Former BOP Warden Convicted of Sexually Abusing Prisoners in California ‘Rape Club’ Scandal
by Kevin W. Bliss
On December 1, 2022, a jury in federal court for the Northern District of California convicted Ray J. Garcia, the former warden of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin, on seven sexual abuse charges and another of lying about it to government agents investigating the crime. The verdict sets up Garcia, 55, for sentencing in March 2023, when he faces up to 15 years in prison.
Garcia was found guilty of abusing three prisoners between December 2019 and March 2020, forcing them to strip naked before he photographed, fondled, penetrated, and extorted them. After the first prisoner came forward to accuse him, investigators found nude photos of other female prisoners on his government-issued cellphone. Garcia then lied about the incidents when interviewed on July 22, 2021.
The former warden is the fourth of five staffers convicted of sexually abusing prisoners at the prison they and staffers called the “rape club.” Former chaplain James Theodore Highhouse, 49, began a seven-year federal prison term for sexual abuse of a ward on November 2, 2022. Former technician Ross Klinger, 37, pleaded guilty to similar charges in February 2022. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.54.] No sentencing date is available for Klinger, who has been on home confinement since July 2021. See: USA v. Klinger, USDC (N.D. Calif.), Case No. 4:22-cr-00031.
His former boss, John Russell Bellhouse, 39, was also charged with shaking down a prisoner for sex in late 2020 and early 2021, currying her favor with earrings and use of his office phone. He has been free on $50,000 bond since shortly after his November 2021 arrest, awaiting trial in May 2023. Two more victims were listed in a superseding indictment unsealed on September 29, 2022. See: USA v. Bellhouse, USDC (N.D. Calif.), Case No. 4:22-cr-00066.
Still awaiting sentencing is Enrique Chavez, 49, a former guard supervising the kitchen who was charged with sexually abusing a prisoner on March 23, 2022. [See: PLN, May 2022, p.28.] He entered a plea deal on October 27, 2022, with sentencing scheduled for February 2023. See: USA v. Chavez, USDC (N.D. Calif.), Case No. 4:22-cr-00104.
Grotesquely, Garcia supervised audits for the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The scandal highlights BOP’s problems not only in handling sexual abuse complaints but also in vetting administrative employees.
At a hearing before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on December 13, 2022, new BOP Director Colette Peters took heat from Chairman Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who said the “situation is intolerable.”
“Sexual abuse of [prisoners] is a gross abuse of human and Constitutional rights,” Ossoff insisted.
Peters admitted to lawmakers that BOP faces a “culture of abuse and a culture of misconduct.” But she promised a “reset” with “systemic changes in the works.”
One of those changes won’t be holding Garcia’s replacement to account for his admitted abuse of prisoners. Thomas Ray Hinkle, who has since moved on from FCI-Dublin to lead BOP’s Western Region, openly admitted to beating Black federal prisoners when he was a guard in the 1970s. Members of the guards’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), picketed outside his new office in Stockton on December 12, 2022, “to spread the awareness of the corruption and the bad intentions by the upper echelon within [BOP],” according to AFGE 1237 Local President Aaron McGlothin of FCI in Mendota.
“The regional directors are the same. The people in central office are the same. How do we expect change when [it is] the people who are in office that make this environment toxic? It doesn’t make any sense,” agreed Edward Canales, union President at FCI-Dublin.
Yet Peters defended Hinkle, pointing to his contrition and his readiness to share his sordid past as a warning to other BOP guards. It remains unclear how potentially abusive guards will be deterred by Hinkle’s story when it includes repeated promotions — he now oversees 20 prisons holding 21,000 prisoners. And who else was repeatedly promoted through BOP’s ranks?
Former FCI-Dublin Warden Ray Garcia.
A civil suit filed in September 2022 by one of Klinger’s victims, identified as M.R., also lodges sexual abuse allegations against Highhouse and a sixth guard, Sergio Saucedo. See: M.R. v. Fed. Corr. Inst. Dublin, USDC (N.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:22-cv-05137. Saucedo has not been criminally charged. But he was reportedly placed on leave the day after former prisoner Andrea Reyes gave a TV news interview on March 22, 2022, implicating him and fellow guard Nicholas Ramos in her sexual abuse. Ramos, 37, then committed suicide on August 21, 2022.
Additional source: AP News
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