Sexual abuse: guards let rapists into women's cells.

• Author: Stein, Bobbie
• Position: Life In Prison - Cover Story

When Ardella West got a phone call from her granddaughter, Robin, asking her to visit her, she knew that there was something terribly wrong. Robin Lucas is a federal inmate. Convicted of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and receiving stolen property, she landed a thirty-three-month sentence. She served part of her sentence at Camp Parks, a minimum-security facility for women in Dublin, California. But after a while she was transferred to the Special Housing Unit across the way at the federal detention center for men.

West had trouble finding Robin. She didn't know that women could be housed in a men's facility. When she finally found her, she was shocked.

"I'd never seen her like that," West recalls. "Her eyes were red, and she was shaking like a leaf on a tree. She told me that the guard was letting guys in on her."

Women are never supposed to be placed in the men's Special Housing Unit--commonly referred to as "the hole" or "the SHU"--unless there is overcrowding in the women's facility, says Wilson Moore, public-information officer for the federal Bureau of Prisons in Dublin. Only the warden himself can authorize such an arrangement, says Moore, and no men are supposed to be present at the same time as the women.

"Men are men," says Moore. "If they know that there are women in there, they may start yelling things at them, and we do not need that at all."

Despite the prison's claim that women are never held in the SHU alongside the men, prison records show that Robin Lucas and several other women were held in the men's unit in August and September of 1995. Inmates of these units are supposed to be locked in their single cells at all times, except when they take showers.

But between midnight and 8 A.M., when a certain correctional officer was on duty, male prisoners routinely had access to the women's cells, Robin says. Men came to for cell, offered her alcohol, and asked her for sex. One night a male prisoner came into their cell and climbed into her bed while she was asleep. Robin woke up and couldn't believe he was there.

"I told him not to do that again," she says. But he came back the following night.

Two days after Robin signed an affidavit complaining about the night-time activities the SHU, the men labeled her a switch. Fearing for her safety, Robin repeatedly requested transfer and protection. But her requests were ignored, and she was left in the men's unit.

Three weeks later, between midnight and 5 A.M., Robin heard the lock...