After almost eight years in prison, Amber Bacon was working toward a fresh start. She was taking classes and had a job helping other women in a prison training program. Then unwanted sexual comments and touching from a work supervisor left her reeling, she said. 

Bacon had been a standout student in a CareerTech training program when an instructor at. Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Taft asked her to be his assistant. She felt honored and thought of the instructor as a role model. 

But one day in 2021, she says he grabbed her buttocks, placing a hand on each cheek and squeezed firmly while she was standing at the copier machine printing handouts for the next class. The CareerTech instructor continued to make sexual comments to her over the next several months, she said. 

The abuse was a blow to her self-worth. 

“It made me wonder, was I doing good in those classes, or did he pick me for an assistant because he wanted to mess with me,” Bacon said. “Mentally, I doubted myself. Was I good enough, or was I not good enough?”

Bacon reported the instructor to prison officials. She also told a mental health worker and her aunt about the abuse. In Oklahoma, unwanted touching by jail or prison staff can lead to felony charges of sexual battery, but authorities did not prosecute the CareerTech instructor who Bacon said groped her. A Department of Corrections investigation did not find evidence of Bacon’s groping claim. But the instructor was found to have made inappropriate comments and CareerTech terminated his job. The man declined to comment. The Frontier is not naming him because no criminal charges were filed. 

A former staff psychologist at Eddie Warrior went public with allegations in 2023 that the Oklahoma Department of Corrections wasn’t adequately investigating reports of staff sexual abuse. Bacon is one of nine women the psychologist claimed were sexually assaulted or harassed, and the Department of Corrections didn’t thoroughly investigate the allegations.

The Frontier spoke with five former Department of Corrections employees who said sexual abuse is prevalent, and the agency turns a blind eye to allegations. The agency denied open records requests, stating employee files and documents related to prison rape were confidential.

Records the agency would release showed officers at Eddie Warrior resigned and the Department of Corrections rarely forwarded criminal charges to the local district attorney’s office between 2018 and 2022.

Corrections officials investigated at least 32 incidents of sexual abuse or misconduct between prisoners and staff between 2018 and 2022 at Eddie Warrior, according to records released by the agency. In most cases, investigators found inappropriate relationships between prisoners and staff, but no physical contact that could be criminally charged.  

Two cases resulted in filed charges and the District Attorney declined prosecution for one case, according to information the Department of Corrections provided.

An agency spokesperson said the department has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual violence and harassment and investigates every allegation thoroughly. 

“We cannot prevent employees from resigning from this agency under any circumstances; however, criminal investigations do not stop when an employee resigns,” Kay Thompson, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections said in a statement to The Frontier. 

Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003 to protect people in jails and prisons from sexual abuse. The law created national standards to reduce prison sexual assault. But the only penalty for states that don’t comply is a 5% reduction in any prison-related federal grants.

If Department of Corrections investigators determine an employee engaged in sexual acts with a prisoner, they are required to refer all substantiated allegations to the local district attorney’s office to file criminal charges.

But allegations can be hard to verify and many cases of prisoner sexual abuse go unprosecuted, according to experts.

District Attorney Adam Panter, whose district includes Lincoln and Pottawatomie counties, has prosecuted sexual assault cases at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud. He said they can be challenging cases because of credibility concerns with victims. It can further complicate things if the sexual acts could be perceived as consensual. 

No one deserves to get sexually assaulted, even if they have been convicted of a crime, Panter said. 

“People still have constitutional rights,” he said. “They have to be treated respectfully no matter what they’ve been accused of or what they’ve been convicted of.” 

The biggest hurdle to filing criminal charges is under-reporting, Panter said. Sexual assault often only gets reported by other prisoners who have seen or heard something. Victims frequently fear reprisal from other prisoners and staff. 

Reporting fears

Department of Corrections policy prohibits prison staff from retaliating against those who report abuse. But Bacon says when she reported the instructor, staff didn’t believe her and fired her from her prison job. 

“We do not retaliate against inmates or staff for reporting PREA incidents and, per policy, monitor them for 90 days post reporting to ensure that does not happen,” an agency spokesperson said. 

The Department of Corrections spokesperson told The Frontier that Bacon’s firing was unrelated to her reporting the abuse. But Bacon’s prison disciplinary records show no record of misconduct. 

Another former work supervisor wrote a letter in 2019 to a judge praising Bacon and described her as a “staple” employee.

Bacon felt like staff were hostile toward her after reporting her boss and she told a mental health worker at the prison that she felt like she couldn’t trust anyone anymore.

“I feel like the staff here is out to get me. I don’t feel safe here, and I don’t like being here,” Bacon said in August 2021, according to her therapy notes from the prison. 

Another former prisoner who worked for the same CareerTech instructor at Eddie Warrior said he also made sexual remarks to her but never touched her inappropriately. She said she never reported the sexual comments because there was a history of prisoners losing their jobs at the prison if they reported abuse. 

She asked to remain anonymous after her release from prison. 

Whitney Louis, a former Department of Corrections psychologist, told prison investigators in July 2022 that prison administrators at Eddie Warrior weren’t following up with prisoners who reported sexual assault, according to copies of emails she provided to The Frontier. 

Some allegations involved women who had willingly had sex with prison staff and other women accused officers of groping them, pulling open a shower curtain and pressuring them for sex. 

The Department of Corrections said in response that it fully investigated all allegations of sexual misconduct. Some alleged victims denied the claims, so the agency did not advance the investigations further. 

The Department of Corrections fired Louis six months after she made the complaint. Louis said she felt compelled to report allegations of sexual abuse by Eddie Warrior staff, who hold power over every aspect of prisoners’ lives, from when they get to take showers to when they get time off their sentence. Past trauma and an imbalance of power can make it difficult for prisoners to reject a staff member’s sexual advances or report abuse, Louis said.

 “They have all the power over those women, to where those women feel like they are an object, and they feel like they have to survive,” Louis said.

Two administrative law judges later ordered the Department of Corrections to rehire Louis. The agency has appealed the ruling, and the case is still pending.

The Frontier reached out to alleged victims that Louis named, some of whom are still in prison. Two women said they feared retaliation from prison officials for speaking out. 

Rep. Justin Humphrey, R-Lane, later asked the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office to investigate Louis’ claims. The investigation found that prison officials adequately investigated reports of sexual abuse, according to the Attorney General’s Office.

Louis and Bacon both said no one from the Attorney General’s office ever contacted them. 

Investigators from the Attorney General’s office didn’t interview any of the alleged victims or investigate their abuse claims but spoke to prison staff and investigators. A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said the agency didn’t look into the validity of the underlying allegations of sexual assault because Humphrey didn’t ask for that kind of investigation. 

”Our office was asked to investigate whether the Department of Corrections conducted adequate investigations and we determined that they did, ” Leslie Berger, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, wrote in an email.

Humphrey told The Frontier he disagreed with the Attorney General Office findings.

Letters and lacy underwear 

Eddie Warrior administrators didn’t immediately request an investigation when allegations emerged that an assistant warden was in a sexual relationship with a prisoner in 2019, according to testimony in a federal lawsuit. Failing to immediately report sexual abuse allegations violates the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Former Deputy Warden Christopher RedEagle manipulated the women’s prison work schedule so he could meet with her, the victim later claimed in a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections and prison officials. RedEagle also smuggled lacy underwear into the prison for her to wear so he could later sniff them, the lawsuit claimed.

The prison warden, didn’t immediately report the allegation of abuse to a regional office, which would have triggered a formal investigation, a Department of Corrections investigator said in court testimony. The warden later told the investigator that she didn’t initially report the incident because she forgot.

A teacher at the prison first reported RedEagle after hearing a rumor from a prisoner. But prison officials didn’t investigate further after the prisoner who reported the rumor couldn’t provide any details and the victim denied the allegations. Another prisoner later reported RedEagle to two mental health workers, prompting a formal investigation, according to court records. 

A Department of Corrections investigator later found panties, photographs and love letters RedEagle wrote to the woman inside a safe at his home, according to court testimony.

The victim said in a deposition that she was pressured into groping sessions with RedEagle in a property room at the prison and that two prison employees directed her to write a statement denying anything inappropriate had happened. 

RedEagle resigned and was charged in state court with sexual battery and bringing contraband into a prison. But the charges were later dropped because of jurisdictional issues and never refiled in federal court. 

The Department of Corrections “verbally counseled” the warden, but she kept her job, an agency spokesperson said.

Federal law requires disciplinary action for staff who don’t report sexual abuse allegations. Consequences can include termination in some situations, said Joshua Delaney, who conducts audits at prisons for compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. 

The warden retired from the agency in 2021. The Frontier couldn’t reach the warden for comment. She didn’t respond to calls or texts.

The court dismissed the prison warden from the victim’s lawsuit because the judge determined the victim didn’t follow the proper grievance procedure. It was reasonable for the warden not to request a formal investigation after the victim initially denied there was any inappropriate relationship, the judge found. Prison guards also searched the victim’s belongings and did not find any lacy underwear.   

The Department of Corrections and other prison officials were all eventually dismissed from the case and the judge ordered RedEagle to pay the victim $6,000. RedEagle didn’t respond to The Frontier’s request for comment via social media, calling, texting or written letters.

Prison audits don’t tell the whole story, experts say 

Steven Harpe, the executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, told state lawmakers at the 2023 hearing on prison sexual assault that a state-contracted auditor considered Oklahoma one of the top states for meeting federal anti-rape standards. 

“The federal government comes in and does PREA investigations on us all the time — PREA audits. They list Oklahoma today as one of the gold standards for federal PREA audits,” Harpe said. 

But the auditor says he never said that. 

Federal rules require Prison Rape Elimination Act auditors to stay objective and impartial. It would violate the rules to make any such claims, Patrick Zirpoli told The Frontier in an email in March 2024. 

“I made no such comment, nor have I had any conversations with anyone in my role as a PREA auditor where I made this comment,” he wrote.

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Zirpoli declined to answer additional questions from The Frontier. 

In an email to The Frontier in July, Thompson wrote Zirpoli told the agency Oklahoma is the “gold standard” in two separate phone calls with agency leaders. But Thompson said the agency didn’t have documentation to show the phone calls happened.  

The Department of Corrections has never failed a prison rape audit since auditing began in 2014. In most years, the agency exceeded the standards.

But a prison advocate said in a U.S. Senate hearing in September 2024 that passing audits don’t prove the lack of sexual abuse and misconduct but show the agency has policies that comply with the national standards. 

Facilities can comply with all the standards and have the correct policies and still have rampant sexual abuse, said Julie Abbate, an advocacy director with Just Detention International, a national organization that advocates to end sexual abuse in detention. 

“PREA audit reports are not consistently reliable. Many audit reports have been superficial and fail to provide meaningful information about whether a facility is complying with the PREA Standards,” Abbate wrote to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee hearing on sexual abuse in prison in September 2024. “Still other audits have reached clearly erroneous conclusions regarding PREA compliance, and facilities rarely fail PREA audits.

Low reporting is a red flag in a state with a large prison population like Oklahoma, said Brenda V. Smith, a professor of law at American University, who helped draft national standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. 

Oklahoma prisons housed about 21,000 people at the end of 2023, but there were only 43 reports of staff sexual misconduct and 51 reports of staff sexual harassment statewide during that time. The Department of Corrections substantiated just 9 staff sexual misconduct reports that year according to agency numbers. 

Zirpoli ended his contract with the Department of Corrections in 2024, but the agency won’t say why. The Department of Corrections declined to release the letter and date when Zirpoli ended his contract. Thompson said the letter was confidential because it included information about the audits and sexual abuse.

Dr. Joey Senat, a journalism professor and open records expert at Oklahoma State University, told The Frontier the records should be available if the agency released other documents from the auditor.

After prison, a new beginning

A mother of three, Bacon was struggling with addiction to prescribed pills before she went to prison. In 2009, authorities charged her with child neglect after she left two of her children unattended in her car while at a garage sale in Ada. 

In 2011, she was charged with burglary after stealing jewelry from a garage sale while getting her tire changed. Bacon was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 after she was kicked out of Drug Court in Pontotoc County for missing meetings, failing drug tests and other rule violations. 

Bacon said prison programs and classes were important to her release because it helped shape her into who she is now. She learned she wasn’t alone and many women in prison struggled like she had. . While in prison, she and another prisoner developed a plan to start a transitional living program in Marshall County. She’s been working to launch the program since her release in November 2021, when she returned to Lake Texoma. 

“This is where our foundation is. This is our hometown,” Bacon said. “There’s no place to come home to. You just can’t come back here because there isn’t any help,” Bacon said.

She also started a successful cleaning business. 

Bacon said she’s healed herself, but the abuse she experienced in prison has taken a toll. 

She said she had to take anxiety medication because of the abuse

“They broke me,” Bacon said.