If the reports emerging from the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) about rampant sexual violence and abuses of power were being reported from anywhere else, there would be outrage across the state. But because these survivors are locked inside California’s largest women’s prison, no one seems to care. The silence is deafening.
What’s worse is that these unacceptable conditions have not changed in the near decade I have been working with criminalized survivors preparing for their parole hearings. They must change
CCWF’s failure to protect people in women’s prisons from abuse by prison staff is well-known and documented. I have witnessed how this abuse impacts my clients on a daily basis. Usually, those impacts are outside of the scope of my work preparing clients to appear before the parole board. But today, it’s different. Former Correctional Officer Greg Rodriguez, the man accused of raping over 20 women at CCWF, was stationed in the area of the prison most connected to someone’s freedom: the area in which people are interviewed by psychologists in preparation for hearings, where attorneys meet with clients and where a lucky few are granted their release.
Opinion
In California, people sentenced to life sentences must appear before the Board of Parole Hearings to get out of prison. Their liberty depends on an extensive interview during which parole commissioners aim to determine if someone poses a risk to public safety by asking questions about every harm they have experienced or inflicted. This process is arduous and emotionally devastating, and few succeed; in 2022, only 14% of the more than 9,000 parole hearings scheduled in California resulted in a parole grant, despite the fact that once released, only about 3% of people who have served these lengthy sentences will ever return to prison. For formerly incarcerated women, return rates are even lower.
For people whose crimes are related to experiences of intimate partner violence, the parole board is supposed to give “great weight” to the impact of intimate partner battering “if it appears the criminal behavior was the result of that victimization.” Despite this requirement, in practice, the board gives this special consideration little credence. The idea that an abusive relationship may have impacted a person’s decision to commit violence runs counter to the board’s general requirement of full responsibility.
For survivors of sexual abuse whose past violence is directly related to their victimization, the board’s questions become even more invasive: Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you stop the abuse? Why didn’t you get a divorce? Traumatic experiences are twisted, leaving many to wish that they had never shared them.
My clients’ stories are not isolated: 93% of incarcerated women in the U.S. experienced trauma or violence prior to their incarceration. In California, a 2014 study found nearly 100% of women incarcerated for the homicide of an intimate partner were abused by the person they killed. Most indicated that the homicide resulted from an attempt to protect themselves or their children.
More appalling is the fact that while facing the dehumanizing gauntlet of the parole board, my clients must now weather the indignity of attempting to secure their liberty in a place where someone wielding a badge of authority is accused of raping dozens of their peers. Already, I have clients who are more frightened to participate in the parole process than ever before; frightened not only of what parole commissioners may force them to relive, but also of doing so in an environment where the brutality of our prison system is on fresh display. The very institutions tasked with maintaining public safety have failed to protect my clients at every turn, both before and during their incarceration.
The parole board — which requires my clients to acknowledge the harm they have caused, show remorse and make amends — has been silent in the face of these allegations. Every survivor of sexual violence deserves to be believed and to have access to healing. This will only happen when our prisons and those who run them are finally held accountable for perpetrating harm and degrading real community safety. My clients deserve no less.
Lilli Paratore is the managing attorney at UnCommon Law, where she directly represents clients navigating the discretionary parole process in California. She has worked with people in prison for nearly a decade, including at the Death Penalty Clinic, the East Bay Community Law Center’s Clean Slate Practice, the Prison Law Office and the Orleans Public Defenders.