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‘Toughen up’: Women working in male prisons face harassment from inmates and co-workers

‘This is a male institution’

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January 29, 2018 at 4:08 p.m. EST

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Michael Allison Chandler.

For decades, women were employed only in women’s prisons.

That started to change in the 1970s as legal barriers broke down and more women entered the workforce. Now they represent nearly 30 percent of correctional employees, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The category includes officers in prisons, jails, juvenile facilities and community-based facilities.

Taronica White first went to work at a Florida state prison in 1991 when she was 20 years old and a new mother. She had a high school diploma and a year of being in the military.

At first it was just that — a job, she said. But four years later, when she got hired at a federal prison in Miami, she saw some lasting benefits, including a pension, the chance for early retirement and different career paths. “I started realizing this will be a good career for me,” she said.

She went back to school for a bachelor’s degree and later a master’s in criminal justice with a specialization in drug treatment. White transferred to the federal correctional complex in Coleman, Fla., in 2005, after a new maximum security prison had opened, because she was in search of new opportunities.

On her first day as a correctional officer at the Coleman prison, her supervisor gave her an oversize jacket to wear on top of her uniform.

White quickly came to understand why, she said recently.

“It was a culture shock,” White said of the Coleman facility. “It was so hostile to female staff.”

White got catcalled, received sexual threats and saw inmates exposing themselves and masturbating in front of her, she recalled. She wrote up 10 incident reports for sexual misconduct in her first week. During the previous decade working in federal corrections, she recalled writing up only two incidents.

At first she thought the behavior could be explained by the fact it was a maximum-security prison and she had worked only in ­lower-security facilities in the past. But after a while, she noticed men were often not being disciplined and basic procedures were not being followed.

“That is when I started asking questions: Why are these inmates not being held accountable?” she said.

She said her boss raped her in a bank vault. Her sexual harassment case would make legal history.

White, who now works for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., went on to become the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit alleging sex discrimination and a hostile work environment at what is the nation’s largest federal prison complex. Last year, the federal government agreed to settle for $20 million and signed on to more than 20 pages of procedural changes to improve employees’ safety, including improved training about sexual harassment, better monitoring for processing incident reports and new prison uniforms without front pockets to deter inmates from masturbating under their clothes.

The lawsuit

At Coleman, White became active in the union, which set up meetings over several years with managers, including male and female wardens, to talk about the widespread harassment. When no real changes occurred, in 2010, they hired a D.C. lawyer.

Their lawsuit was a long shot, the women were told, but hundreds of female employees rallied around the effort and created an emotional network for each other.

In 2013, they won the first crucial victory, when an administrative judge certified the plaintiffs as a class. “I thought, ‘Okay, finally, somebody is listening to us,’” White said.

The lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit represented more than 500 women who were employed as correctional officers, teachers, nurses or office workers at the prison. In hundreds of pages of legal documents, female officers detailed often-daily harassment they endured in the course of their jobs.

In July 2016, in response to a motion for summary judgment, the judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, affirming that the women had been subject to severe or pervasive sexual harassment. The only major issue remaining for trial was whether the U.S. Department of Justice was liable for the sexual harassment. The government agreed to settle the case.

Attorneys for the women say it is one of the largest settlement agreements to date for a class-action lawsuit alleging sexual harassment. It is certainly not the first of its kind.

‘This is a male institution’

In the Coleman suit, the women alleged management did little or nothing to protect them. Superiors often failed to process incident reports and in some cases shredded them. Women said they were told “Toughen up,” “Your skin is too thin,” “This is a male institution,” or “You’re ‘too pretty.’”

The underlying message to women was clear, they said: You should not be here.

But the male-dominated culture in corrections is slowly beginning to change as more women rise through the ranks to leadership positions, said Shirley Moore Smeal, president of the Association of Women Executives in Corrections and executive deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

“But we still have growth to do,” she said. “Some people would still rather not have women work in corrections at all,” a dynamic she said feels “very recent and very real.”

To handle sexual harassment, supervisors must set clear expectations and enforce them, she said.

“Whether there is one instance or 1,000 — procedures should be in place, with avenues available for women to report and to know that their concerns are going to be addressed,” she said.

“That is the culture that we need to cultivate on a daily basis.”