When Rape is State Torture

California’s now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution Dublin — widely known as the “Rape Club” — was deemed 100% compliant with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) even as the prison warden, chaplain, medic and six other employees sexually assaulted incarcerated women and retaliated against those who reported it.

Now, a new report from the Government Accountability Office sheds light on that failure, indicating the federal government’s safeguards against prison rape remain deeply limited: the audits meant to enforce “zero tolerance” standards are not actually designed to uncover or halt ongoing sexual abuse.

FCI Dublin formally closed in December 2024 after years of scandal. That year, 103 survivors received a landmark $115.8 million settlement from the U.S. Department of Justice — the largest ever awarded to incarcerated people in a sexual abuse case.

Another 294 women are expected to file suits against the Bureau of Prisons and Dublin staff in coming months, bringing the number of plaintiffs so far just shy of 400.

“The facility gained national attention in 2021 when then Warden Ray Garcia—who also directed training on the Prison Rape Elimination Act—was first charged...He was later sentenced to nearly six years in prison for abusing three female inmates.”

Early this month, local reports as well as the GAO study renewed attention on the former women’s prison and its legacy. California advocates and lawmakers continue efforts to block the facility from being repurposed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Heinous and Pervasive”

The nonpartisan GAO found that, despite serious obstacles to reporting, all federal prisoners regardless of gender filed roughly 8,500 allegations of sexual abuse between 2012 and 2022. About half involved accusations against corrections staff. A full nine percent of those cases were substantiated, while fewer than one percent were determined to be unfounded; most however remained unresolved or lacked sufficient evidence for formal findings.

Under federal rules, prisons must undergo an external Prison Rape Elimination Act audit every three years. But the GAO report notes a striking limitation: auditors are not required to detect abuse inside facilities.

Instead, audits largely focus on whether prisons maintain the required policies and procedures — including informational posters, staff training and multiple avenues for reporting abuse — rather than whether sexual violence is actively organized or excused.

But there is no requirement for auditors to detect ongoing abuse. -- GAO

As a result, prisons have passed federal rape audits even while widespread abuse continued unchecked.

“Another [FCI Dublin] abuser was a prison chaplain, who taught classes about boundaries and self-worth, while sexually assaulting women in his chapel office.”

Ineffective from the Start

Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003 after finding the nation was “largely unaware of the epidemic character of prison rape and the day-to-day horror experienced by victimized inmates.” In 2012, the Department of Justice adopted a final rule entitled “National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape.” Despite the name, the original language noted the standard was not outcomes-based, that is, it focused on policy and procedure because “it is difficult to employ [performance] standards effectively to combat sexual abuse in confinement where significant barriers exist to the reporting and investigating of such incidents.”

It should be no surprise that 23 years after the PREA, the GAO report indicates the auditing system measures signage more effectively than prison rape itself.

The Bureau of Prisons is entrusted with the health and safety of about 141,000 incarcerated individuals.

Meanwhile, the future of the former Dublin prison remains contested. The Rape Club reputation endures. Decaying infrastructure pollutes the groundwater.

Resolutions opposing ICE takeover of the site recently passed the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and the Dublin City Council, though the measures are largely symbolic because the prison sits on 87 acres of federal land.

Advocates want the facility demolished outright.

In 2021, federal estimates placed the cost of addressing the site’s leaking sewage system, mold and asbestos at roughly $50 million.

Related

May 5, 2026 | KRON 4 News

The Heinous Crimes Haunting Federal Prisons—Rape and Sexual Abuse

May 6, 2026 | Press Release - Government Accountability Office

Final FCI Dublin Officer Sentenced in Biggest Sex Abuse Scandal at US Prison

May 1, 2026 | KTVU Fox 2

Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse

May 5, 2026 | Report of the Government Accountability Office

Inmates testify about sexual abuse at FCI Dublin women’s prison

January 5, 2024 | CBS - Bay City News Service

Source: Ukrainian civilians abducted, tortured in Russian prisons

April 11, 2026 | DW

Tags: Ukraine, Clandestine Russian prisons, Activatica, Political prisoners, Enforced disappearance

Armed men in masks started disappearing Ukrainian civilians into Russian prisons over 10 years ago, after pro-Russian separatists, backed by the Kremlin, declared zones of eastern Ukraine the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” With the Russian military invasion in February 2022, thousands more were abducted.

“[Civic actors] are a threat to the occupiers because they could potentially become the nucleus for organized resistance,” explains Savva, adding that mass arrests also intimidate the citizenry. “You literally demonstrate that the same thing can happen to anybody, that you can just be disappeared,” —Mikhail Savva of Ukraine’s Center for Civic Liberties

Human rights groups and filmmaker Evgenya Chirikova estimate up to 30,000 are being held in prisons known for systematic torture. There they await politically motivated trials.

Activatica’s investigation Prisoners, Part Two details what is known about their treatment, conditions and locations. A vote in the European Parliament condemning Russian detention of Ukrainian civilians came one week after the debut of Part One. At the time only 600 Ukrainians had been released from the system of Russian prisons featured in the report.

The Prisoners, Part 2: The System of Terror {Eng. subtitled]

A torturer’s second act—and a survivor still paying the price

Source: What the CIA’s “Queen of Torture” did next

March 25, 2026 | The New Statesman

Library: ProQuest Database | New Statesman, Vol. 155, Issue 5849 (Mar 27-Apr 9, 2026): 34-41.

Tags: Khaled el-Masri, Alec Station, CIA black sites, Alfreda Bikowsaky, Freda Scheuer

Author Faye Curran profiles former CIA Chief of Alec Station alongside one man she rendered to torture: Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen grabbed off a tour bus by mistake and tortured for five months.

Over the years, he has found himself searching for Bikowsky online. “She was rewarded for her work, and I have been punished as a victim,” he says.

Opening with a description of Alfreda Bikowsky drinking wine and talking books with her (ex-CIA) husband, the article depicts a woman resolutely proud of her contributions to the war on terror. Bikowsky foregrounds her work as a life coach to women who are moving on from professions in military or law enforcement ($397 for three sessions or $597 for six sessions).

The article quickly becomes an overview of Bikowsky’s role, under a number of aliases, in the response to the 9/11 strikes and the CIA use of severe torture techniques from 2001-2009. A relentless and influential defender of CIA torture, she testified repeatedly to the value of life-saving intelligence it extracted. Analysis dismissed each such claim as false in the 2014 Senate Intelligence Report on “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (Torture Report).

Bikowsky moved to CIA clandestine operations in 1990. In the wake of September 11, 2001, she was named deputy chief of Alec Station—a special unit targeting Osama Bin Laden. By 2003 she headed the group. Though not an interrogator, she is understood to be the woman dubbed the Queen of Torture in one account and, in another, the one determined to “be in the room” during the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Routinely promoted and decorated with the agency’s highest honors, she retired after 33 years. Now she rebrands.

“CIA’s inspector general launched an investigation and concluded in 2007 that there had been no legal basis for el-Masri’s rendition—a startling confession. There will be no apology.”

Life is not as good for Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesman of Lebanese descent, who was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and transferred to a CIA black site known as the Salt Pit. It was known for constant darkness, continuous loud music, regular beatings, and fatal cold. Throughout his five-month ordeal, several jailers sent word they believed him there by mistake, but the deputy chief insisted otherwise. More than twenty years later, his life has been profoundly altered by his torture. Unable to work for a living, he suffers from a painful disease of the nervous system and struggles with anger. Volatile outbursts in Germany, attributed to his trauma, have cost him money and jail time. He now lives in Austria. The European Court of Human Rights denounced his capture and torture in 2012 and found Macedonia responsible for his treatment and transfer to the CIA. The US court system refused to hear his claims.

Survivors drive new UN charter on recognition, reparations, and prevention

Source: Torture survivors push for landmark charter to turn rights into reality

March 16, 2026 | UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights

Tags: Survivors, Accountability, United Nations, Rehabilitation

Survivor expertise and experience led the development of a new UN Charter on the Rights of Victims and Survivors of Torture. Presented to the UN Human Rights Council by Alice Edwards, UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, the “Survivor’s Charter” is the culmination of three years of hearings held in Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Bogotá and 120 submissions from survivors. Edwards aims for implementation in the next five years.

“Survivors have not asked for performative sympathy — they have asked for legal recognition, for rehabilitation that actually reaches them, and for justice that does not become another form of harm,” -- UN Special Rapporteur Alice Edwards

The document calls for real survivor participation in decision making about services meant to protect and care for others. It advances measures to ensure timely access to services, recognition of their unique needs in rehabilitation, and an end to justice procedures that re-traumatize.

Report condemns “irremediably flawed,” endless UK prison terms, again

Source: IPP prisoners subjected to ‘inhuman treatment’ under ‘dystopian’ UK system, major report to UN warns

25 February 2026 | The Independent

Tags: Prison suicide, United Kingdom, UN Convention Against Torture, Prison accountabiity

On average, they have each served 516 per cent of their original minimum term.

The notoriously indeterminate prison sentences that hold UK men for decades were taken off the books in 2012, but some 2400 men sentenced before that date remain under vague “Imprisonment for Public Protection” orders or IPP.

A report to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in February detailed the inhuman and degrading treatment of eight neurodiverse men, called for their immediate release or resentencing, and denounced the “dystopian” bind that prevents the Parole Board from revisiting or removing their classification as dangerous.

“The open-ended punishments, which have been linked to almost 100 suicides in prison, have been compared to a “gulag system” for trapping thousands without a release date, including some for minor crimes.”

Another report to the UN working group on arbitrary detention addressed the plights of five additional prisoners. Successive UK governments have failed to face the scandal or remedy the situation despite a bipartisan review in 2022 that found IPP “irremediably flawed” and called for resentencing.

LA jury convicts Syrian general on torture and conspiracy to torture

Source: Former Syrian prison chief convicted in landmark torture trial in LA

March 18, 2026 | Iowa Public Radio

Tags: Syria, Bashar al-Assad, prison accountability, Anti-torture activism, Los Angeles

Intercepted making his way to a Los Angeles airport departure gate, Samir Ousman Alsheikh was arrested on charges of torture, conspiracy to torture and immigration fraud in 2024. He held a one-way ticket to the Middle East.

“He didn’t count on a dedicated network of Syrian activists.”

Credit for that coup goes to a team of Syrian activists who reported his presence in Los Angeles in 2022, and a network of former prisoners who located witnesses willing to testify. The trial was monitored in the courtroom by law students participating in Loyola’s Justice for Atrocities Clinic.

“This is a guilty verdict for a man who was close to President Assad and his family and had privilege and power” -- Mouaz Moustafa, Syrian Emergency Task Force.

In March, Alsheikh faced survivors detailing his crimes. He was convicted on all counts in a landmark trial. He is the first high-ranking Syrian official held to account for crimes of the regime in the wake of 14 years of war. It is only the fourth trial invoking a US statute enabling prosecution for torture that occurred abroad. The US is a 1994 signatory of the UN Convention Against Torture. Alsheikh was chief of the Adra Prison, Damascus from 2005-2008.

Related case in the UK:

UPDATE: Syrian colonel charged with crimes against humanity and torture of Damascus demonstrators in 2011

Men expelled to CECOT demand reparations for torture and wrongful detention

Source: Venezuelans deported by US detail fresh claims of torture and abuse at El Salvador mega-prison

March 26, 2026 | The Guardian

Tags: Enforced disappearance, Accountability, United States, El Salvador, CECOT

Eighteen men expelled from the US and interned in the notorious Salvadoran mega-prison without charge filed a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in March. They cited torture and abuse and seek reparations as well as psychiatric and psychological resources, asking that El Salvador be declared in breach of its obligations under the American convention on human rights.

A total of 288 men were expelled from the US to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in March 2025. Of these, 252 men were returned to Venezuela and released, while 36 Salvadoran men remain imprisoned incommunicado, whereabouts unknown.

“He was beaten dozens of times during his four months of incarceration...But in neighboring cells, he said, detainees were beaten more than 100 out of the 125 days that they were incarcerated. ‘We could hear them screaming in pain.’”

The majority of men expelled to CECOT had no record of violent offenses, many with legal immigrant status or no criminal records in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Related:

Andry Hernández Romero and five other men file claims against US DHS

Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel’s suit against the United States for $1.3 million

Pseudonym “Johnny Hernandez” files intent to sue U.S. for $56 million

Share The Wells Record - Torture Networks, Policing and Prisons

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The Wells Record tracks global news on the human infrastructure of state violence.

Ida B. Wells, trailblazing journalist, organizer and publisher, inspired this effort and the book that preceded it, Torture in the National Security Imagination.

Curating news, human rights monitoring, analysis and reviews, The Wells Record points up state torture as a process and a deliberate and daily social practice, not an isolated incident.

Torture thrives globally because it has carved out local social functions and (putative) benefits.

To document this fact, Wells traveled the U.S. to the still-volatile sites of recent lynchings, doggedly investigated, and delivered terse unsparing analysis.

She revealed lynching torture as a social strategy: this was a public-private collaboration in wholesale racial terror, yes, but also the most complete and deadly form of economic competition, and a tool of white ethno-racial community building.

Wells, later Wells-Barnett, campaigned abroad to declare lynching an international disgrace, demanding economic sanction.

Global State Torture, Police & Prison Systems: Torture as Social Work

We are conditioned to see targeted violence as an incidental excess, as “brutality,” not as torture and part of a routine way of conducting operations. But torture is wedded to our culture of confinement and fuels it.

Globally, state torture takes many forms and serves many social purposes, used often to:

• Dominate people and places, viscerally and politically

• Solidify group identity, mark out subordinations of caste, control territory

• Chill dissent, terrorize groups, undercut economic and political activity

• Accomplish organizational goals, close cases, marshal authority, administer “order”

• Garner economic, personal and professional benefits

Networks: The Human Infrastructure of State Violence

Networks of people—lawyers, recordkeepers, officers and bureaucrats--make state torture possible. Pursuing context matters.

• Policing, military, detention, prisons: Tracking organizational cultures of capture and confinement, of discretion as violence and domination.

• Administrative teams, incentives and permission structures: Analyzing the legal and bureaucratic systems, constraints and protocols that reward or support systematic harm.

• Security narratives, interorganizational commerce and exchange: Identifying markets for force and geopolitical alliances for training and equipment.

• Public complicity and support: Challenging political discussion and media conventions that misname, euphemize, or evade.

The Human Cost

Torture delivers enormous interpersonal, intergenerational harm and institutional corruption.

Never neutral, state violence targets marginalized groups, attacking them deliberately in particularly racial, gendered, religious, economic and many other ways. Survivor care is a massive and essential responsibility for us all.

Attending to the networks and social functions of torture deepens understanding of our own complicity. It empowers us to move the work of accountability forward.

Human Rights Prohibitions on Torture & Anything Close to Torture

United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT and CIDTP).

Global News

Roma Couple Win Case Against Police Torturers in Serbia

Source: Roma Tortured by Serbian Police Win Case at European Court

17 February 2026 | European Roma Rights Centre

Tags: Accountability, Torture teams, Policing, Serbia

Years after Romani couple Marko and Sandra Stalović were held without charge in Belgrade, the European Court of Human Rights has found Serbian police officers subjected them to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment in 2017. Police and the public prosecutor were also faulted for ineffective investigation of this crime.

“They trusted the system and that trust was weaponized against them.”

The pair had sought out local police to report their car stolen but then were driven 49 miles in an unmarked car to a precinct in Belgrade with a years-long reputation among human rights monitoring organizations for impunity in the face of routinized violence against those in custody. There Marko was surrounded by eight officers, forced into stress positions, beaten, whipped across the hands, suffocated with plastic, and threatened with a gun to his head while Sandra Stalović was forced to listen. Both endured racial, ethnic and religious abuse; perpetrators threatened their children and forced them to sign false documents. The court issued a monetary judgment.

“Nearly nine years on, not a single officer has faced consequences for his actions. What makes this case particularly chilling is that Marko and Sandra actually called the police themselves in the first place to report a crime” — Human rights lawyer Andrea Čolak, working with European Roma Rights Centre.

Full-body WRAP restraint linked to ICE deaths, police and jail fatalities

Source: Citing AP investigation, new bill seeks to prohibit DHS from using full-body restraints

25 Feb 2026 | Associated Press / Santa Cruz Sentinel

Tags: Weapons and restraints, Accountability, Policing, ICE

Illinois representative promotes new legislation to ban US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security use of the full body “WRAP” device. The immobilizing restraint is used increasingly by local police and jails. An Associated Press report has linked the WRAP to a dozen deaths. It is manufactured by Safe Restraints Inc., of California.

Additional links

Associated Press report on ICE fatalities and the WRAP

Corporate marketing videos from Safe Restraints Inc.

CPJ documents torture experience of 59 Palestinian journalists held by Israel

Source: ‘Torture, threats, rape’: Palestinian journalists detail Israeli jail abuse

19 February 2026 | Al Jazeera

Tags: Committee to Protect Journalists; Political repression; Israel; Sde Teiman

Al Jazeera staff lend context to a February 19 report of the International Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Sexual violence appeared repeatedly in the testimonies, with journalists describing assaults as intended to humiliate, terrorise and permanently scar them.”

The group interviewed 59 Palestinian journalists imprisoned by Israel after the brutal Hamas-led attacks of October 2023. Fifty-eight reported “torture, abuse or other forms of violence” including baton beatings, electroshocks, rape, excruciating stress positions, immersion in sewage. The journalists lost an average of 54 pounds (23.5 kilos) in custody.

UK complicity case compensates Abu Zubaydah - subject of US torture, 24-year detention

Source: Guantanamo detainee paid “substantial” compensation by UK to settle torture complicity case.

11 January 2026 | BBC

Tags: Accountability; United Kingdom; United States; Guantanamo

The UK settled a civil case brought by Saudi Palestinian Abu Zubaydah. British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 were aware of the ongoing CIA torture program and collaborated in violent interrogation of Saudi Palestinian Zubaydah.

“These violations of his rights are not historic, they are ongoing.”

The US has withdrawn claims that he was a member of al-Qaeda yet continues to hold him prisoner without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay. The US Senate and UK parliamentary reports of 2014 and 2018, respectively, documented that he was waterboarded 83 times, locked in cramped boxes and assaulted physically in a variety of ways.

“The compensation is important, it’s significant, but it’s insufficient.” - Prof. Helen Duffy, international legal counsel for Zubaydah.

Additional links

Sharp rise in forced confessions broadcast on Iranian state TV intensifies long pattern

Source: Activists say Iran has aired at least 97 coerced confessions from protesters, often after torture

13 January 2026 | Associated Press / WSLS, Roanoke VA

Tags: Torture broadcast; Execution; Iran; Political repression

The AP recorded a rising number of arrests and confessions linked to torture broadcast in the immediate wake of the nationwide protests that began on Dec. 28. The surge is relative to similar Iranian state broadcasts over the course of the last fifteen years. The article also cites the UN’s count of 975 state executions in 2024.

“The nearly 100 confessions broadcast over just two weeks is unprecedented for Iran” – Human Rights Activists News Agency, deputy director

Warning for Ireland on Police Shock and Spray Devices

Source: Ireland: Gardaí less-lethal weapon expansion poses grave human rights risks, warn UN experts

18 February 2026 | UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights

Tags: Weapons and arms, Ireland, Policing, Torture markets

“[Experts] were dismayed at the information by the Gardaí that these [shock] weapons could be used against pregnant women and the elderly.”

UN human rights and weapons experts issued a warning notice concerning the acquisition of dangerous crowd control devices by the Gardaí, the National Police of the Irish Republic. UN experts noted the injury of peaceful protesters in October 2025, allegedly caused by ‘double-strength pepper spray’ (product name: SABRE Red Crossfire MK‑3 Gel), and added that the Gardaí have also invested in taser-like Conductive Energy Devices (CED) designed to deliver electric shocks when pressed against the body. CED fall under the “preliminary list of items identified by the Special Rapporteur on torture as being inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading and therefore considered to be prohibited,” they said.

Guantanamo Update: US Appeals 2025 Military Court Finding of Torture

Source: War Court Prosecutor Asks Panel to Overturn Torture Finding in 9/11 Case

27 February 2026 | New York Times

Tags: Al Qaeda, Torture teams, Black sites, United States

The US government asked a Pentagon review panel to overturn a 2025 decision that excluded from trial a confession obtained by CIA torture. That statement, contended the military commissions prosecutor, remains the “best evidence” against Ammar al-Baluchi, one of five alleged members of the 9/11 hijacking plot of 2001. All have been held over 20 years without trial. Contention over agency torture continues to dog and delay the case against them. Before his transfer to Guantanamo, Al-Baluchi was held in CIA black sites for years, kept standing, chained and naked for more than three days without sleep, subjected to drowning in ice water, held in darkness for five months, and repeatedly “walled” (head slammed against the wall) until his interrogators grew tired.

Books

Prisons: Of political philosophy and our own backyards

Source: There are more prisons in heaven and earth, Spencer J. Weinreich reviews The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy by Jacob Abolafia

March 10, 2026 | Public Books

Tags: Political philosophy, Prison abolition, Incarceration

Reading Abolafia’s 2024 study with appreciation, Weinreich charts the book’s course down two paths of Western political philosophy. Both take the prison as a necessary touchstone, whether the philosopher is ruminating on tensions facing the authority of the state or on the moral psychology of reform. While prisons may persist, he says, as a critical puzzle for political philosophy, Weinreich points to actual prisons and prisoners as the very engine of today’s politics. The “untidy violence” of prisons leaves little room for nuance and powerfully shapes our lives.

“The prison and its outriders—policing, probation, parole, bail, surveillance—have become many citizens’ most immediate and most meaningful encounters with the state. Entire realms of the political, such as migration, are framed in carceral terms. The prison poses an anomaly for representative democracy, its inmates usually deprived of the right to vote but counted for purposes of gerrymandering. Contemporary political economy must account for...the vast economic ecosystem, of caterers and internet service providers and architects, sustained by the public money poured into prisons...The fact that one in every three American adults has a criminal record demands a whole new account of citizenship and its relationship to punishment.”

Historical

Read Writing by Ida B. Wells

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (1892, 1893, 1894)

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)

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