Bodily autonomy is a cornerstone of women’s rights in California. But behind prison walls, incarcerated women can face a very different reality in which the state holds enormous power.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice delivered a damning assessment of California’s two state prisons for women. Federal investigators concluded that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and its two women’s prisons — the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and California Institution for Women in Chino — are violating the Constitution by failing to protect female prisoners from sexual abuse and harassment by staff.
Investigators found a long-standing pattern of staff sexual misconduct, inadequate safeguards, flawed investigations, and insufficient accountability, concluding that CDCR, CCWF, and CIW fail to adequately and effectively implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Washington now faces its own test: The Justice Department gave California 49 days to satisfactorily address its findings before the attorney general may initiate litigation. With that window closing in early October, the Trump administration should insist on measurable protections for incarcerated women, and Congress should demand answers about why its landmark prison-rape law remains so poorly implemented.
For a state that prides itself on women’s rights and criminal-justice reform, that should be intolerable. And California cannot claim it wasn’t warned. In 2023, the state paid millions to settle claims involving former prisoners who alleged sexual assault by CCWF correctional officer Gregory Rodriguez, who was later convicted of dozens of sexual-abuse charges. This year, California agreed to pay another $1.9 million to 13 women who alleged prison staff retaliated violently against them for reporting sexual misconduct.
It was not an isolated incident. In 2024, the federal government agreed to pay nearly $116 million to 103 survivors of the now-shuttered federal women’s prison FCI Dublin in the Bay Area that became so notorious for staff sexual abuse it was nicknamed “rape club.” In 2023, an Illinois federal jury awarded $19.3 million to a former Logan Correctional Center prisoner who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a prison counselor; an appeals court later upheld liability findings against prison officials but ordered a new trial on damages. In 2021, New Jersey agreed to pay nearly $21 million to resolve sexual-abuse and misconduct claims involving the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.
Congress passed PREA in 2003 with a clear mandate: eliminate sexual abuse in the nation’s detention facilities. More than two decades later, California’s own prisons show how far reality has fallen short of that promise and how disproportionately women bear the gap. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of substantiated incidents from 2016 to 2018, women made up just 10% of the combined U.S. prison and jail population, yet accounted for 27% of all victims of staff sexual misconduct. The same BJS data show incarcerated women are roughly three times as likely as incarcerated men to be sexually victimized by staff. Twenty-three years of federal law have not closed that gap.
The Justice Department’s notice of required remedial measures for CCWF and CIW includes expanded camera coverage, enhanced confidential reporting channels, strengthened investigative protocols, improved staff training and monitoring, and implementation of PREA-compliant safeguards. Companies are working to fill that gap. Texas-based LEO Technologies recently launched Verus Vision AI, which turns correctional cameras into real-time monitoring systems through agentic AI, capable of detecting behaviors and conditions that may signal developing threats.
LEO Technologies’ products give correctional officers another set of eyes where humans cannot possibly watch every camera, corridor, and cellblock simultaneously. The company frames the tool as flagging risk before harm occurs to enhance the ability of human judgment to take the proper course of action, not to replace the human component of the process.
CAMERAS ONLY WATCH PRISON ASSAULTS. AI CAN ACTUALLY PREVENT THEM
That distinction matters because technology is not a substitute for accountability. Two decades after PREA became law, California still hasn’t been able to improve its implementation. Cameras go unmonitored, incidents go undocumented and uninvestigated, and reports vanish into a bureaucracy without consequences.
California is home to some of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world. It should be equally sophisticated about protecting the women whose safety it has taken into its own hands. PREA set the standard in 2003, but California is still failing to meet it. When incarceration is the punishment, sexual abuse should never be part of the sentence.
Adelle Nazarian is a journalist, entrepreneur, and commentator covering politics, culture, technology, and the ideas shaping America.