MIAMI — In a scathing rebuke of Florida's Department of Corrections, the U.S. Department of Justice has found that officers at Lowell Correctional Institution have repeatedly raped, sodomized, beaten and choked female inmates as part of a pattern of rampant civil rights abuses that go back years.
The sexual abuse of inmates at the institution so horrified DOJ investigators that they put the state on notice, demanding that the agency immediately reorganize Lowell's staff, install adequate video surveillance and institute a number of changes to protect women prisoners from sexual abuse by staff.
"There is reasonable to cause to believe ... that conditions at Lowell violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution due the sexual abuse of prisoners ... and these violations are pursuant to a pattern or practice," the Justice Department wrote in the 36-page report released Tuesday.
The Eighth Amendment prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishment.
Federal investigators reviewed over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewed dozens of inmates at the prison, one of the largest women's prisons in the nation.
The sprawling dilapidated compound, located in Ocala, has been the focus of federal scrutiny since 2018, when lawyers for the Justice Department's civil rights division began meeting with inmates and their families about the poor physical conditions at the prison. What they discovered, however, were abuses far worse than poor medical care and sanitary conditions. They found that the prison fostered an environment where sexual violence and abuse not only thrived, but it was almost "normalized," the report said.
The DOJ report comes five years after a Miami Herald series, "Beyond Punishment," documented interviews with more than three dozen former and current inmates at Lowell who described being forced to have sex with officers or face solitary confinement or losing the ability to visit with their children.
Among the litany of crimes listed in the report were a 2018 incident in which a sergeant grabbed an inmate, pulled her clothes off and sodomized her; another officer who took a prisoner outdoors, pushed her down and put his penis in her mouth; and an officer with a history of sexual abuse complaints who woke an inmate up in the middle of the night, forced her to have sex then supplied her with a prescription drug.
"Incidents of staff sexual abuse of prisoners at Lowell are varied and disturbing," DOJ said. "Prisoners were forced or coerced to perform fellatio on or touch intimate body parts of staff. In other incidents, staff demanded that prisoners undress in front them, sometimes in exchange for basic necessities, such as toilet paper."
While the report demands fixes, it stops short of holding anyone criminally accountable.
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