During December’s holiday season the Miami Herald published a shocking investigative report. The investigation centered on numerous complaints from women incarcerated at Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution, the largest women’s prison in America. In case you missed it, Reentry Central is reposting the Herald’s findings.
Although the new warden at Lowell downplays the accusations of sexual, physical and mental abuse by women incarcerated at the prison, the Marion County Chief Assistant State Attorney likened the goings-on as “akin to prostitution,” albeit it coerced prostitution.
From the Miami Herald:
Bartered sex, corruption and cover-ups behind bars in nation’s largest women’s prison
A Miami Herald I-Team investigation into corruption, sexual abuse and medical neglect at the largest women's prison in the nation, Lowell Correctional. Reporting by Julie K. Brown / jbrown@miamiherald.com.
Casey Hodge stepped from the prison van, trembling under the weight of her thick handcuffs and leg shackles. The slight 25-year-old was led with a group of other women into a small room and ordered to strip naked.
“Show me your pink,” said a female corrections officer, instructing her to squat and cough so that they could peer between her legs and certify that she wasn’t concealing anything.
Hodge, who has been legally blind since she was 16, then was told to remove her glass eye. “They wanted to make sure I wasn’t hiding anything in my socket,’’ she remembers. So she pulled it out with her fingers. The officers nearly fell off their chairs, she said, mocking her like children and pretending to vomit.
“I felt like I was a kid, being bullied all over again,” said Hodge, who had never been in trouble with the law before her arrest on drug trafficking charges in 2012.
Read more here.
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