The now-closed Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, on May 30, 2025. The prison was a low-security women’s facility with a history of staff sexual abuse scandals. Charges against two more former correctional officers at the now-shuttered FCI Dublin bring the total to 10, but victims and advocates say the culture of abuse was widespread. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
When Aja Jasmin arrived at FCI Dublin in September 2021, her fear about the federal women’s prison immediately became reality.
During her medical intake examination, she said the officer on duty — who she said told her he was a nurse — ordered her to expose her breasts and touched her pubic area under the guise of a check for a skin rash.
“He had said to lift my shirt up, as well as my bra, and pull down my pants,” she told KQED. “When I told him no, he said if I didn’t, it would be considered insubordination and that I shouldn’t want to start my time off like that.
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“My first introduction to Dublin was my introduction with him,” she said.
Jasmin had heard about the sexual abuse accusations swirling around FCI Dublin after its former warden, Ray Garcia, was walked off the campus and placed on administrative leave just months before. She said her husband had reassured her that she should be safe, since the facility was likely under additional scrutiny in the scandal’s wake.
“That was not what happened,” she told KQED.
The now-closed Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, on May 30, 2025. The prison was a low-security women’s facility with a history of staff sexual abuse scandals. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Jeffrey Wilson, the officer who Jasmin said assaulted her on her first day, is one of two former correctional officers who were charged last week with sexually abusing women under their care at the prison. In total, 10 former employees at the now-shuttered facility have now been charged with such crimes.
Wilson is charged with five counts of sexual abuse against a woman incarcerated at Dublin between March and August of 2022. Prosecutors allege he forced his penis into her mouth on four occasions and penetrated her with his fingers on another, according to the charging document.
He also faces an additional charge for allegedly telling federal agents that he had no sexual contact with the victim and had never given her contraband.
The accusations made by Jasmin are not included in the charges, though she told KQED she spoke with federal agents multiple times throughout their investigation.
Lawrence Gacad, the other guard charged last week, faces one count of abusive sexual contact that allegedly took place the same year.
The charges are the latest in a yearslong FBI investigation into FCI Dublin. More than 100 women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct at the facility, where reporting from the Associated Press in 2021 uncovered a culture of abuse, retaliation and cover-up that led staffers and women incarcerated there to call the prison “the rape club.”
The Bureau of Prisons said it could not comment on pending litigation or ongoing investigations, citing safety and privacy reasons.
The latest charges come two years after a wave of eight former employees, including Garcia, were indicted.
Kendra Drysdale, who was a victim of abuse while at Dublin in 2023 and 2024, said the new charges revived her hope that the Department of Justice was continuing to investigate.
Still, she said, offenders — including the officer who she said abused her — have not faced repercussions.
The now-closed Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, on May 30, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
“They completely protected the officer,” she said, adding that the true number of employees who abused women there, and continue to at other Bureau of Prison facilities, is much greater.
“These 10 that have been charged are just a few of the many,” she told KQED. “The system is hugely built on protection and cover-ups. It’s just a widespread culture of complicity.”
Drysdale, who now works as an advocacy coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, said that after reporting her offender, she was accused of filing a false Prison Rape Elimination Act violation and was retaliated against, losing access to phone calls with her daughter and commissary.
She said she was forced to work in the department her offender oversaw until she was released from Dublin the week the facility was abruptly shut down in April 2024.
She said women who have made similar allegations face similar retaliation, as do those who were part of a class-action lawsuit that led to a landmark consent decree awarding women at Dublin special protections while they are incarcerated.
As part of one of two class-action suits that have been settled with the BOP, about 300 women who remained incarcerated after the closure and were moved to other federal facilities are supposed to receive special protections including monitoring surrounding their medical and mental health care and in instances when they are placed in solitary housing or report retaliation, among others.
But this week, a court-appointed “special master” tasked with tracking prisons’ compliance with those protections found that in April 2025, the first month since the consent decree went into effect, the BOP failed to comply or only partially complied with nearly all of the agreed-upon protections.
“It’s devastating,” Drysdale said. “This report, although not surprising, was really upsetting to know that nothing’s changed.”
The report from special master Wendy Still said that in the monthlong period, there were 13 complaints of sexual abuse and three of physical abuse that, in some cases, warranted no follow-up action from staff.
Seventeen women also reported retaliation by staff because of their status as part of the class-action suit, including during instances when they were placed in solitary housing, removed from specific programs or lacked responses to requests for remedies promised to class members.
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into staff sexual abuse allegations at two women’s prisons in Chowchilla and Chino, following a series of lawsuits and similar abuses at federal facilities like FCI Dublin, which was closed due to widespread misconduct. (J. David Ake/Getty Images)
In one case, Still wrote, a class member lost recreation time for 120 days after being charged with refusing to obey an order.
“Although this is a sanction available to the [unit disciplinary committee] … [it] is an extreme penalty in relation to the violation,” her report reads.
She said class members were also struggling to access medical and mental health care, in part due to systemic understaffing.
Drysdale believes the report “shows that they’re either unwilling or incapable or both of providing care and safety for our class members.”
“Clearly, oversight isn’t working,” she said. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners has called for all of the members of the class to be released.
The new charges against Wilson and Gacad come as Darrell Wayne Smith, the only other correctional officer charged in the probe who has not yet been sentenced, awaits a new trial. In April, his criminal trial on charges of abusive contact with five women ended in a mistrial after a jury was unable to agree on any of the 15 counts against him.
His defense argued that the women who accused him of assault used him as part of a scheme to gain the relief awarded to other victims, including early release from prison, settlement money, and, in some cases, legal status to remain in the U.S.
