national level failures contributed to the horrific allegations in this case”.

‘I went through a living hell’

Ellis, the army veteran, said the abuse she faced started two days after she transferred to the administrative unit at the prison in May 2019.

The unit manager sexually assaulted her, she said, then threatened her with retaliation if she spoke out. Her time in prison would be made even worse if she tried to report him, she recalled him saying.

For two years, the officer routinely took Ellis to his office, a conference room or the beauty salon and sexually assaulted her, she said. She was essentially his “sex slave”, she said: “I went through a living hell. I can’t even describe.”

Six months after the sexual assaults started, Ellis said, she told the assistant warden in person that she was being assaulted. They took no action, Ellis says in her lawsuit. The abuse continued, she said, until September 2021, when the BoP transferred her to FTC Oklahoma, a federal transit facility in Oklahoma City. In November 2021, Ellis filed a formal sexual assault report against the officer.

Ellis reported the officer through an “administrative remedy” form and talked with special investigative agents; BoP staff members in charge of investigating sexual misconduct claims. After the initial interviews, she said, she did not hear back from officials until March 2022, when the administrative remedy coordinator at the central office sent her a note saying they received her report.

For several months, Ellis again did not hear back, she said. According to documents that Ellis shared with the Guardian, in October 2022, the central office sent another notice informing her that her administrative remedy had been closed in December 2021.

Ellis continued to ask the agents assigned to the case about the investigation, and each time, the agents told her it was “being handled”, she said. After five years, the agents told her the officer retired.

The BoP did not provide records or answer questions about the investigation into Ellis’s report.

Another woman, who the Guardian is not naming because she fears retaliation but is identified in the lawsuit she filed as Jane Zoe, alleges she was sexually assaulted for more than a year by the prison’s therapist, who was assigned to treat her anorexia. The Guardian did not speak with Zoe, but spoke extensively with her lawyers.

In December 2023, Zoe reported the therapist to Carswell administrators, according to the suit, and the following month, they interviewed her about the alleged abuse.

During the investigation, the BoP put the therapist on administrative leave, according to the suit.

On 5 January, 2024, the facility interviewed Zoe about the abuse allegations again. Less than a month later, on 14 February, staff placed her in the special housing unit (SHU) on disciplinary violations that were later dropped, according to the lawsuit. Zoe believes the move was in retaliation for reporting the therapist. While in the SHU, Zoe had a severe relapse of her eating disorder, according to the suit, and after one month in the isolated unit, she had to go to an outside medical hospital due to severe malnutrition.

While in the SHU, the facility chaplain started to visit her, and helped her “feel less alone”, the suit said. In the summer of 2024, when Zoe was released from the SHU, she visited the chaplain in his office. According to the suit, he grabbed her forcefully, touched her breasts and kissed her.

In November 2024, the facility reinstated the therapist, the lawsuit says. The chaplain is still employed at Carswell, according to the suits.

The BoP did not answer questions about Zoe’s allegations.

Tormented but afraid to come forward

Chrystal Larcade, 51, said an officer began to sexually assault her in December 2022, the same month in which BoP director Collette Peters testified before Congress that “stopping sexual misconduct at bureau facilities is an issue of critical importance”.

That month, Larcade started working in the BioMed office, a coveted job at Carswell; the women there fix medical equipment at the facility, including hospital beds, CO2 machines and dialysis machines.

The officer in charge of BioMed made sexual jokes and inappropriate comments to her and other women, Larcade said, and at first it felt nice to be called beautiful. But the attention she got from him “never felt right”.

The week before Christmas 2022, the officer forced Larcade to perform oral sex on him, Lacarde said. After that, she said, he sexually assaulted her and another woman in the office nearly every day for six months.

The officer forced her and the other women to perform sexual acts on him together, Larcade said. She said he choked them, demanded they wear makeup at all times and warned them not to tell anyone what he was doing. He made her memorize his phone number so she could call him when he was off work; making her repeat it back to him over and over.

Larcade was tormented, but afraid to come forward: “I went along with it. I didn’t know what else to do. He told me it was a job requirement. What people don’t know is, in here, we have to do lots of things to survive.”

In June 2023, Larcade heard from other women at the prison that the officer was walked off the facility. It was only then that she felt safe enough to report him, she said.

She messaged the facility’s special investigative agent, who is in charge of initiating and overseeing sexual assault investigations, and told the agent she had been sexually assaulted and needed help, Lacarde recalled.

Larcade said she did not hear back for two weeks.

Larcade next talked to a counselor at the Women’s Center of Tarrant county, which provides sexual assault counseling. It was only after that counselor reported the allegation to the prison that administrators acted on her report, Lacarde said. To Larcade, the agent’s delayed response suggested that officials would prefer to simply bury reports of sexual assault.“Everyone keeps passing the buck,” Larcade said.

Larcade is one of six plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse by the Biomed officer. Four of the six women said the officer told them he had previously been investigated for inappropriate behavior, but nothing had come of it.

One day, Larcade recalled, the officer even showed her an email from administrators warning him to stay away from the dialysis department because a nurse and contractor had reported feeling threatened by him. “He showed it to me and was laughing about it. He said they can’t do anything to him, and bragged he was untouchable.”

Jillian Price says she, too, was abused by the officer when she worked in BioMed from December 2019 until her release in March 2022. Price never had sex with the officer, she said, but remembers the closest she came to doing so. She and the officer were in the back room, and he had her bend over, she recalled. But, she said, she was shaking so badly that he told her it was “a turn-off”.

Like many sexual assault victims in prison, Price never reported the abuse while she was incarcerated. Whether it was abuse or another violation, she said, reporting seemed useless because no one believed the incarcerated women.

“Nobody cared about anything you had to say,” she said.

According to government employee records, the officer has worked at Carswell since at least 2004, which is as far back as the online records go. The Office of the Inspector General did not respond to questions about investigations into the officer.

The BoP would not comment on the officer’s tenure at Carswell or sexual assault allegations.

A facility’s history of sexual abuse

The fresh reports of sexual assaults at Carswell are particularly troubling because the facility has a long history of sexual abuse, and a long history of pledges for reform, according to lawyers, advocates and survivors.

Since 1997, 13 correctional staff at the facility have been convicted of sexual abuse and misconduct. From 2014 to 2018, 35 women at Carswell reported sexual abuse and misconduct by staff members, the highest rate of any federal women’s prison for that time period.

In 2022, Congressman Marc Veasey – the representative for the area – called for a congressional inquiry into the facility after the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published an investigation into sexual abuse there. But the inquiry never happened.

Top BoP officials and Carswell administrators are aware of the pattern of sexual abuse in the facility, according to Alix McLearen, a former acting director of the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), a department within the BoP that develops policies and trainings for corrections officials.

McLearen was part of an audit at Carswell between 2022 and 2023. The report warned the prison has a problem with sexual assault.

That audit was sent to the warden and the director of the BoP’s south central region, where Carswell is located, McLearen said. And yet, she said, nothing meaningful was done to curb the violence.

“[Carswell] has a pattern of reported sexual instances. Some of them have led to convictions, so they’re not just reported. We know they happened,” she said. “And there hasn’t been any massive change that anybody can see.”

“There’s no way you have that many [sexual assaults] and no one knows anything,” said McLearen.

The BoP did not respond to questions about the audit.

A Carswell officer, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the prison since she’s previously spoken out about conditions there, said Carswell has made some positive changes in the last year. She said many administrators have retired or resigned, and when an officer was accused of sexual assault recently, the prison promptly investigated him. But, she said, sexual abuse persists. The problem is not that administrators don’t know about sexual abuse, she said; its that few, if any, officers or administrators take action to stop it.

“A lot of people have information,” she said, but many don’t want to come forward “because they have to protect their job.”

A deeper cultural problem

The pattern of abuse is perpetuated not just by sexual assaulters, echoed kolins, the attorney, but indicates a deeper cultural problem. Officers who sexually assault women may not be thoroughly investigated or even fired, kolins said. This allows abusers to victimize others.

BoP records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, show assault accusations at Carswell rarely lead to discipline, let alone criminal prosecution. In March 2023, the Guardian requested internal affairs complaints into alleged misconduct at Carswell from January 2021 to March 2023. The records, released in May 2024, show Carswell investigated seven allegations of a staff member having an “inappropriate relationship” with an incarcerated person in that 26-month time frame. The BoP defines inappropriate relationships as including, but not limited to, “personal, financial, sexual, and/or emotional relationships with an inmate, former inmate, their family members, or associates”.

Four of the claims of an officer having an inappropriate relationship with an incarcerated person were substantiated. One of the cases resulted in the officer being convicted of sexual abuse. In the three other cases, the staff member resigned or retired and the investigation was closed.

The BoP has not fulfilled open requests for more recent investigation records.

The staff member at the facility who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said it’s common knowledge in the facility that staff are allowed to resign or retire to avoid criminal charges.

Across BoP facilities, investigations seldom find abuse accusations to be substantiated. In 2024, the BoP reported 724 allegations of staff members sexually assaulting incarcerated people across its 122 prisons, according to the agency’s annual report on sexual abuse. The agency determined only two of those assaults happened.

A sexual abuse allegation being “unsubstantiated”, like 99% of the cases in 2024, does not mean the assault did not happen, kolins said.

Across the BoP, administrators tasked with investigating sexual abuse required “significantly more proof than necessary” to “prove” a sexual assault happened, an OIG report in 2022 concluded. Essentially, prison administrators did not determine an assault happened unless it was caught on video, resulted in “forensic evidence” or the officer confessed. This reluctance to rely on witness testimony, the report says, “enhances the likelihood that employees who have engaged in misconduct avoid accountability for their actions and remain on staff”.

Prea under attack

Lawyers and advocates fear the investigations into abuse at prisons will only slow down in the second Trump administration.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act’s policies include specific requirements on sexual assault prevention, oversight and investigations.

But despite being passed unanimously by Congress in 2003, Prea is now under attack by the Trump administration.

On 23 April, the Department of Justice cancelled the grant that funds the National Prea Resource Center. One of the Center’s main responsibilities is conducting audits of correctional facilities to make sure they are following Prea’s policies, including the investigation, monitoring and prevention of sexual abuse of incarcerated people.

On 20 May, some funding was restored to the Resource Center, allowing it to continue audits. While Prea itself was not changed, the funding changes have caused confusion among advocates, attorneys and incarcerated people, said Kara Janssen, senior counsel at the law firm that led the legal charge over sexual abuse at a California-based federal prison.

“There was at one time a broad agreement across all political variations that rape in prison was unacceptable, and that we as a country should do whatever we could to stop it. And it is disconcerting and disparaging that that consensus seems to have disappeared,” Golden said.

The White House did not respond to questions.

Since 2021, Ellis has been transferred to four other facilities, including FCI Dublin, the California-based prison that the BoP shut down in 2024 due to widespread sexual abuse by staff. When Dublin closed, Ellis ended up at Waseca. As far as she knows, the investigation into her sexual assault continues.

Every prison Ellis has been in has the same systemic issues, she said, although some are worse in specific areas than others. She said in her experience, Carswell is the most “abusive sexually, physically, emotionally”.