Chaotic prison closure in Northern California leads to fighting, crying, cutting, inmates say

Closing the women’s federal prison in Dublin, California, was supposed to put a swift end to the abuse and dysfunction of the troubled facility. But inmates say the chaotic and hurried transfer of 600 inmates this past week to prisons as far as Minnesota and Miami has wrought suffering all its own.

Prisoners have been sent on grueling cross-country bus trips and flights – some without medical prescriptions or sanitary products, prisoners say – with little sense of their destination.

“We were all bruised up on our wrists because of the fact that they put the handcuffs on so tight and so long,” inmate Vaudencia Hamilton told the Bay Area News Group in a phone call Tuesday from the Miami prison, after a three-day journey by bus and plane. She went without her diabetes medication throughout the trip, she said, and felt “dizzy and sick and nauseated.”

Shuttering the federal correctional institution in Dublin comes in the aftermath of a “rape club” culture that saw eight jail officers charged, with six convicted, of sexually abusing inmates. One judge called the facility, also riddled with mold and asbestos, a “dysfunctional mess.”

But as Hamilton puts it after her ordeal, “the men went to prison and we got the punishment.”

Nearly a dozen inmates, most incarcerated on drug charges, and their relatives reached out to the Bay Area News Group over recent days to describe the chaos and anxiety they say the prisoners experienced during the frenetic move.

There was so much confusion during the first days of transfers last week that some inmates languished for upwards of five hours on buses in the Dublin prison parking lot before returning to their cells without explanation. Their only meal was frozen sandwiches, they said. Toilet paper on the bus ran out.

“People were crying. I had anxiety the whole time,” inmate Sara Victoria, 47, told the Bay Area News Group last week after she was stuck on the parked bus. “We just didn’t know where we were going and what we were doing.”

“I have witnessed people fighting. I have witnessed people crying. I have witnessed people drinking pills because they just want to pass out and not think about it. I have witnessed people vomiting,” inmate Maria Morales Rodriguez, 43, said. “Another lady over here next to me, she was cutting herself. We have witnessed all of that. And even officers over here are crying because that’s how crazy it is.”

Inmates with children who live in the Bay Area and were able to visit their loved ones in prison fear they won’t see their kids again. Those with pending release dates to halfway houses worry those plans will be lost in the chaos. And those who formed tight friendships in the prison are panicked about adjusting to new facilities.

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