Twenty women have launched a lawsuit against the Clark County, Indiana Sheriff and multiple Correctional Officers at the Clark County Jail after one of those officers sold male inmates keys to the female cells for the purposes of allowing them to sexually abuse the women.
According to a lawsuit filed on June 21, the incarcerated women were terrorized and assaulted when Correctional Officer Davie Lowe sold access to their section of the jail to two male inmates for $1,000. During a horrific ordeal which lasted “multiple hours,” the women were abused by several male inmates who had been allowed in by the two who had bought the keys.
The case documents, submitted at the US District Court’s New Albany Division, allege that the 20 plaintiffs “suffered horrific physical and psychological injuries” during the night of October 24, 2021.
Beginning at approximately 11:30 p.m, the two male inmates who had purchased the keys to the female pods entered and began going from cell-to-cell, warning the female inmates that they would “kill them” if they used their emergency call buttons. The two men then left and returned with several more male inmates, many of which had obscured their identities by cloaking their faces in fabric.
Over the course of the night, the women were groped, threatened, and forced to expose their bodies. At least two female inmates were raped.
The filing then details that “after multiple hours, a female inmate hit the emergency button and began screaming to call for the correction officers,” resulting in the male inmates retreating back to their area of the prison.
But the women’s ordeal didn’t end there, with correctional staff apparently penalizing the female inmates for having called them.
The women were punished with a loss of “dark privileges,” meaning they were subjected to 72 continuous lights-on in order to prevent them from sleeping. Over the next several days following the incident, the women were placed on lockdown and subjected to questioning in holding cells. Many of the women’s personal possessions were also confiscated in organized “shakedowns.”
Local reports also state that none of the male inmates have faced any charges, and no rape kits were administered on the abused women.
In addition to David Lowe, the lawsuit filing identifies Clark County Sheriff Jamie Noel and “Unnamed Officers of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department” as defendants. As alleged in the filing, Sheriff Noel “allowed Defendant Officers Lowe and other Unnamed Officers to be employed in the manner … without adequate supervision, which created a substantial likelihood that violations of the constitutional rights of inmates, and in particular Plaintiffs, would occur.”
A trial by jury has been requested by the plaintiffs.
Speaking to Reduxx, Amie Ichikawa expressed disappointment in the case, but felt it was part of larger trend of a widespread disregard for incarcerated women’s safety and dignity.
“Incarcerated women will remain the most vulnerable sector of all women until the day that they are seen to have societal value,” she says.
Ichikawa is the founder of WomenIIWomen, an advocacy group based out of California which advocates for the needs of female inmates. Ichikawa’s website notes that 93% of incarcerated women in the United States have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes.
“In the situation[s] in Clark County, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, on Rikers, [and] at Edna Mahan — female inmates are seen as worthless and treated as such. This also explains why the media isn’t creating a firestorm regarding this incident, because they don’t care.”
Ichikawa references the shocking recent stories out of prisons in New York, New Jersey, and California as other examples of where the safety of female inmates have been outright dismissed by both administration and the mainstream media.
While in Clark County, male inmates were sold the keys to the female cells to gain access, many states have adopted policies of enabling males to transfer into women’s facilities on the basis of a self-declared ‘non-cis male’ gender identity alone.
Several states have adopted explicit self-identification policies, allowing men with histories of sexual and physical violence towards women and children to be transferred into women’s correctional institutions after coming out as “transgender.” In likely the most extreme example, male inmates in California are not required to have undergone any legal or medical changes in order to be approved for transfer.
According to Keep Prisons Single Sex USA, just under 50% of trans-identified male inmates at the Federal level have a history of committing sex offenses. The organization has also revealed that in California, one-third of male inmates who have requested transfer to women’s prisons are on the sex offender registry.
Similar to what was declared in the Indiana lawsuit, female inmates in New Jersey and California have reported being “punished” by correctional staff for filing formal complaints about violations they have witnessed or experienced at the hands of male transfers.
In addition to the lawsuit, David Lowe, the now-former Clark County Jail Correctional Officer who had facilitated the sale of the keys, was arrested in October of 2021, and is currently facing criminal charges related to inmate trafficking. His trial is set for September of this year.
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