The following contains descriptions of sexual assault of women in prisons.
In 2015, a woman incarcerated at SCI-Muncy, a women’s state prison in central Pennsylvania, spoke out about multiple instances of a prison doctor raping her. In the first instance, Donald James Stone, who had worked at Muncy for over a decade, grabbed her “by her arm and pushed her against the wall,” according to her testimony to police and as reported by The Luminary. After the third assault, the survivor requested pregnancy tests and to test for sexually transmitted diseases.
In 2020, former prisoner Josie McCormick won a settlement against a correctional officer (CO) at Muncy for repeated instances of sexual advances in 2015 and 2016, as reported by the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. The rapist CO, Matthew Allabach, exposed himself to McCormick, locked her in a room after she refused to disrobe for him, and sexually assaulted her.
In 2021, serial abuser Brian T. Scott was charged with institutional sexual assault for crimes against at least five women at Muncy. He passed mail and other items between prisoners in exchange for sexual favors. “He’s very flirty and tries to be your friend,” one woman testified in an affidavit against Scott, reported by NorthcentralPA.com. Another woman testified that Scott approached her with his pants unzipped and asked her to touch him.
And in April 2025, a woman named Miranda Barbour detailed in a lawsuit how abusive staff at Muncy commit violence against women with impunity. “A lot of the staff at SCI-Muncy think sexual abuse is a joke,” she wrote in a press release. “In the past, I’ve been afraid to say anything when I’ve been hurt. I kept quiet as a mouse. But I realized that nothing will ever change if I don’t say something and I will never be safe.” For several months in 2023, her parole agent stalked, harassed, and sexually assaulted her, demanding sex from her almost every day.
We first learned about the horrors at SCI-Muncy from a former staff member named Devon, who faced retaliation for speaking out against abusive staff at the prison. “I’ve been desperately trying to figure out a way to address/draw attention to what has been happening to a women’s prison on the east coast,” they wrote us. “So much has been covered up, what makes it to the news is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Over hours-long conversations, we learned from Devon how deep the iceberg sinks: Abusive correctional officers who leverage their power against prisoners unchecked; prison officials who wield reform programs to perpetuate sexual assault in prison; and a network of advocacy groups, lawyers, judges, and officials in the prison town who largely ignore and even play an active role in perpetrating systematic sexual abuse at Muncy.
SCI-Muncy holds nearly 1,100 prisoners, including dozens with life sentences. Farm fields, silos, and forest surround the Muncy compound, keeping the prison far out of sight of the cities and suburbs where prisoners come from. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) website boasts a long list of programs and services for prisoners, including education programs, vocational training, and a litany of “health and wellness” activities. In reality, sexual assault and harassment are pervasive. Women face constant physical threats, high rates of suicide and mental illness, and on top of this, cruel and well-documented medical neglect.
Devon told us about how at one housing unit in Muncy, a clique of prison staff was notorious for excessive force against prisoners, using abusive and vulgar language, and retaliating against anyone who threatened their setup. Within the building, they referred to J-Unit as “the Jungle,” where rapist COs harassed and assaulted women in their cells and in spots they knew surveillance cameras didn’t cover. Women prisoners would file high numbers of complaints and grievances, to no end. The depraved pigs stalking these hallways enforced strict silence among concerned staff members and had free reign to get away with nearly anything. This unit has hardly been the only one where women face threats to their safety from prison staff.
In Devon’s own experience, a correctional officer harassed them repeatedly starting in 2019. They reported the incidents to supervisors a few months later after initially trying to handle it on their own. “I was afraid of him escalating and posing a greater danger due to his existing threats and actions,” they told us.
After Devon’s report, this CO, who openly bragged about having sexual relations with staff, made physical and verbal threats against Devon and threatened to destroy their career. In the face of these threats, Devon chose not to back down from pursuing recourse against him. The DOC ultimately fired Devon in 2021 for violating the prison’s code of ethics, and the prison took no action to reprimand the abusive CO. Muncy’s true code of ethics is clear: allow staff to abuse prisoners, promote the most violent abusers, and retaliate against anyone who dares to speak out.
How PREA Has Enabled, Not Eliminated, Prison Rape
In 2003, George W. Bush signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) into law with significant bipartisan support. Previously, in 1998, members of Congress had attempted to pass similar legislation as part of the Violence Against Women Act, but lawmakers had stripped it from the bill. Landmark reports from Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1996 and 2001 exposed the crisis of sexual assault in state prisons, generating widespread support among advocacy organizations for reform through legislation. Thousands of incarcerated people wrote to Prison Legal News detailing their own cases of abuse and torture.
According to law professor Brenda V. Smith, the sudden swing in congressional support for PREA came with the bill’s shift in focus from staff-on-inmate sexual abuse in women’s prisons, to instead highlight inmate-on-inmate assault cases in men’s prisons. Conservative Christian organizations like The Hudson Institute fixated on homosexual sex in men’s prisons, and so lent their support to PREA’s passage alongside liberal groups like HRW and Stop Prisoner Rape. In other words, when the bill was about ending the sexual abuse of women prisoners, Congress struck it down, but once there was testimony from white male survivors of homosexual assault perpetrated by other prisoners, lawmakers flocked to support PREA.
PREA took years to implement in many states, including in Pennsylvania, which didn’t formally implement the bill’s mandates for reporting and staff training until 2012. At SCI-Muncy, prison rape has not been eliminated, or even reduced, following PREA implementation. In 2015, Muncy’s PREA audit reported an increase of allegations against staff to 55, a 140% increase from 23 allegations in 2013. Former Corrections Department Secretary John Wetzel said of the increase, “At this point, I believe it is a blip, not a trend. I hope it is not the new normal.”
Prison rape has always been normal at Muncy, and it still is. In Muncy’s 2024 PREA audit, people incarcerated there filed 93 reports of sexual abuse and harassment against staff. The same audit indicated Muncy met 39 PREA standards in the period reviewed, with zero standards not met. Across Pennsylvania state prisons, and in prisons throughout the country, auditors check boxes every year to confirm compliance in reports that are hundreds of pages long. This is standard bourgeois state bureaucracy that uses pencil-pushing and stacks of reports to sanitize and perpetuate institutional oppression among prison staff that amounts to sex trafficking. These staff rarely face any real accountability. For those who do, it often only comes after criminal charges and media coverage of abuses, which distorts the regularity of such cases as regrettable misconduct from individuals.
Denial of abuse and victim-blaming is also rampant as state-wide reports of staff abuse have skyrocketed. In 2013, a PA DOC report indicated that incarcerated people filed 122 allegations of staff sexual misconduct with the DOC. By 2018, the number of reports was 766. DOC investigations have “substantiated” just 2.5% of over 5,300 cases since 2013. This is also just the official count of reports that victims of abuse have filed — there are undoubtedly thousands of more instances of assault and harassment that have gone unreported, since reports can invite retaliation and further harassment. If a prisoner’s PREA report has a 2.5% chance of being deemed legitimate, let alone leading to actual consequences for abusive staff, why invite the risks?
Devon described how PREA implementation has enabled abuse at Muncy. Through staff trainings, predatory staff learn how they can leverage their positions to commit and cover up abuse against prisoners. They learn what signs of abuse auditors and staff are on the lookout for. Abusers piece together, “here’s the kind of potential victim who you can get away with abusing,” Devon told us.
There used to be a PREA hotline at the prison, but the DOC claimed people incarcerated at Muncy were misusing it. PREA enforcement officers themselves had track records of harassing and abusing women at Muncy, both staff and prisoners. Devon recounted how staff even received instructions from prison administration to cover up abuse, including by rewriting incident reports. These reports were often “kicked back” to staff that wrote them with instructions to paint the actions of abusers as justified, or to scrub details that implicated them. “Basically, you were encouraged to lie,” Devon told us.
The insidious nature of prison reforms like PREA is how they create the illusion of progress, when in reality the injustices we’re told they will eliminate continue unimpeded. Concerned people within the prison system, who try to pursue real accountability for abusers, face immediate retaliation, including threatening letters, stalking, harassment at work, and being fired. Every supposed accountability measure funnels back to the DOC, the agency responsible for the abuses in the first place. It’s a joke for anyone to expect the DOC to police itself, when the agency’s highest-ranking officials are full participants in covering up prison rape.
The Confines of Lawsuits, Reforms, and Leftist Organizing
PREA is an important example of how chasing reforms as ends in themselves, rather than attacking the capitalist system responsible for injustice and oppression, is always a losing strategy. In the town of Muncy, local prison advocacy organizations and legal firms have failed to attack the roots of systematic abuse at the prison, limiting themselves to fighting individual cases of abuse, if they even do that.
After decades of widespread abuse against women at Muncy, the only attempts to intervene in the abuse have come in the forms of civil lawsuits on behalf of individuals and groups of prisoners (and even those are uncommon). These efforts can at best win financial recompense for survivors, but stopping the rapists who go clock in to work at Muncy every week has never been on the table. There’s nothing wrong with survivors choosing to bring lawsuits against their abusers, but it’s crucial to recognize how common it is for the necessary political battles against these horrific injustices to get completely subsumed to legal battles that take years to resolve and only involve a tiny fraction of all the people who deserve justice. We’ve heard of numerous cases of families facing orders from lawyers to avoid speaking out or protesting after their loved ones have been brutalized by the police or correctional officers because it could have a negative impact on their civil suit. This is how the “common sense” option of filing civil lawsuits for victims of police and prison brutality who want to fight for justice not only fails to deliver that justice, but actually muzzles the most fiery and dedicated fighters against police brutality and mass incarceration.
Beyond legal struggles, Devon told us how local nonprofit organizations have seemingly steered clear of cases of abuse at Muncy, instead focusing advocacy efforts around other concerns like food quality and visitation rights. It’s not that fighting for any form of better treatment for incarcerated people is wrong, it’s that these nonprofits are conspicuously ignoring the worst crimes against people imprisoned in Muncy in order to fight for secondary goals that are less antagonistic toward the system.
Across the country, well-funded prison reform nonprofits have annual budgets in the millions and programs that pose no threat to corrections departments. Cushy careers for nonprofit executives come with six-figure salaries and social clout at petty-bourgeois cocktail parties and fundraising events. Check out the compensation reports in tax filings for organizations like Prison Policy Initiative, The Sentencing Project, and Common Justice to see what we’re talking about.
On the periphery of the reform efforts are Leftist organizations, which vary in size and actual physical presence outside of social media. The town of Muncy has limited, if any, Leftist organizing, which is often the case in deindustrialized towns. But in larger cities, Leftist organizations have a significant presence and dominate activist efforts surrounding mass incarceration and prison abuse. These organizations profess to fight for prison abolition, an idea we have consistently found has no resonance among the masses, and is one that generates backwards formulations like the idea that we shouldn’t demand killer cops be imprisoned.
In New York City, abolitionist organizations have led ongoing campaigns to close Rikers Island Correctional Facility, despite the fact that this is exactly what the city government already had in mind in the midst of its plans to build several new jails throughout the city. Most damning is how abolitionist organizations refuse to go to the masses and wage struggles alongside them to take on the prison system, choosing instead to spend their time in familiar, insular activist circles. In Devon’s case, they reached out to multiple Leftist organizations who all ghosted them after learning they had worked at the prison, likely because their role as a former staff member violated the purity of their “abolitionist” politics that prioritize individual virtuousness over waging mass struggle, which would require confronting such contradictions head on.
These groups have no conception of the strategic importance of defection from the ruling class’s institutions. We’re not trying to change the minds of the people abusing prisoners — they are the enemy and deserve punishment. But people who work within prisons and other repressive institutions like courts, schools, and social service agencies can come to see the integral role they can play in disrupting the normal functioning of these institutions, and the need for mass organizing outside the confines of the system. By nature of how closely they witness the worst horrors of the system, they can come to this recognition and find the conviction to do something about it, no matter the risks.
With all of these reformist and Leftist organizing efforts, we have to question why we allow so much time, energy, and money to pour into campaigns that produce no results. Millions of people are languishing in jails and prisons, including thousands who are subjected to the daily torture of solitary confinement. Millions more are facing the precarity of parole, or the impossibility of finding employment and housing with a felony charge. There are thousands of cases of sexual assault in Pennsylvania state prisons since PREA was first implemented over a decade ago, and PA is just one of the US’s 50 state prison systems. The injustices only multiply, seemingly never to subside.
The ruling class initiates and props up reform efforts to channel righteous rebellion against the capitalist system into dead ends. PREA is doing exactly what it was designed to do: create the appearance of accountability against rampant abuse, while allowing it to continue out of public eye. Even this righteous veneer was too progressive for Trump’s Department of Justice as officials unilaterally cut all funding to the PREA Resource Center back in April. Other reforms that could have some real positive impacts for the masses in prison, like the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act (HALT) in New York, have also quickly come under attack by reactionary lawmakers and prison staff and get sent to the chopping block. Every reform can be unreformed.
We Need to Fight to Win
There are positive material outcomes that can result from winning reforms against things like solitary confinement, sexual abuse, or inhumane conditions. But we must think of how reforms are won. Did masses of people come together with boldness and militancy to confront their oppressors and win victories, gaining trust in each other and their own leadership capabilities in the process? Or did career activists and politicians hold some boring rallies at city hall to get a bill passed, with a police escort and some masses there as window dressing? We also need to think of what comes next after reforms are won. Do we allow reforms to be ends in themselves, or do we push further, not just to maintain those wins, but to actually end oppression and injustice for good?
In December 2024, Robert Brooks was beaten to death by COs at Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate NY. Due to unrest on Rikers Island, with gangs expressing support for Brooks, and unrest in the streets of New York City, the NY Attorney General quickly fired the COs who murdered him, and later indicted some of them. When Tyre Nichols was brutally murdered by Memphis PD in 2023, mass uprisings in Memphis and around the country resulted in the swift arrest and indictment of the cops who murdered him.
Both of these examples show that mass resistance can achieve immediate wins that far outpace the legislation that reformists spend years fighting for. In Tyre Nichols’s case, once the uprising died down and the masses took their eyes off his murderers, the state quietly acquitted them of all wrongdoing. The same is likely to happen to Robert Brooks’s killers without continued pressure. When the masses rise up against the system, they can quickly achieve victories, like forcing abusers and murderers to face actual consequences. These victories aren’t even on the table for reformist or Leftist organizations. But in order for the wins to stick once the spontaneous uprisings begin to fade, we must maintain momentum through dedicated mass organizing.
To people who insist, “you have to work within the system,” we have to insist on saying fuck that. We must instead spread resistance among the masses from cell blocks to the projects, and we must inspire those working within bourgeois state institutions to defect from the system, toward the end of revolution — the only way we can end the American Nightmare for good.
Dare to Struggle 