A group of 28 women will never forget what happened on October 24, 2021, at Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana. For over two hours, a group of incarcerated men broke into their pod to sexually assault them - and may have paid this jail guard $1,000 to get the jail keys to do it.
According to the women’s lawsuits, David Lowe was paid off to allow the men to grope, threaten, and rape them, and despite emergency buttons and cameras, no one came to help.
Jail officials even PUNISHED the women for reporting what happened, revoking “privileges” and confiscating their personal items. And after all this, some of them are STILL behind bars, terrified of another attack!
Lowe claimed he got set up. But regardless, all of the moving pieces of this situation speak to the brutal reality of incarcerated women.
What kind of system would allow this to happen?
Women are 30x more likely to be raped when incarcerated. Worse, 94% of incarcerated women may report sexual or physical abuse BEFORE imprisonment. And the incarceration rate for Black women specifically? It’s increased by 800% since 1986.
The prison system is a factory for sexual violence that needs to be abolished. Abolition means dismantling prisons and creating a world where sexual abuse is thoroughly unacceptable - behind and beyond prison walls.