'I Knew They Were Scumbags'

How federal prison guards confessed to rape-and got away with it

- By C.J. Ciaramella

Ron Berman agonizes over how to tell this story, where even to start, because the short version doesn’t capture the full travesty and the long version is overwhelming. But here’s the crux of it: A group of federal prison guards raped his daughter and got away with it. Not only did they get away with it, but they got away with it even after they admitted they did it.

Berman’s daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.

Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.

Most of the guards retired before they could be fired, meaning they walked with their retirement benefits intact. Over the last five years, Berman’s daughter and the rest of those women were failed by nearly everyone around them at every level of government.

Berman has been emailing and calling everyone he can think of—his congressional representatives, the FBI, federal prosecutors, local prosecutors, the county sheriff, reporters— trying to get justice for his daughter.

“It’s not the system that failed her,” he says. “It’s the people.”