Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.

“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”

Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.

Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.

“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.

Taylor said nothing. 

Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”

An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience. 

But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.

One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.

Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.” 

Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.” 

“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”

By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”

Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated. 

Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.

“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”

“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said. 

A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”

With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was. 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.

But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story. 

The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault. 

“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”

Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”

But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.

“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”

Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.

“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”

When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.” 

For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF. 

Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.  

When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.  

Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected. 

But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts. 

She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along. 

It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.

Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”

Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.

Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.

But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records. 

The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.” 

By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church. 

Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know. 

Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.

Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.

Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.” 

Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.” 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.

There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was. 

Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone. 

Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”

Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”

In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case. 

“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.” 

If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”

“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”

Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.

Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.

“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”

Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.

Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.

Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.

Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.

Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.

In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.

In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.

We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.

There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.

The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources. 

Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.

Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.

Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse. 

The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report. 

“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”

But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”

Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”

Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”

After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.

Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair. 

She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”

In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.” 

Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer. 

Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer. 

Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.  

“Dear dad,

im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”

One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs. 

The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging. 

She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar. 

Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.

“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”

As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box. 

Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.

Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.

After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.

Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it? 

She dialed 911.

Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.

“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”

At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.

Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”

Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this. 

“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”

Today, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”

The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.

“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”

Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.” 

The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.

In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop. 

Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.

In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”

The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.

“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”

Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.   

Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)

Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.

In a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s "thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.” 

But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month. 

“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.

The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.” 

Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.

Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit. 

Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused. 

For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”

Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by. 

Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis.

Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.

“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”

Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.

Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.

“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.

Taylor said nothing. 

Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”

An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience. 

But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.

One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.

Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.” 

Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.” 

“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”

By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”

Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated. 

Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.

“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”

“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said. 

A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”

With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was. 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.

But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story. 

The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault. 

“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”

Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”

But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.

“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”

Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.

“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”

When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.” 

For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF. 

Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.  

When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.  

Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected. 

But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts. 

She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along. 

It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.

Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”

Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.

Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.

But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records. 

The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.” 

By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church. 

Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know. 

Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.

Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.

Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.” 

Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.” 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.

There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was. 

Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone. 

Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”

Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”

In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case. 

“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.” 

If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”

“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”

Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.

Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.

“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”

Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.

Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.

Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.

Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.

Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.

In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.

In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.

We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.

There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.

The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources. 

Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.

Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.

Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse. 

The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report. 

“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”

But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”

Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”

Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”

After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.

Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair. 

She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”

In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.” 

Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer. 

Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer. 

Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.  

“Dear dad,

im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”

One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs. 

The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging. 

She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar. 

Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.

“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”

As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box. 

Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.

Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.

After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.

Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it? 

She dialed 911.

Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.

“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”

At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.

Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”

Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this. 

“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”

Today, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”

The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.

“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”

Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.” 

The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.

In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop. 

Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.

In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”

The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.

“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”

Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.   

Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)

Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.

In a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s "thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.” 

But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month. 

“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.

The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.” 

Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.

Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit. 

Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused. 

For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”

Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by. 

Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.

“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”

"The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report. Not once."

.@SpeakerJohnson lays out why he opposes the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General pick former Rep. Matt Gaetz. pic.twitter.com/gQbvi7LoMh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 17, 2024

As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.

Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.

When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.

Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.

The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)

But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.

“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”

"The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report. Not once."

.@SpeakerJohnson lays out why he opposes the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General pick former Rep. Matt Gaetz. pic.twitter.com/gQbvi7LoMh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 17, 2024

As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.

Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.

When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.

Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.

The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)

But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.

I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.

Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:

In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.

Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.

I know what I’m talking about.

“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.

“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.

I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.

“The good news: It’s federal.”

Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.

The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.

If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.

Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.

When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.

But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.

Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.

This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.

After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.

Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.

Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.

“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.

“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”

After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.

“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.

The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

“It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:

“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”

Where the fuck am I?

Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.

I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!

The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.

But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”

That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.

Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?

He’d have to learn.

An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.

The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.

I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

“Who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily. Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.

One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.

We have our standards.

I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:

• Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
• Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
• Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
• Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
• Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
• America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?

Now back to the story.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.

PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.

Lucky, right?

You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.

Everything in life is.

Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.

I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?

People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”

My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?

I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.

“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”

He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)

Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.

I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:

Who should I vote for?

I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.

I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.

Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:

In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.

Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.

I know what I’m talking about.

“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.

“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.

I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.

“The good news: It’s federal.”

Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.

The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.

If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.

Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.

When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.

But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.

Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.

This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.

After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.

Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.

Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.

“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.

“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”

After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.

“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.

The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

“It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:

“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”

Where the fuck am I?

Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.

I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!

The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.

But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”

That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.

Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?

He’d have to learn.

An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.

The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.

I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

“Who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily. Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.

One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.

We have our standards.

I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:

• Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
• Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
• Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
• Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
• Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
• America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?

Now back to the story.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.

PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.

Lucky, right?

You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.

Everything in life is.

Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.

I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?

People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”

My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?

I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.

“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”

He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)

Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.

I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:

Who should I vote for?

Content warning: The story discusses childhood sexual abuse.

In Polk County, Florida, where its sheriff has said his department will “go to the ends of the earth” to arrest child predators, one child victim was left wondering how she ended up on the other side of the law. 

Taylor Cadle was 12 years old when she disclosed to a trusted adult that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her since she was 9. Law enforcement was quick to respond, and almost just as quick to suspect that Taylor had made up the allegations. The lead detective, Melissa Turnage, began to question Taylor aggressively, even threatening her with returning to foster care if she continued with her allegations.

“I told her time and time and time and time again that I am not the liar here,” Taylor said of the detective. 

Despite Taylor’s pleas, Turnage eventually sought criminal charges against her for lying to police. 

For the Emmy-winning Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, I found hundreds of others nationwide who, like Taylor, began as alleged victims reporting sexual assaults to police, and ended up criminal suspects. My reporting uncovered shocking police missteps in several of those investigations. All of those alleged victims remain adamant that their reports were truthful. 

In a surprising development in her case, Taylor vindicated herself. With our partner PBS News Hour, I went to Polk County to meet her—and hear how she finally put her abuser in prison.

When J. Vasquez was incarcerated at Salinas Valley State Prison in California, he worked as a porter—sweeping, mopping, and taking out the trash. It paid less than 15 cents per hour and, as the “third watch” porter, he worked from 2 to 9 p.m. The timing of his shift often coincided with prison programming, which was a source of continual frustration for Vasquez. He had entered prison at 19 and was looking to “take accountability for [his] life.” But he was not allowed to take time off his job to attend classes. When a group of crime survivors came to the prison to speak with incarcerated people, Vasquez told me, “I thought about just putting down that broom and going anyways.” But he feared that if he refused to work, it could result in a disciplinary violation, which would eventually appear on his parole application. 

California’s penal code requires that most incarcerated people work while they are in prison, and if they refuse to do so, they can be disciplined—ranging from losing access to phone calls to being placed in solitary confinement. This is because California’s state constitution has one caveat to its ban on involuntary servitude: It is allowed “to punish crime.” Proposition 6 will give California voters an opportunity to decide whether to remove this exception from the constitution. 

For advocates of Prop 6, the exception in the state constitution is a clear, and troubling, remnant of slavery. “The practice of involuntary servitude is just another name for slavery in our California prisons and jails,” Carmen-Nicole Cox, an attorney at ACLU California Action, told Mother Jones.

“The practice of involuntary servitude is just another name for slavery in our California prisons and jails.”

But the movement to abolish involuntary servitude has not been as straightforward as one might imagine in California, and advocates face an uphill battle. A statewide poll conducted in early September found that 50 percent of voters said they would vote against the proposition, while 46 percent would vote for it.

Of the 95,600 people incarcerated in state prisons in California, around 65,000 work. This reflects the national trend: A 2022 ACLU report estimated that two out of every three people incarcerated in state and federal prisons work. In California, the majority of jobs involve the day-to-day operations of prisons: preparing food, doing laundry, or completing janitorial duties. Some jobs are unpaid, but most pay between 8 and 37 cents per hour.

Around 7,000 incarcerated people work manufacturing and service jobs—such as making license plates, processing eggs, and fabricating dentures—through the California Prison Industry Authority. Those jobs are coveted because they pay more—their range is between 35 cents and $1 per hour. Around 1,600 people work in conservation camps, where they respond to fires and other natural disasters. They’re paid between $1.45 to $3.90 per day and paid an extra $1 per hour for emergency firefighting. 

Currently, at least 15 states have constitutions that allow involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Lawmakers around the country have moved to ban forced prison labor by amending their state constitutions. In 2022, voters approved amendments in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont—joining Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska. 

In 2020, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, then a California Assembly member, introduced an early version of a ban on forced prison labor. But it failed to pass the state Senate after the California Department of Finance opposed it, writing in a report that given the broad language of the amendment, its financial impacts were largely unknown. The report warned that it would cost taxpayers around $1.6 billion to pay incarcerated workers California’s minimum wage, which was $15.50 in 2023. Plus, the report said, the measure could make the state vulnerable to potential litigation from incarcerated people. In Colorado, for instance, incarcerated people sued in 2022 because they still were forced to work despite a constitutional amendment banning involuntary servitude in prisons.

The report also pointed out the broad definition of involuntary servitude. Judges can sentence someone to community service instead of a fine or jail time—because that work is unpaid, it might also be considered involuntary servitude. 

Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer voted alongside five Republicans against the measure. After it failed, Glazer said in a statement that the issue of forced prison labor was better suited for the legislature to take up. He argued that unilaterally banning the work requirement would “undermine our rehabilitation programs” and “make prisons more difficult to manage safely.” 

This time around, a companion bill—intended to address concerns about prisoner pay—would allow the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set wages for incarcerated workers if a constitutional amendment passes. 

In January, Assembly Member Lori Wilson brought back the measure, which was included in a package of bills recommended by the California Legislative Black Caucus as part of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans.

Although the current version of the ballot measure easily moved through both the state Assembly and Senate—with the support of Glazer—many of the same concerns persisted. Glazer recently told Capital Public Radio that he is still worried about “unintended consequences” for prisons. There has been speculation that if incarcerated people refuse to work in laundry and kitchen positions, prisons will find it difficult to function. Glazer told the radio station that he had been assured that the state could still compel people to do “chores.” 

In particular, financial concerns linger. Even if incarcerated people are not paid minimum wage, the amendment may still result in higher prison operation costs. A summary prepared by the attorney general’s office cautioned that prisons might have to find “other ways of encouraging working” if incarcerated people are not disciplined for refusing to do so. This might include raising pay or offering “time credits” off a prison sentence. 

Advocates say these concerns reflect a misunderstanding of life inside prison. Vasquez, who is now a policy and legal services manager at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, said incarcerated people frequently want to work, even if only to get out of their cells. There also are some “fringe benefits” to working, he explained. As a porter, Vasquez was able to get some spare cleaning supplies, and extra food might be available for those who work in the kitchen. And given that there are positions available for only about two-thirds of incarcerated people, there are sometimes waiting lists for jobs. 

Moreover, advocates say it is misguided to calculate the cost benefit of Prop 6 only in terms of the burden on taxpayers. Brandon Sturdivant, the campaign manager for Prop 6, says eliminating forced prison labor will give incarcerated people the opportunity to pursue rehabilitation and better prepare themselves to return to their communities. Sturdivant said his father spent 12 years in prison, where he spent time making license plates instead of “getting the tools he needed to come out and be a father and a pillar of his community.” 

Proponents of Prop 6 also point out that education and rehabilitation programs have been found to reduce recidivism. And this has its own economic benefit—it now costs $132,860 per year to incarcerate someone in California. To Sturdivant, the biggest hurdle in passing Prop 6 is reaching and educating voters, which the coalition of organizations supporting the ballot initiative has been attempting to address through phone banks. When talking to voters, they try to dispel misconceptions and frame the issue in personal, humanitarian terms. Esteban Núñez, a formerly incarcerated consultant and strategist, said that fundamentally, Prop 6 presents voters with a “moral issue” and a chance to “restore dignity to those inside.” 

Paris Alexander had been in a destructive relationship for over a decade, learning to tolerate the intolerable even as the abuse progressed—first mental and emotional torment, then physical and sexual torture. Like many survivors, Alexander, who is nonbinary, stayed in the relationship hoping that it would improve. “We stick it out,” they said, “because we think that they’re going to change and come to their senses.” 

Then, one day in September 2020, Alexander’s male partner beat them up and dragged them outside their Providence, Rhode Island, home by their hair. Wandering their neighborhood, covered in blood and desperate to flee, Alexander felt haunted by the years of forced isolation: “I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to,” they recall. A Google search on their phone led them to Sojourner House, which runs the state’s only shelter specifically for LGBTQ victims of intimate partner violence. Almost miraculously, there was some space. Finally, Alexander had caught a break. 

At the shelter, known as RISE, Alexander focused on taking “baby steps” toward independence. They got a library card. They started individual therapy. They joined a weekly virtual LGBTQ support group, where they heard terms like “nonbinary,” “gender-queer,” and “gender fluid” for the first time. Back then, Alexander identified as a transgender woman and felt pressured to “look female as much as possible.” The support group taught them, “You don’t have to be [male or female]—you can just simply be who you are, and that’s okay.” 

RISE is one of three shelters operated by Sojourner House, named for the 19th-century slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was also an ardent advocate for women’s rights. Since its founding in 1976, the organization has served more than 60,000 people—1,800 last year alone. A small but critical part of this past year’s $7.4 million budget comes from the federal Crime Victims Fund, a pot of money created by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act, also known as VOCA. Across the country, VOCA helps pay for the hotlines survivors call in crisis, the shelters they flee to, and the advocates who accompany them to court and help them heal.

VOCA-supported programs helped almost 8 million people in fiscal year 2022–2023, funding nearly 3 million shelter beds and 2.3 million crisis-hotline calls, according to the Department of Justice. Those services have become more critical since the pandemic, as rates of intimate partner violence have soared, a housing crisis has made it even harder for survivors to flee, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given abusers another way to threaten pregnant survivors. But even as the need is growing, VOCA funding has been plummeting—and Congress has failed to act on what many advocates say may be the best hope for a legislative fix.

The current funding crisis is rooted in changes in DOJ policy that date back years. The Crime Victims Fund gets most of its money from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, according to the department. Those fees and fines have been falling as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements, which allow defendants more time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government. As a result, deposits into the pot shrank from a high of $6.6 billion in 2017 to $1.39 billion in fiscal year 2023. (Because of congressional caps, the actual amount of money disbursed is even lower.) These declines have trickled down to state agencies—which receive VOCA funds based on their state’s population size—and then to eligible programs. Rhode Island, which has one of the smallest populations, has seen a 54 percent drop in VOCA funds since 2017, to $2.9 million in the last fiscal year. California, the most populous state, went from receiving $218.9 million in VOCA funds in 2017 to $87 million over the same period.

Most states, including California, have managed to come up with some funding to offset the federal cuts, but the money is mostly temporary—lasting a year or two max. Fourteen states, including Rhode Island, did not appropriate any money in their most recent budgets to offset the VOCA cuts, I found in my reporting. This past spring, Rhode Island lawmakers proposed $2 million in supplemental funding, but the bill died in committee.

I’ve spent four months trying to understand how these extreme VOCA cuts are affecting domestic violence programs across the United States, doing more than two dozen interviews and tracking down budget data from every state. The picture that has emerged is deeply troubling: Lifesaving services for survivors are struggling to stay afloat, and experts fear what might happen if a long-term funding solution isn’t found.

Law enforcement groups are equally worried. “Without Congressional action, victim service providers will be forced to cut critical services, and many will be forced to close,” more than 700 prosecutors wrote in an open letter to lawmakers in February. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing.” But with the November elections looming, Congress’ attention has been focused elsewhere.

The VOCA Fix Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2021, diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund—but this turned out to be inadequate. This term, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have proposed a bill to supplement VOCA with funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government. The legislation has attracted 170 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House but languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Durbin chairs. A spokesperson for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the committee’s highest-ranking Republican, did not respond to questions about whether the bill will get a hearing. Congress has also punted on Biden’s proposal for a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund for next year. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.”

At a virtual event this week commemorating the 40th anniversary of VOCA, the mood was less than celebratory. “I’m hearing about programs shutting down, positions being cut, victim services being impacted,” Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, told more than 250 attendees. To Vanessa Volz, Sojourner House’s president and CEO, the funding crisis illuminates a harsh reality: “Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.” 

Domestic violence hotlines like the one that led Paris Alexander to Sojourner House are among the most critical services that VOCA funds. Because hotlines are the point of entry to a support system that can mean the difference between life and death, slashed budgets can be especially disastrous. Rhode Island’s statewide 24/7 helpline has historically relied almost entirely on VOCA funding—about $118,000 last year, less than half what it received in 2019. More cuts would likely hit the helpline’s overnight shifts hardest. For people who are abused in the dead of night, or who have a small window to seek help while their abusers are sleeping or working, this could be catastrophic.

The Rhode Island helpline routinely gets calls from people in Massachusetts and Connecticut who can’t access services in their own areas—even though both of those states, unlike Rhode Island, have appropriated supplemental funds to offset VOCA cuts. Connecticut’s additional money came from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, which disappears at the end of this year. Without a new infusion of money, the statewide domestic violence hotline, Safe Connect—which is 100 percent funded by VOCA—will have to drastically cut services, lay off advocates, or even shut down, says Meghan Scanlon, president and CEO of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which staffs the hotline. “The reality is, as much as we are advocates who don’t want to say ‘no,’ at some point, we’re gonna have to,” she laments. “And that doesn’t feel great.” 

Some of the greatest effects are likely to be felt in programs that serve transgender clients and undocumented immigrants, such as Sojourner House’s RISE shelter and THEIA Project, which supports victims of human trafficking. Hot-button politics around LGBTQ+ and immigrant clienteles make such programs especially difficult to fundraise for, Volz says.

Yet as Alexander’s story shows, immigrant survivors are particularly vulnerable to abuse from partners who exploit their status as another form of control. Despite their strong New England accent that makes them sound as if they had been born and raised in Boston, Alexander originally hails from São Miguel, a lush island in the Azores archipelago of Portugal. When they were 5 years old, they arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with their parents—but without documentation. Their mother secured US citizenship when Alexander was a teenager—a process that automatically made them a citizen, too. But after getting kicked out of the house at 16, and no parental contact over the years, Alexander lacked both identification and proof of their citizenship status. “I became like a ghost,” they recall. In their 20s, they told me, essentially undocumented, they dropped out of cosmetology school and the regular labor force and drifted into sex work.

Sojourner House didn’t just get Alexander out of an abusive relationship. Its VOCA-funded team of immigration advocates helped Alexander secure identification, represented them in immigration proceedings, and prepped them for their citizenship test—a process that took over a year; in March 2022, Alexander was officially sworn in as a US citizen. “We’re really at risk of not being able to continue providing these services at the same level,” Volz notes.

In some places, cuts affecting VOCA-funded legal advocacy services have already been devastating. Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, Kentucky, used to have advocates in her courtroom every Tuesday, the day she hears domestic violence cases involving people seeking emergency protective orders against their abusers. The advocates—employed by the statewide Center for Women and Families—would bring survivors into a private room after their hearing and explain a new set of risks: “Once the order is entered, it’s really the most dangerous time,” Santry told me. “The perpetrator is losing that control, and that’s when the lethality red flags are elevated.” Recently in Hardin County, 60 miles from Louisville, a man fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and her mother near the courthouse where they had a hearing about an emergency protective order against him. (He also killed himself.)

In Santry’s courtroom, the advocates would help survivors come up with practical strategies to safeguard themselves and their families: keep gas in their cars, charge up their phones, pack emergency bags in case they had to flee. Their in-person presence was essential, says Elizabeth Martin, the center’s president and CEO: “If you aren’t where people are, they’re not necessarily going to reach out to you.”

But over time, the number of advocates in Santry’s courtroom dwindled, and since August 2021, they’ve been completely gone. With VOCA funding for the center plummeting more than 60 percent since 2019, to just over $437,000 last year, Martin was forced to cut her domestic violence staff in half and remove advocates from courtrooms. Now, a court staffer hands out pamphlets and business cards to survivors bearing the center’s name, website, and phone number. Martin only sends an advocate if a survivor asks for one. “They don’t know what they don’t know,” Martin says. “The contact, that personal touch, that involvement has been watered down significantly.”

Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem, this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

Domestic violence groups were grateful when Kentucky legislators allocated $7.1 million in their latest budget to offset VOCA cuts, but say the one-time grant isn’t enough. Without advocates to provide support, “the consequence may be death,” Santry says. In 2020, Kentucky ranked 10th in the nation for domestic violence homicides, according to the Violence Policy Center, with men murdering 46 women across the state. Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem,” Martin says, “this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

California is another state where advocates say lawmakers haven’t done enough to address a steep decline in VOCA funds—down 60 percent since fiscal year 2017. Now domestic violence organizations there are facing a new crisis as they grapple with the repercussions of this summer’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness.

After a months-long advocacy campaign that drew the support of actress Angelina Jolie, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office scrounged up $103 million in June to supplement the $87 million in federal VOCA funds. That one-year reprieve helped to avert what could have been a catastrophe for VOCA-funded organizations. But then in July, Newsom ordered state agencies to clear out homeless encampments following the Grants Pass ruling. Advocates warned that the decision could be devastating for survivors of intimate partner violence, who struggle to access shelter and housing nationwide—and especially in California, which has the largest population of unhoused people in the United States.

“The reality before [Newsom’s] executive order was that there were not enough DV-specific shelter beds, and just in general, there’s not enough emergency shelter beds,” says Jennifer Willover, housing policy analyst at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. Since Newsom’s mandate, Willover adds, domestic violence programs across the state have reported increased calls to their hotlines requesting shelter. In some parts of the state, advocates report that they are spending more time visiting encampments and informing unhoused people of domestic violence-specific services they offer, Willover says. (Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

Experts see the situation there as a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide: As the National Network to End Domestic Violence and other advocacy groups said after the Grants Pass ruling, “Gender-based violence is a cause and consequence of homelessness, and this ruling will further trap people who are homeless, including survivors, in cycles of poverty and housing insecurity.”

In a report about homelessness in the state published in January by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, nearly one-fifth of cisgender women surveyed said they had experienced intimate partner violence in the six months prior to homelessness, and 40 percent said violence was a reason for leaving their last housing. Many were homeless because of the far-reaching effects of domestic abuse: living in isolation from family and friends and unable to work, their financial resources controlled by their abusers, resulted in intractable poor credit and records of eviction. “There’s a lack of awareness, still, of the fact that there is that intersection of domestic violence and homelessness,” says Leticia Campos, chief programs officer at the Marjaree Mason Center, which serves victims of domestic violence in Fresno County, where the population tops 1 million and the poverty rate is well over the national average. 

Marjaree Mason—established in 1979 and named after a 36-year-old woman murdered by her ex-boyfriend, a sheriff’s deputy with the county—offers a case study of the problems facing VOCA-funded organizations in California post–Grants Pass. Fresno County has the highest number of calls to law enforcement for domestic violence per capita in California, and Marjaree Mason is the county’s only 24/7 domestic violence shelter and service provider. The Fresno City Council allocated $300,000 earlier this year to help the organization fend off the impacts of the years-long decline in VOCA funds, but staff members say they still struggle to meet the needs of survivors.

In June, I visited the VOCA-funded emergency shelter, which can accommodate 140 people. The rooms have bunk beds with colorful, patterned bedspreads, and televisions mounted on the walls, and outside there’s a playground shaded by palm trees. But even before the Supreme Court ruling, getting a bed there wasn’t easy. Empty beds are often filled within hours, Campos says; when I visited, the shelter had been at capacity for three weeks. Survivors who are turned away often have no choice but to return to their abusers. A spokesperson told me that last year, 80 percent of the organization’s clients had no income of their own, and of the ones who did, two-thirds made under $15,000. 

After Newsom issued his executive order, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance making “unlawful camping” a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. The city of Fresno passed a ban that was even more aggressive: a $1,000 fine and a year behind bars, which took effect in late September. The mayor has said that arrests will be limited to “habitual offenders” and that people will first be offered supportive services, though it’s unclear whether those include referrals for domestic violence treatment.

Staff at Marjaree Mason saw an impact within days of Newsom’s executive order, when the sheriff’s office dropped off an unhoused woman and two children at the drop-in center in the middle of the night after clearing an encampment, according to Joseph Hickman, the center’s interim crisis response manager. “It was very eye-opening to see that it happened that quickly,” Hickman says. “It definitely kind of lit a fire under us.”

The problem, as Campos says, is this: “What should we do when we’re at capacity? Where should we send victims of domestic violence?” Laura Moreno, program manager at the Fresno County Department of Social Services, says those questions point to a broader, county-wide issue. “We don’t have enough shelter beds, period, for the number of people we have on the streets,” she told me. A federally mandated one-day census in Fresno and neighboring Madera counties in January 2023 found nearly 4,500 unhoused people, up 7 percent from the year before. A county spokesperson said outreach teams provide homeless people with relevant resources, including information about Marjaree Mason’s services.

Helping survivors find assistance elsewhere when the shelter is full is a task left to Diana Hernandez, a former 911 dispatcher who joined Marjaree Mason’s staff in September 2021. In her previous job, she told me, she hated having to hang up on callers who were clearly in need but not in the throes of an emergency. Now, as a client navigator, she can talk to survivors who call the hotline for as long as they want, providing them with emotional support and resources. But she can’t always give them what they need most, which is usually a bed.

While we were chatting in her cubicle in June, she received a hotline call from a woman who said she’d been physically assaulted by her boyfriend. She had been living in a car, and needed a safe place to stay. Marjaree Mason’s shelter was full, so Hernandez offered to call homeless shelters in the area to see if they had room. But she also cautioned that those shelters wouldn’t offer advocacy support and legal services specifically for domestic violence victims. Nor would their locations be confidential, like domestic violence shelters’ are. Add to that, most likely they would require residents to leave during the day; Marjaree Mason lets them stay. 

Hernandez gave the woman phone numbers for other local organizations that could provide services, and suggested that she change her passwords on her email and social media accounts, make sure her phone’s location-sharing feature was turned off, and call back on the hotline at any time if she wanted to talk. In such instances, “I try to exhaust my resources,” Hernandez told me after the call ended, “so I know I did everything I could.”

After seven months at RISE, Sojourner House’s LGBTQ shelter, Paris Alexander might have ended up like so many other survivors of intimate partner violence: homeless and back on the street. But because Alexander had been a victim of sex trafficking, they were eligible for assistance through another Sojourner House program offering transitional housing for survivors of human trafficking. The program paid the rent and utilities on a third-floor apartment where Alexander lived while they were sorting through their citizenship problems and unable to work. Without a Social Security number, they couldn’t apply for food stamps or government assistance. Every few weeks, Alexander recalls, a Sojourner House advocate showed up with some food—bread, peanut butter, canned beans. “And that was pretty much what I had to live off of.” 

Alexander finally secured their citizenship in March 2022 and was able to begin searching for permanent housing. Once more, Sojourner House provided vital support. Robin Greene, an advocate who had once been unhoused, also works with trafficking survivors through the organization’s THEIA Project, which includes a VOCA-funded shelter. Greene helped Alexander find an apartment and even convinced the landlord to renovate the space by replacing the floors and covering up cracks and holes in the walls. 

For Greene, ensuring her clients live in comfort is key to helping them stay on the road to recovery. Greene recalls spending time in homeless shelters that were “gross,” “vermin-ridden,” “humiliating,” and “degrading.” At the shelter for trafficking victims, she painted the walls and floors with pops of green, yellow, and purple and adorned the office space with house plants. She mows the front lawn herself. “I want it to look not like a shelter,” she told me when I visited. “I want it to look like a home.” 

Two years after Alexander moved in, their apartment—the same one that Greene helped secure—has become their “sanctuary,” where they live with their two cats, Bast and Isis. They painted the walls yellow, green, and blue; hung up their own artwork; and put some of the house plants Greene brought to life in front of the bay windows in their living room, a daily reminder of someone who helped transform their life.

According to Greene, Alexander represents “the epitome” of what Sojourner House and domestic violence organizations like it can do, if they have the vision, the people—and the funding to support survivors. “Paris was determined to just sit in their little apartment and never come out with their cats,” Greene told me, “but not now.” 

Today, Alexander volunteers with Sojourner House and spreads word of its services within the community. They also volunteer with a trans youth mentorship program, through which they meet weekly with a younger trans mentee, and they host events—including a recent makeup workshop, drawing on their cosmetology background—for trans and nonbinary young people. In November, they’ll host a virtual Friendsgiving hangout—meant to be “a safe and loving space during Thanksgiving,” they said, adding, “the holidays can be a tough time of the year for queer folks.”

Alexander knows firsthand the negative thoughts that can run rampant through survivors’ minds: “We feel like we’re not worthy. We feel like no one cares. We feel like no one understands. You don’t trust that there’s genuine empathy out there.” Empathy, though, tends to be abundant among people who support survivors of domestic violence; what’s in short supply is cash. This is partly why Alexander was eager to tell their story: They want lawmakers to know that VOCA funds have “the power and the ability” to save lives. “I wouldn’t be here today,” they told me, “if it weren’t for the Sojourner House program.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state.

This article was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund.

In early September, Peterson Harter was working the lunchtime rush in his sandwich shop on San Francisco’s Haight Street when in walked prosecutor Ryan Khojasteh, sporting slicked-back hair and circular glasses.

The year before, Harter had been punched in the face by a man who’d been urinating outside his shop. He posted a video of his black eye on Instagram, and it went viral. Khojasteh, a prosecutor who’s challenging San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins for her job in November, wanted to hear about his public safety concerns heading into the election.

“I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand.”

Harter told Khojasteh that the man who assaulted him came back to apologize after getting out of jail; he was later arrested again for assaulting someone else. “This guy actually needs mental health help,” said Harter, leaning against the counter in his apron. They began talking about the benefits of early intervention. If only “we could have helped this person way back when,” Khojasteh said.

The question of how to treat young offenders was on everyone’s mind that week. Days earlier, 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot by a 17-year-old during an attempted robbery near luxury stores in Union Square, making national news. Jenkins may try to transfer Pearsall’s shooter to adult court but hasn’t decided yet. (She’s also recommended transferring two 16-year-olds to adult court in an unrelated case.) Khojasteh says there are very few circumstances in which he’d do the same. “I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand,” he tells me. “That is the whole passion of this job.”

Khojasteh’s emphasis on early interventions is one of the ways he’s setting himself apart from Jenkins, who has taken a more punitive approach to teens after being appointed following the recall of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

San Francisco’s DA race has not gotten much attention in a presidential election year, but the results will be significant because of what Boudin’s recall represented: Observers nationally described it as evidence that famously liberal San Francisco had rejected criminal justice reforms, and that other progressive prosecutors outside California should beware a similar fate. Jenkins pledged to “restore accountability and consequences” to the city. If she loses, it could signal that voters believe the pendulum swung too far right under her leadership.

Khojasteh has welcomed endorsements from heavyweights in the progressive prosecutor world, including George Gascón in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and from a slate of local progressive politicians and community leaders. But he is young, turning 31 next month, with less money, name recognition, and establishment support than Jenkins, who is endorsed by Mayor London Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

And he will be trying to sell voters on his message about helping youthful offenders at a time when fears about violence are intensifying. Though juvenile crime has been falling for decades in San Francisco (and nationwide) to near historic lows, there’s been an uptick recently in kids arrested for serious offenses in the city. Not far from Harter’s sandwich shop, there were at least three other shootings over the past couple of years near Haight Street, a popular tourist destination; some of the gunmen were younger than 25. When Khojasteh spoke with other shopkeepers there, several said they didn’t feel safe. “The cops sadly don’t do anything,” an employee at a cafe told him.

As I tagged along with him on Haight Street, Khojasteh tried to convince people that he would offer a middle path between Boudin, a bold progressive, and Jenkins, a tough-talking moderate. “Anytime anyone commits a crime and I can prove it, I’m going to file charges,” he told a shopkeeper. But “the question is: How do I make sure they don’t come back into the system?” That’s what justice is, he says: figuring out how to keep someone accountable and keep them from coming back.

Khojasteh’s long-game approach to justice was shaped during his childhood. Raised in the Bay Area to Iranian immigrants, he was a toddler in 1996 when his family suffered a death that would cause him to question the root causes of youth violence. His uncle Cyrus Salehi was working the late shift at a Denny’s restaurant in Los Angeles when a 20-year-old walked inside, demanded money, and then aimed a pistol at his chest; two 18-year-olds and a 16-year-old sat outside with the getaway car. As Khojasteh grew older, the loss motivated him. “Why does this happen in the first place?” he wondered. “Why are there kids at that age with guns?” After Salehi’s wife got remarried, to a bureau chief of the Los Angeles DA’s Office, Khojasteh decided he wanted to become a prosecutor too.

He interned at the Santa Clara DA’s office after undergrad, then graduated early from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, in 2018, where he wrote a thesis on ending the school-to-prison pipeline. He also worked up the nerve, at age 24, to run against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the House. (He lost.)

Next up was a fellowship at the San Francisco public defender’s office, where he met Chesa Boudin, then a deputy public defender. “For someone at his point in his legal career, he had a unique confidence,” Boudin says, describing Khojasteh as “hardworking, compassionate,” and eager to grow. “When I learned he’d run for office against Pelosi, I thought, ‘What a tremendous amount of character that would build, and what a steep learning curve it would be at his age.’”

Working with Boudin would have a deep impact on the way Khojasteh thought about helping teens who committed crimes. After Boudin was elected DA in 2019, Khojasteh was one of his first hires in the juvenile justice unit, as an assistant DA. Change was in the air; the San Francisco Chronicle had just published an investigation showing that youth crime had dropped enormously since the ’90s, but that San Francisco continued spending large sums of money on a juvenile hall that now held fewer and fewer kids. In February 2020, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to close the facility by 2021. “This jail for kids is morally repugnant,” said then-Supervisor Matt Haney. “I thought Ryan’s compassion and energy would be particularly useful” carrying out that mission, says Boudin.

Together, Khojasteh and Boudin tried to do more to connect kids with services rather than locking them up. They expanded the Make It Right initiative, launched by former DA Gascón in 2013 for teens who committed certain felonies. If the young offenders worked with a caseworker, talked with the person they harmed, and took steps to repair the damage, including through community service, they could avoid prosecution. Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted, according to a study by University of California researchers and the California Policy Lab.

Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted.

Boudin leaned on these services, diverting more teens than Gascón and pledging to use juvenile hall as a last resort. For more serious cases that required prosecution, he and Khojasteh tailored the punishment. When a 12-year-old robbed an elderly Chinese man, they filed charges but asked the victim what kind of justice he envisioned: The man wanted the boy, who was Black, to research the exploitation of Chinese people in America and think about their shared oppression. The boy also did community service, and the DA’s office checked to make sure he was going to school. Six months later, his mom reported that she’d never seen him behaving so well. “That had much more impact on his life and development than a couple of days in jail,” Khojasteh says.

Another time, Khojasteh prosecuted a 16-year-old who committed a serious property offense and was waiting in juvenile hall for placement at a residential school; the boy’s single mom couldn’t visit him because she was in hospice care with about a month to live. “I remember thinking, ‘If we keep this kid in juvenile hall, that would profoundly traumatize this child, the fact that he would never see his mother again,’” Khojasteh says. He arranged for the boy to leave and be with his mom for her last few days before returning to finish his sentence. “We don’t want to further cause the psychological damage that could ultimately cause him to act out or commit more crimes in the future,” he adds.

Khojasteh thinks some cases involving young people do require a tougher approach, especially if a victim is injured. He has incarcerated kids for offenses like carjacking. Juvenile hall “is a tool to protect the public and to protect the kid,” he says. But the number of children locked up for crimes fell dramatically in San Francisco under Boudin’s leadership—from an average of 33 kids a day in January 2020, when Boudin took office, to 9 kids daily in June 2020 and 16 kids daily in June 2021, according to city data. (Part of the drop can be explained by the pandemic: Social distancing forced detention facilities to downsize, and courts temporarily stopped trials.)

While working in Boudin’s office, Khojasteh also helped create a program for unaccompanied immigrant kids who committed crimes, and another that offered financial assistance to teens so they could pay restitution to their victims. Without the aid, the owed money often turned into debt for the teens’ parents, affecting the family’s credit score and upward mobility by making it harder to apply for housing or student loans.

San Francisco’s juvenile hall never shut down; Mayor Breed did not support its closure, and momentum for the plan dwindled. Then on June 7, 2022, San Francisco voters recalled Boudin, many of them frustrated by his perceived leniency amid heightened drug use and homelessness, as well as community violence against Asian American elders and viral social media footage of car break-ins and store thefts. (Though overall crime fell during Boudin’s tenure, commercial burglaries and homicides increased in San Francisco, as they did nationally around that time.) After the recall, Khojasteh urged Breed to pick a new DA who would continue the work he and Boudin had started on juvenile justice. “San Francisco deserves to see these reforms through,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Chronicle that July.

That’s not exactly what happened. Three days after the op-ed ran, Breed announced that Jenkins, a former assistant DA who’d quit Boudin’s office and then campaigned to recall him, would be the city’s next lead prosecutor. Khojasteh, now working on adult felony cases, tried to extend an olive branch: After Jenkins told staff she wanted to improve morale at the office, he emailed her to share his thoughts on how staffing increases in the felony unit might accomplish that. Days later, while he was at a family wedding, she called and fired him. “It was such an inappropriate way to handle this,” he tells me, frustrated that she didn’t give him time to write transition memos. He contemplated running against Jenkins in the November 2023 election but was not old enough; the law requires candidates to have worked five years as attorneys, and he would be several months shy of that. Instead, he got a job in Oakland at the Alameda DA’s office.          

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders.

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders. In September 2022, juvenile justice reform groups protested outside her office after she announced that she would consider charging children as adults in certain “heinous” cases, a departure from Boudin’s policy. “We won’t stand by and let our youth be criminalized!” Ally Durante, a youth organizer at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, yelled into a microphone.

Jenkins’ office also referred fewer teens with felony cases to diversion programs like the ones Khojasteh and Boudin had championed, according to Khojasteh, Boudin, and other attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice. It’s “back to the traditional approach,” says Daniel Macallair of San Francisco’s nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It’s been difficult to work with her,” says Julia Arroyo, executive director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which mentors girls in the justice system. Lucero Herrera, who also works at the center, says Jenkins’ office stopped referrals to their programs without explanation: “She believes in charging young people, overcharging them.” The DA’s office and Jenkins’ campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these claims. In 2023, when the Chronicle reported that Jenkins was referring fewer adults to diversion programs, she said her team was more “thoughtful” than Boudin’s about selecting participants.

Because San Francisco has long been a leader on juvenile justice, says Macallair, kids with good public defenders and community advocates have continued to get connected with services in the city, despite Jenkins’ new policies. But she has also gone tougher on them in other ways. Her office has charged more strikes against teens, something Boudin and many other DAs in California have tried to avoid. Strikes remain on a kid’s record into adulthood and three of them can lead to harsher sentences.

Jenkins also made the unusual move of refusing to try new cases in front of a judge who took a progressive approach to juvenile justice late in his career. “She’s attacked judges in a way that’s unprecedented,” the now-retired judge, Anthony Kline, tells me, adding that her reluctance to refer both kids and adults to treatment-focused programs is “out of sync with the modern standards of criminal justice.” Under Jenkins, the number of kids at juvenile hall increased nearly threefold—from an average of 12 kids per day in June 2022, the month Boudin was recalled, to 31 kids a day in October 2023, a peak, and then 27 kids in July 2024, the last month for which data is publicly available.

In November 2022, San Francisco voters passed a ballot measure that pushed back the next DA election from 2023 to 2024, a change that meant Khojasteh would be experienced enough to run. This summer, he left the Alameda DA’s office to campaign full time.

If he's elected, Khojasteh wants to beef up the general felonies unit as well as the special prosecutions division, which handles public corruption, major financial crimes, and police violence; Jenkins downsized it and dismissed all the charges that Boudin had filed against cops. He wants to hold workshops with residents to teach them what to do if they are victims of crime. And he wants to expand the use of collaborative treatment courts for people who break the law because of drug addiction.

When it comes to teen offenders, he says he would increase referrals to the juvenile diversion programs he helped expand under Boudin, and he’d restart the relationship with the Young Women’s Freedom Center and other community groups. “We want to bring our community-based organizations into the fold when it comes to developing treatment plans and resources for kids,” he says.

Khojasteh has avoided labeling himself a “progressive prosecutor,” wary of the recall movements that other progressives like Boudin and now Oakland’s Pamela Price have faced. In a public conversation with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi in June, Khojasteh described his top goal as public safety and said he was not seeking Boudin’s endorsement, though he’s still in touch with his former boss: “I’ve certainly had conversations with him on how I can not make some of the mistakes that he made.”

As I shadowed Khojasteh on Haight Street in September, I saw him talk with shopkeepers about accountability and pledge to prosecute whenever a crime is committed. Later, I asked him to elaborate on how he could make these promises while still prioritizing rehabilitation for kids. It was then that I saw how he might be more moderate than Boudin, even while maintaining a similar ethos. Khojasteh explained that Boudin’s office sometimes gave kids charges that were less serious than what the police had alleged. Teen robberies, for instance, were sometimes charged as thefts so that kids didn’t end up with strikes on their records. He believes this left prosecutors at a disadvantage during negotiations with defense, because the DA's starting offer was already so sweet.

“I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke."

Khojasteh would take a different approach: He would charge whatever crime is supported by the evidence, including robberies, but would later negotiate the charges down—so that kids would still face consequences without getting a strike or record that might keep them from securing a job or financial aid after their punishment. “I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke,” he told me. “I will still file the charges for serious cases—I'm going to hold you accountable—but I can do so in a way that lets you go on into adulthood with every tool at your disposal.”

Khojasteh diverges from his former boss in other ways. He does not support a blanket ban on trying 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, but says he’d only consider doing so in extreme cases like a mass school shooting. Nor does he support a blanket ban on gang enhancements, stiffer punishments that disproportionately affect people of color, though he views these enhancements with “disdain” and would generally avoid them.

Khojasteh declined to say whether he would charge the 17-year-old who shot 49ers receiver Pearsall as an adult, explaining that he hadn’t seen all the details of the case. But in late September, after Jenkins asked a judge to transfer two 16-year-olds to adult court for an alleged murder, Khojasteh criticized her decision. “This is election-year politics at the expense of justice,” he told me, noting that Jenkins made the transfer request a mere days before the kids were scheduled to go to juvenile trial, which is unusually late in the process, and just over a month before Election Day.

Jenkins told me she made the request because she did not believe the teens could be rehabilitated in the juvenile system, which can hold them until age 25. “I will not allow us to return to the days where blind loyalty to a failed dogma reigned supreme and perpetrators were not held accountable or faced consequences for their crimes,” she said. Khojasteh points out that if the kids were held in juvie until age 25, that would be more than half their current lifetimes incarcerated; if convicted in adult court, they face up to life in prison.

Whether Khojasteh can win enough votes remains to be seen. He’s the only challenger in the election. Jenkins has faced some recent setbacks: A court ruled that she committed misconduct in 2021 by disparaging a defense lawyer. Dozens of attorneys have left her office, some of them citing mismanagement. And a record number of drug overdoses in San Francisco last year fueled allegations that her crackdown on dealers isn’t making the city any safer. “People are frustrated and becoming disillusioned because nothing is changing,” retired San Francisco Judge Ellen Chaitin, who opposed Boudin's recall, told the San Francisco Standard.

There are some signs that Khojasteh’s message, meanwhile, is finding traction. Peterson Harter, the man who went viral for his black eye, agreed to put a campaign sign in his sandwich shop after Khojasteh’s visit. “Accountability and support—can we have those two things?” Harter said, moving his hands up and down like a scale.

Later that day in the Haight, a woman on the street stopped Khojasteh; she wanted to learn more about his juvenile justice stances, because her sister had spent time in a mental health facility and said too many kids there were later locked up. “The way we treat our young people says a lot about our values and our society,” says Celi Tamayo-Lee of the SF Rising Action Fund, a grassroots fund for communities of color.

But Jenkins has backing from San Francisco’s moderate political machine—I’ve heard rumors that her sights are set, eventually, on California’s attorney general office, the same path Kamala Harris took from the San Francisco DA’s office. (She did not reply when I asked her about this.) And she has funding from some of the rich execs who paid for Boudin’s recall: As of this month, campaign filings showed she’d garnered $368,000 for the election, compared with Khojasteh’s $105,000. She has declined to publicly debate him, making it harder for him to get media attention. “The fact that Brooke is an incumbent works to her advantage, and there has been a trend for voters to favor more tough-on-crime policies right now in San Francisco,” says Tamayo-Lee. Voters there recently passed ballot measures that decreased police oversight, increased police surveillance, and required people to get drug-tested in order to receive certain social services.

And then there’s the question of Khojasteh’s youth. Jenkins, 43, is more than a decade senior. Over the summer, Mission Local’s Eskenazi teased him for trying to look older than his years by cutting his long hair short and donning “Clark Kent glasses.” (They’re Garrett Leight.)

Khojasteh doesn't seem fazed. He tells me he did away with his long hair because he wanted to mark the transition into his 30s. He bought glasses because he couldn’t see the board during law school, though he soon realized (and embraced) that fewer people confused him for an intern when he wore them to court.

In fact, Khojasteh sees his youth as a plus. Unlike older politicians with ambitions for higher office, he says he can afford to stick around San Francisco as long as it takes to make the city safer, to balance accountability with the services and compassion that might keep people out of the justice system for good. There’s “value in me being a young candidate,” he told me before looking out onto Haight Street and all the people walking by. “I’m committed to San Francisco—this is my home. And I can be here for a long time.”

In early September, Peterson Harter was working the lunchtime rush in his sandwich shop on San Francisco’s Haight Street when in walked prosecutor Ryan Khojasteh, sporting slicked-back hair and circular glasses.

The year before, Harter had been punched in the face by a man who’d been urinating outside his shop. He posted a video of his black eye on Instagram, and it went viral. Khojasteh, a prosecutor who’s challenging San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins for her job in November, wanted to hear about his public safety concerns heading into the election.

“I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand.”

Harter told Khojasteh that the man who assaulted him came back to apologize after getting out of jail; he was later arrested again for assaulting someone else. “This guy actually needs mental health help,” said Harter, leaning against the counter in his apron. They began talking about the benefits of early intervention. If only “we could have helped this person way back when,” Khojasteh said.

The question of how to treat young offenders was on everyone’s mind that week. Days earlier, 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot by a 17-year-old during an attempted robbery near luxury stores in Union Square, making national news. Jenkins may try to transfer Pearsall’s shooter to adult court but hasn’t decided yet. (She’s also recommended transferring two 16-year-olds to adult court in an unrelated case.) Khojasteh says there are very few circumstances in which he’d do the same. “I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand,” he tells me. “That is the whole passion of this job.”

Khojasteh’s emphasis on early interventions is one of the ways he’s setting himself apart from Jenkins, who has taken a more punitive approach to teens after being appointed following the recall of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

San Francisco’s DA race has not gotten much attention in a presidential election year, but the results will be significant because of what Boudin’s recall represented: Observers nationally described it as evidence that famously liberal San Francisco had rejected criminal justice reforms, and that other progressive prosecutors outside California should beware a similar fate. Jenkins pledged to “restore accountability and consequences” to the city. If she loses, it could signal that voters believe the pendulum swung too far right under her leadership.

Khojasteh has welcomed endorsements from heavyweights in the progressive prosecutor world, including George Gascón in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and from a slate of local progressive politicians and community leaders. But he is young, turning 31 next month, with less money, name recognition, and establishment support than Jenkins, who is endorsed by Mayor London Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

And he will be trying to sell voters on his message about helping youthful offenders at a time when fears about violence are intensifying. Though juvenile crime has been falling for decades in San Francisco (and nationwide) to near historic lows, there’s been an uptick recently in kids arrested for serious offenses in the city. Not far from Harter’s sandwich shop, there were at least three other shootings over the past couple of years near Haight Street, a popular tourist destination; some of the gunmen were younger than 25. When Khojasteh spoke with other shopkeepers there, several said they didn’t feel safe. “The cops sadly don’t do anything,” an employee at a cafe told him.

As I tagged along with him on Haight Street, Khojasteh tried to convince people that he would offer a middle path between Boudin, a bold progressive, and Jenkins, a tough-talking moderate. “Anytime anyone commits a crime and I can prove it, I’m going to file charges,” he told a shopkeeper. But “the question is: How do I make sure they don’t come back into the system?” That’s what justice is, he says: figuring out how to keep someone accountable and keep them from coming back.

Khojasteh’s long-game approach to justice was shaped during his childhood. Raised in the Bay Area to Iranian immigrants, he was a toddler in 1996 when his family suffered a death that would cause him to question the root causes of youth violence. His uncle Cyrus Salehi was working the late shift at a Denny’s restaurant in Los Angeles when a 20-year-old walked inside, demanded money, and then aimed a pistol at his chest; two 18-year-olds and a 16-year-old sat outside with the getaway car. As Khojasteh grew older, the loss motivated him. “Why does this happen in the first place?” he wondered. “Why are there kids at that age with guns?” After Salehi’s wife got remarried, to a bureau chief of the Los Angeles DA’s Office, Khojasteh decided he wanted to become a prosecutor too.

Next up was a fellowship at the San Francisco public defender’s office, where he met Chesa Boudin, then a deputy public defender. “For someone at his point in his legal career, he had a unique confidence,” Boudin says, describing Khojasteh as “hardworking, compassionate,” and eager to grow. “When I learned he’d run for office against Pelosi, I thought, ‘What a tremendous amount of character that would build, and what a steep learning curve it would be at his age.’”

Working with Boudin would have a deep impact on the way Khojasteh thought about helping teens who committed crimes. After Boudin was elected DA in 2019, Khojasteh was one of his first hires in the juvenile justice unit, as an assistant DA. Change was in the air; the San Francisco Chronicle had just published an investigation showing that youth crime had dropped enormously since the ’90s, but that San Francisco continued spending large sums of money on a juvenile hall that now held fewer and fewer kids. In February 2020, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to close the facility by 2021. “This jail for kids is morally repugnant,” said then-Supervisor Matt Haney. “I thought Ryan’s compassion and energy would be particularly useful” carrying out that mission, says Boudin.

Together, Khojasteh and Boudin tried to do more to connect kids with services rather than locking them up. They expanded the Make It Right initiative, launched by former DA Gascón in 2013 for teens who committed certain felonies. If the young offenders worked with a caseworker, talked with the person they harmed, and took steps to repair the damage, including through community service, they could avoid prosecution. Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted, according to a study by University of California researchers and the California Policy Lab.

Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted.

Boudin leaned on these services, diverting more teens than Gascón and pledging to use juvenile hall as a last resort. For more serious cases that required prosecution, he and Khojasteh tailored the punishment. When a 12-year-old robbed an elderly Chinese man, they filed charges but asked the victim what kind of justice he envisioned: The man wanted the boy, who was Black, to research the exploitation of Chinese people in America and think about their shared oppression. The boy also did community service, and the DA’s office checked to make sure he was going to school. Six months later, his mom reported that she’d never seen him behaving so well. “That had much more impact on his life and development than a couple of days in jail,” Khojasteh says.

Another time, Khojasteh prosecuted a 16-year-old who committed a serious property offense and was waiting in juvenile hall for placement at a residential school; the boy’s single mom couldn’t visit him because she was in hospice care with about a month to live. “I remember thinking, ‘If we keep this kid in juvenile hall, that would profoundly traumatize this child, the fact that he would never see his mother again,’” Khojasteh says. He arranged for the boy to leave and be with his mom for her last few days before returning to finish his sentence. “We don’t want to further cause the psychological damage that could ultimately cause him to act out or commit more crimes in the future,” he adds.

Khojasteh thinks some cases involving young people do require a tougher approach, especially if a victim is injured. He has incarcerated kids for offenses like carjacking. Juvenile hall “is a tool to protect the public and to protect the kid,” he says. But the number of children locked up for crimes fell dramatically in San Francisco under Boudin’s leadership—from an average of 33 kids a day in January 2020, when Boudin took office, to 9 kids daily in June 2020 and 16 kids daily in June 2021, according to city data. (Part of the drop can be explained by the pandemic: Social distancing forced detention facilities to downsize, and courts temporarily stopped trials.)

While working in Boudin’s office, Khojasteh also helped create a program for unaccompanied immigrant kids who committed crimes, and another that offered financial assistance to teens so they could pay restitution to their victims. Without the aid, the owed money often turned into debt for the teens’ parents, affecting the family’s credit score and upward mobility by making it harder to apply for housing or student loans.

San Francisco’s juvenile hall never shut down; Mayor Breed did not support its closure, and momentum for the plan dwindled. Then on June 7, 2022, San Francisco voters recalled Boudin, many of them frustrated by his perceived leniency amid heightened drug use and homelessness, as well as community violence against Asian American elders and viral social media footage of car break-ins and store thefts. (Though overall crime fell during Boudin’s tenure, commercial burglaries and homicides increased in San Francisco, as they did nationally around that time.) After the recall, Khojasteh urged Breed to pick a new DA who would continue the work he and Boudin had started on juvenile justice. “San Francisco deserves to see these reforms through,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Chronicle that July.

That’s not exactly what happened. Three days after the op-ed ran, Breed announced that Jenkins, a former assistant DA who’d quit Boudin’s office and then campaigned to recall him, would be the city’s next lead prosecutor. Khojasteh, now working on adult felony cases, tried to extend an olive branch: After Jenkins told staff she wanted to improve morale at the office, he emailed her to share his thoughts on how staffing increases in the felony unit might accomplish that. Days later, while he was at a family wedding, she called and fired him. “It was such an inappropriate way to handle this,” he tells me, frustrated that she didn’t give him time to write transition memos. He contemplated running against Jenkins in the November 2023 election but was not old enough; the law requires candidates to have worked five years as attorneys, and he would be several months shy of that. Instead, he got a job in Oakland at the Alameda DA’s office.          

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders.

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders. In September 2022, juvenile justice reform groups protested outside her office after she announced that she would consider charging children as adults in certain “heinous” cases, a departure from Boudin’s policy. “We won’t stand by and let our youth be criminalized!” Ally Durante, a youth organizer at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, yelled into a microphone.

Jenkins’ office also referred fewer teens with felony cases to diversion programs like the ones Khojasteh and Boudin had championed, according to Khojasteh, Boudin, and other attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice. It’s “back to the traditional approach,” says Daniel Macallair of San Francisco’s nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It’s been difficult to work with her,” says Julia Arroyo, executive director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which mentors girls in the justice system. Lucero Herrera, who also works at the center, says Jenkins’ office stopped referrals to their programs without explanation: “She believes in charging young people, overcharging them.” The DA’s office and Jenkins’ campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these claims. In 2023, when the Chronicle reported that Jenkins was referring fewer adults to diversion programs, she said her team was more “thoughtful” than Boudin’s about selecting participants.

Because San Francisco has long been a leader on juvenile justice, says Macallair, kids with good public defenders and community advocates have continued to get connected with services in the city, despite Jenkins’ new policies. But she has also gone tougher on them in other ways. Her office has charged more strikes against teens, something Boudin and many other DAs in California have tried to avoid. Strikes remain on a kid’s record into adulthood and three of them can lead to harsher sentences.

Jenkins also made the unusual move of refusing to try new cases in front of a judge who took a progressive approach to juvenile justice late in his career. “She’s attacked judges in a way that’s unprecedented,” the now-retired judge, Anthony Kline, tells me, adding that her reluctance to refer both kids and adults to treatment-focused programs is “out of sync with the modern standards of criminal justice.” Under Jenkins, the number of kids at juvenile hall increased nearly threefold—from an average of 12 kids per day in June 2022, the month Boudin was recalled, to 31 kids a day in October 2023, a peak, and then 27 kids in July 2024, the last month for which data is publicly available.

In November 2022, San Francisco voters passed a ballot measure that pushed back the next DA election from 2023 to 2024, a change that meant Khojasteh would be experienced enough to run. This summer, he left the Alameda DA’s office to campaign full time.

If he's elected, Khojasteh wants to beef up the general felonies unit as well as the special prosecutions division, which handles public corruption, major financial crimes, and police violence; Jenkins downsized it and dismissed all the charges that Boudin had filed against cops. He wants to hold workshops with residents to teach them what to do if they are victims of crime. And he wants to expand the use of collaborative treatment courts for people who break the law because of drug addiction.

When it comes to teen offenders, he says he would increase referrals to the juvenile diversion programs he helped expand under Boudin, and he’d restart the relationship with the Young Women’s Freedom Center and other community groups. “We want to bring our community-based organizations into the fold when it comes to developing treatment plans and resources for kids,” he says.

Khojasteh has avoided labeling himself a “progressive prosecutor,” wary of the recall movements that other progressives like Boudin and now Oakland’s Pamela Price have faced. In a public conversation with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi in June, Khojasteh described his top goal as public safety and said he was not seeking Boudin’s endorsement, though he’s still in touch with his former boss: “I’ve certainly had conversations with him on how I can not make some of the mistakes that he made.”

As I shadowed Khojasteh on Haight Street in September, I saw him talk with shopkeepers about accountability and pledge to prosecute whenever a crime is committed. Later, I asked him to elaborate on how he could make these promises while still prioritizing rehabilitation for kids. It was then that I saw how he might be more moderate than Boudin, even while maintaining a similar ethos. Khojasteh explained that Boudin’s office sometimes gave kids charges that were less serious than what the police had alleged. Teen robberies, for instance, were sometimes charged as thefts so that kids didn’t end up with strikes on their records. He believes this left prosecutors at a disadvantage during negotiations with defense, because the DA's starting offer was already so sweet.

“I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke."

Khojasteh would take a different approach: He would charge whatever crime is supported by the evidence, including robberies, but would later negotiate the charges down—so that kids would still face consequences without getting a strike or record that might keep them from securing a job or financial aid after their punishment. “I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke,” he told me. “I will still file the charges for serious cases—I'm going to hold you accountable—but I can do so in a way that lets you go on into adulthood with every tool at your disposal.”

Khojasteh diverges from his former boss in other ways. He does not support a blanket ban on trying 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, but says he’d only consider doing so in extreme cases like a mass school shooting. Nor does he support a blanket ban on gang enhancements, stiffer punishments that disproportionately affect people of color, though he views these enhancements with “disdain” and would generally avoid them.

Khojasteh declined to say whether he would charge the 17-year-old who shot 49ers receiver Pearsall as an adult, explaining that he hadn’t seen all the details of the case. But in late September, after Jenkins asked a judge to transfer two 16-year-olds to adult court for an alleged murder, Khojasteh criticized her decision. “This is election-year politics at the expense of justice,” he told me, noting that Jenkins made the transfer request a mere days before the kids were scheduled to go to juvenile trial, which is unusually late in the process, and just over a month before Election Day.

Jenkins told me she made the request because she did not believe the teens could be rehabilitated in the juvenile system, which can hold them until age 25. “I will not allow us to return to the days where blind loyalty to a failed dogma reigned supreme and perpetrators were not held accountable or faced consequences for their crimes,” she said. Khojasteh points out that if the kids were held in juvie until age 25, that would be more than half their current lifetimes incarcerated; if convicted in adult court, they face up to life in prison.

He interned at the Santa Clara DA’s office after undergrad, then graduated early from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, in 2018, where he wrote a thesis on ending the school-to-prison pipeline. He also worked up the nerve, at age 24, to run against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the House. (He lost.)

Whether Khojasteh can win enough votes remains to be seen. He’s the only challenger in the election. Jenkins has faced some recent setbacks: A court ruled that she committed misconduct in 2021 by disparaging a defense lawyer. Dozens of attorneys have left her office, some of them citing mismanagement. And a record number of drug overdoses in San Francisco last year fueled allegations that her crackdown on dealers isn’t making the city any safer. “People are frustrated and becoming disillusioned because nothing is changing,” retired San Francisco Judge Ellen Chaitin, who opposed Boudin's recall, told the San Francisco Standard.

There are some signs that Khojasteh’s message, meanwhile, is finding traction. Peterson Harter, the man who went viral for his black eye, agreed to put a campaign sign in his sandwich shop after Khojasteh’s visit. “Accountability and support—can we have those two things?” Harter said, moving his hands up and down like a scale.

Later that day in the Haight, a woman on the street stopped Khojasteh; she wanted to learn more about his juvenile justice stances, because her sister had spent time in a mental health facility and said too many kids there were later locked up. “The way we treat our young people says a lot about our values and our society,” says Celi Tamayo-Lee of the SF Rising Action Fund, a grassroots fund for communities of color.

But Jenkins has backing from San Francisco’s moderate political machine—I’ve heard rumors that her sights are set, eventually, on California’s attorney general office, the same path Kamala Harris took from the San Francisco DA’s office. (She did not reply when I asked her about this.) And she has funding from some of the rich execs who paid for Boudin’s recall: As of this month, campaign filings showed she’d garnered $368,000 for the election, compared with Khojasteh’s $105,000. She has declined to publicly debate him, making it harder for him to get media attention. “The fact that Brooke is an incumbent works to her advantage, and there has been a trend for voters to favor more tough-on-crime policies right now in San Francisco,” says Tamayo-Lee. Voters there recently passed ballot measures that decreased police oversight, increased police surveillance, and required people to get drug-tested in order to receive certain social services.

And then there’s the question of Khojasteh’s youth. Jenkins, 43, is more than a decade senior. Over the summer, Mission Local’s Eskenazi teased him for trying to look older than his years by cutting his long hair short and donning “Clark Kent glasses.” (They’re Garrett Leight.)

Khojasteh doesn't seem fazed. He tells me he did away with his long hair because he wanted to mark the transition into his 30s. He bought glasses because he couldn’t see the board during law school, though he soon realized (and embraced) that fewer people confused him for an intern when he wore them to court.

In fact, Khojasteh sees his youth as a plus. Unlike older politicians with ambitions for higher office, he says he can afford to stick around San Francisco as long as it takes to make the city safer, to balance accountability with the services and compassion that might keep people out of the justice system for good. There’s “value in me being a young candidate,” he told me before looking out onto Haight Street and all the people walking by. “I’m committed to San Francisco—this is my home. And I can be here for a long time.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and Arizona Luminaria. 

The first punch to her head knocked Grace Pinson to the floor. She put up her arms to protect her face as Ricki Mahkimetas struck her again. When his fist hit her nose, she felt it crunch.

The cells in the special housing unit at the federal penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, have solid steel doors, making it almost impossible to see what is going on inside. Each cell is designed with an alarm button that can alert corrections officers down the hall if there’s an emergency. But Pinson’s cell had no button—just a hole in the wall with exposed wires.

Pinson is transgender, a woman with breasts and long curly hair in a prison full of men. She is also a dogged jailhouse lawyer. Over the 17 years she’s spent in federal prison, she’s brought more than 100 lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons and its staff. For refusing to provide her with adequate gender-affirming care. For refusing to move her to a women’s prison. For failing, again and again, to keep her safe. In the years leading up to the July 2019 attack in cell B-140, she had been beaten, stabbed, slashed, and struck in the head with a padlock. Government lawyers, prison officers, and psychologists have kept meticulous records of these assaults and described them in court. “I have been attacked many times,” she told me. “My trauma haunts my very dreams.”

“I have been attacked many times. My trauma haunts my very dreams.”

This beating by her cellmate, who is serving more than 16 years for sexual assault, became the basis of another lawsuit. Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Mahkimetas disputed that he beat her, but they contested her other allegations. Pinson said that during the attack Mahkimetas tried to yank off her pants. Whenever she reached down to hold up her waistband he would punch her in the face. He denied this to prison investigators, saying there was nothing sexual about the assault. She said she had told a guard earlier in the day that Mahkimetas had been threatening to rape her and asked to be moved to another cell. The guard later said he knew nothing in advance. So much of the case came down to who could be believed about what happened to Pinson that day.

Over several years and hundreds of handwritten pages of filings, Pinson jumped over one legal hurdle after another, all the way to trial. Fewer than 1 percent of federal prisoner civil rights claims reach that stage without an attorney, a luxury almost no one in prison can afford.

The federal Bureau of Prisons declined multiple requests to make officials available for an interview and declined to comment on the assault and the ensuing lawsuit, citing privacy, safety, security, and deference to the court. The bureau “takes seriously the duty to protect individuals entrusted in our care,” spokesperson Randilee Giamusso said in an emailed statement. “When we are made aware of security hazards, such as faulty duress alarms, we take steps to immediately address the issue.”

If Pinson’s legal tenacity makes her unusual, the harm she has suffered in federal prison does not. Life in prison is relentlessly dangerous, and for transgender people especially so. More than 1,300 trans women are locked in federal prisons alongside men. Not only are they at risk for extortion and assault, they are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. A 21-year-old law meant to prevent prison rape created a world of rules and procedures, yet hundreds of people continue to report being violated in federal prison each year. The prison where Pinson was held has and one of the highest rates of sexual abuse allegations in the entire federal system.

The trial in Pinson’s lawsuit offered a window into how difficult it can be to hold prison officials accountable, and in doing so, raised other questions: Why is it so dangerous to be a trans woman in prison? And when you are harmed in a place whose purpose is to punish wrongdoing, why is it so hard to get justice?

Curled up in the fetal position as Mahkimetas beat her, Pinson yelled for help. It felt like the beating went on for a very long time. The floor began to tremble as people in nearby cells started kicking their doors, trying to get the attention of the guards. Pinson said she felt a pang of gratitude that people didn’t want her to die.

Finally, she heard keys jangling as officers made their way toward her cell. Mahkimetas backed away. When officers rolled the steel door open, they found Pinson bruised and bloodied, her nose broken and her eyes beginning to swell shut.

Pinson v. the United States of America convened in November 2023, on a hot Monday in Tucson. Pinson shuffled into a federal courtroom wearing an oversized white T-shirt and prison-issued, gray-green canvas pants, shackles clanking at her ankles. She sat alone at the plaintiff’s table, her left hand padlocked to a chain around her waist. She couldn’t afford an attorney, or even the $350 filing fee for the lawsuit, and so she represented herself. Three lawyers in dark suits sat at the defendant’s table, representing the Bureau of Prisons for the US Attorney’s office.

The courthouse sits about 20 minutes away from the prison, a complex that includes a high-security penitentiary, where Pinson was housed, a medium-security correctional institution, and a low-security camp.

Pinson hoped her case would lead to a sort of #MeToo moment for the federal prison system. Her court filings framed Mahkimetas’ attack as part of a longstanding, pervasive pattern of sexual violence at her facility. And in the months leading up to the trial, she proposed a list of witnesses that included dozens of people who said they saw, or in some cases experienced, sexual assaults in the penitentiary—and the staff’s indifference when they tried to report it.

Pinson argued that the assault represented a failure of Bureau of Prisons employees to enforce the Prison Rape Elimination Act, almost universally referred to by its acronym, PREA. Passed by Congress in 2003, the law’s stated purpose was to “establish a zero-tolerance standard for the incidence of prison rape” in the United States. Its passage created a universe of new procedures and requirements and—as a result—increased awareness among correctional workers of the problem of sexual assault in prisons and jails.

Pinson, who is serving time for writing threatening letters to public officials, tried to argue that the officers guarding her in the Tucson penitentiary should have known that as a transgender woman, she was at high risk for sexual assault. Prison psychologists knew she’d been raped before. And yet officers assigned her to a cell without a working alarm, locking her in with Mahkimetas, who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl. Pinson said she had warned an officer, Miguel Vasquez, earlier that day that Mahkimetas was threatening to rape her, and she needed to be moved. She said that after Mahkimetas attacked her, officers didn’t take what happened to her seriously and gave her a disciplinary infraction for fighting, leaving her to languish in the special housing unit. Mahkimetas did not respond to letters seeking comment on Pinson’s allegations. Vasquez declined to comment through a representative from his union.

In pretrial filings, government lawyers said Vasquez’s handling of PREA was “irrelevant and immaterial.” The case was not about whether Mahkimetas was punished for attacking her, the lawyers told the judge. It was also not about her cell’s missing duress alarm; alarms are provided at the bureau’s discretion, they said, and are not required.

As far as the government was concerned, the only relevant questions were: Did the officer on duty the day of the attack know Pinson’s cellmate had threatened to rape her? And, if so, did he fail to separate them?

Federal District Judge Rosemary Márquez agreed and denied Pinson’s request to call witnesses about the rape elimination law.

On the stand during the trial, Vasquez testified he was “100 percent positive” that Pinson did not warn him in advance that Mahkimetas had threatened to rape her.

Pinson later tried to get Vasquez to admit that he didn’t always act on requests to change cellmates. “If a cellie is telling staff they’re about to be raped, what’s the response?” she asked.

“We would move them immediately,” Vasquez said.

She talked about her gender identity and the Bureau of Prisons’ failure to “recognize me for the woman that I am.”

In an attempt to keep the focus on her suffering, Pinson put her psychologist on the stand and asked him about her experiences of being assaulted, about her anxiety, her self-harm, her PTSD. She talked about her gender identity and the Bureau of Prisons’ failure to “recognize me for the woman that I am.” She asked the officer who investigated Mahkimetas’ assault if he had treated the cell as a crime scene or reviewed video of that night. (He did neither, he testified.)

In closing arguments, one of the government’s lawyers repeated that these issues “have no bearing.” The judge was clear in her pretrial ruling, he reminded her. “Plaintiff focuses on these extraneous issues because she cannot meet her burden to prove that alleged negligence actually occurred in this case.”

Every year since 2016, the penitentiary in Tucson has been among the top 5 percent of federal facilities with the most allegations of sexual abuse or harassment, according to federal data analyzed by The Marshall Project.

Incarcerated people and prison workers alike attribute the high rate of sexual assault at the prison in part to the mix of people housed there. The penitentiary in Tucson is home to a sex offender treatment program, one of 10 throughout the federal system. People convicted of sex offenses are widely despised and often targeted for physical and sexual abuse in prison.

“Those people are more likely to be victimized. But then they also are predators,” said Jill Roth, a psychologist who retired as the bureau’s PREA coordinator in 2021. “In an institution with a sex offender treatment program, you’ll usually have a lot more allegations” of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assault and harassment.

The program at Tucson is the only one in a high-security penitentiary that holds people with serious or violent convictions or disciplinary problems. Keith Raniere, convicted of sex trafficking as head of the NXIVM sex cult, is incarcerated in Tucson. Larry Nassar, the disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor who molested hundreds of girls in his care, was there for a time too. Roughly 60 percent of the population at the penitentiary is in the sex offender program, according to numbers provided by the Bureau of Prisons.

In a prison full of predatory men, transgender women are a ready target. Trans people in prison are sexually assaulted at a much higher rate than prisoners in general. A federal survey published in 2014 estimated that nearly 40 percent of transgender people in prison were sexually assaulted, compared with 4 percent of all people in prison. According to the bureau’s data, the penitentiary in Tucson houses 120 transgender women, more than any other federal prison.

Under PREA’s rules, prison officials should decide where to house transgender people on a case-by-case basis, with the person’s “views with respect to his or her own safety…given serious consideration.” Yet, in practice, transgender people are almost always housed according to their sex assigned at birth. Last year, of the more than 1,000 transgender women in federal prison, only 10 were held in women’s facilities, according to information that bureau Director Colette Peters provided to Congress.

PREA also requires that staff assess each person’s “risk of sexual victimization,” and in a statement, spokesperson Scott Taylor said the Bureau of Prisons “uses that information to inform housing, bed, work, education, and program assignments.” Taylor said the bureau “works to ensure the best fit for everyone in our care and custody.”

Despite all of its infrastructure, PREA often fails to protect vulnerable people like Pinson, prisoners and correctional experts say. Effective implementation relies on the good faith of prison staff, many of whom share the prejudices against LGBTQ people that make them vulnerable in the first place. To Pinson, because the law includes few repercussions for staff who break it, her lawsuit was an opportunity to prove the devastating consequences of their indifference.

But the dynamics of victimization are complicated. At the Tucson penitentiary, 75 percent of the transgender women—who as a population are so vulnerable to sexual assault—have committed sex crimes, according to data provided by the Bureau of Prisons. For them, lonely men can also be targets, Pinson and others say.

“Some people are doing forever in there. They want companionship,” said Eric Ontiveros, who served time with Pinson at Tucson. Some transgender women exploit that loneliness and “use that to manipulate the situation in their favor, to get money, drugs, whatever they need.”

“Some people are doing forever in there. They want companionship.”

Public health research suggests that LGBTQ people are more likely than others to be convicted of sex offenses, though it’s unclear whether this reflects over-policing, unfair treatment within the system, or other dynamics is difficult to say, says Ilan Meyer, a public health researcher at UCLA law school. Transgender people face significant barriers in housing, education, and employment, and those limited opportunities can force people into sex work and other black market jobs that can lead to legal trouble, research shows.

After an incarcerated person reports a sexual assault, PREA requires that the prison conduct an internal investigation. Federal prison investigators almost never prove, or “substantiate,” that an assault happened. From 2016 through last year, officials corroborated fewer than 6 percent of the 4,100 allegations in federal prisons, according to bureau data analyzed by The Marshall Project. Tucson’s rate was similar to the national rate. At dozens of facilities each year, investigators don’t substantiate any allegations at all.

Experts say prison investigators should confirm far more reports of assault because under PREA they do not have to meet the high bar of “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in a criminal courtroom. Instead, investigators must be more certain than not—at least 51 percent sure—that an assault happened.

“PREA fails in a whole shit-ton of ways,” said Julie Abbate, an attorney who helped implement the law while working at the civil rights division of the Department of Justice in the 2010s and now works for an organization dedicated to ending prison rape.

Bureau of Prisons leadership “say the right things at the headquarters level, and, for the most part, I believe them,” she said. “The disconnect happens between headquarters, regional offices, and individual facilities.”

Several correctional experts noted that investigators too often discount testimony if it comes from incarcerated people. “The only people that say it happened were inmates,” was a common refrain at the penitentiary in Tucson, according to a recently retired bureau official who asked not to be named because they still have family working at the agency. A 2022 report by the inspector general who oversees the bureau said investigators’ practice of not relying on this testimony also makes it harder for the agency to punish staff who break rules in other ways.

Giamusso, the bureau spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the inspector general’s concerns have been addressed, that investigations are thorough and witnesses’ credibility is “evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and is not based on the individual’s status as an incarcerated individual.” Sexual abuse investigations in prison, she added, “are as complicated, if not more so, than those outside of prison.”

For all its shortcomings, PREA does offer victims and those at risk of sexual assault one protection: Each allegation sets in motion a chain of events—reporting, investigation, response. Other kinds of physical assault are often downplayed or ignored by prison officials. No federal law requires officers to investigate when an incarcerated person is beaten or stabbed. In a place where incarcerated people feel helpless and silenced, PREA can become an avenue to make someone take notice.

“You’re looking at people who have very few options,” said Cathy Thompson, who retired last year as a top psychologist at the Bureau of Prisons. “There’s nothing else they can allege that is given that kind of attention.” Staff, correctional experts and incarcerated people alike report that PREA allegations can be misused for a variety of reasons, like retaliating against an ex-lover, or having an enemy removed from a compound.

“Someone legitimately made me feel so unsafe that I did not feel I could spend another 24 hours with them having access to me without hurting me.”

Pinson herself has been accused of using false allegations of sexual harassment “as a weapon against other inmates,” according to incident reports the government filed in response to one of her lawsuits. She denied this but did concede that sometimes PREA is the only way to get officers to take a scary situation seriously. “Every single person I have filed a PREA complaint against them, I can tell you this much is true: I genuinely feared that person was going to hurt me,” she said. “Whether I feared they were going to rape me is a different story. Someone legitimately made me feel so unsafe that I did not feel I could spend another 24 hours with them having access to me without hurting me.”

She insists that in the case of Mahkimetas, the attempted sexual assault was real, and terrifying. But when it came to PREA, it was her word against his: There were no cameras in their cell and no eyewitnesses. Investigators at the Tucson penitentiary labeled Pinson’s allegation that Mahkimetas tried to rape her as unsubstantiated.

She had little redress beyond going to the courts.

In some of Pinson’s earliest memories, she is rummaging through her mother’s jewelry box, trying on the shiny baubles and makeup. “And my mom would just look at me with amusement and befuddlement,” Pinson recalled in an interview. Debra Pinson didn’t know what to make of this child of hers. When, as a teenager, Pinson told her mother she was a girl, Debra replied, “You’re just gay.” Grace didn’t argue.

Extremely precocious, Pinson was also troubled. She began reading the newspaper before she started kindergarten, her mother recalled. Debra’s father was “so abusive and so tortuously cruel” to Grace, according to a psychologist’s court testimony, once locking her out of the house overnight in the winter. A neighbor began sexually abusing her when she was 7, and she was hospitalized for psychotic symptoms and suicide attempts several times throughout her childhood.

In school, Pinson was bullied by other kids who called her “queer” and “fag.” Whenever she had problems at school, her mother would move them—they moved a lot. Children can be vicious, and so could Pinson. Once, she stabbed a classmate with a pen. She threatened to blow up her school with her Toys R Us chemistry set. Debra Pinson recalls one psychiatrist telling her, “Ma’am, your child is just evil.”

Pinson was diagnosed at different times with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and PTSD. “Pinson had not experienced any significant period of effective psychological functioning since early childhood,” according to a court evaluation.

At some point in her adolescence, her mother gave up and didn’t enroll Pinson in school at all. That meant even fewer checks on her impulsive behavior. While living in North Carolina, she got into trouble with the law, ransacking an office where she worked after she said a coworker made a homophobic comment. She pleaded guilty to several felonies and spent time in a county jail and a psychiatric hospital. They moved again.

In Oklahoma City, she was arrested again. She had gotten a job in a congressman’s district office and was accused of stealing campaign money. In recent interviews, she said she spent money she was told to spend, but in 2003, at age 17, Pinson pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to three years in an adult state prison.

While waiting for her case to be resolved, Pinson spent months in the Oklahoma County jail. At that time, the US Department of Justice was investigating conditions at the jail and a report released years later revealed violence, overcrowding, and inadequate access to medical and mental health care, among other problems. It was not a safe place for anyone, let alone a teenage transgender girl. She had been experimenting with female pronouns for years, and it was in jail that she read a book with a chapter called “Grace,” and thought, “That’s me.”

Pinson said her cellmate at the state prison—which Pinson said was even more violent than the jail—told her about the cushy setup in “Club Fed,” a slang term for federal prison. All she needed to escape the oppressive conditions in the Oklahoma system, she was told, was to commit a federal crime. So she dashed off a seven-word letter and mailed it to the White House. “YOU WILL DIE SOON!” she scrawled. “DIE BUSH DIE.”

“I thought I was playing a big prank on the federal government,” she said in a recent interview. “As it turns out, I was playing a prank on myself.”

“I thought I was playing a big prank on the federal government. As it turns out, I was playing a prank on myself.”

The Secret Service descended on the Oklahoma County jail. Sitting in endless interrogation sessions and facing a slew of new charges, it dawned on her that she had traded a three-year state sentence for much more serious trouble. Still, she scrawled more threatening letters, “in impotent anger at a situation that I had created myself,” she told me: one to a Secret Service agent, one to a US Marshal, one to a judge.

Pinson emerged from the letter-writing spree with a new sentence: 21 years. She arrived in a maximum-security federal prison in 2007 and discovered that for a transgender woman, it was hardly “Club Fed” at all.

By the time she was processed into federal prison, Pinson had already suffered stabbings, beatings, and sexual assault in Oklahoma, she said in court papers. She filed more than half a dozen lawsuits, accusing sheriffs and corrections officials there of failing to keep her safe. In each of those instances, the cases were dismissed, or Pinson lost, or gave up and voluntarily dismissed the case when it was clear she was not going to win.

These were her first lessons in the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The 1996 federal law, passed during an era of tough-on-crime legislation, “made cases harder to bring and harder to win,” said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan who studies civil rights litigation. It was meant, she said, to stem what legislators described as a wave of frivolous prisoner lawsuits by throwing up legal hurdles that no one else faces in the courts.

Pinson’s early years in federal prison did not go well, either. She tried to repress her gender identity, wearing a beard and short hair and joining a gang for protection. She fought with other incarcerated people and guards; she set fires and flooded cells.

A psychologist had testified at her sentencing that she would need intensive mental health treatment, so the judge recommended she be sent to a federal medical center for care. Instead, she was sent to some of the system’s most notorious penitentiaries, including one known as “Bloody Beaumont” and the supermax in Florence, Colorado, where she was held in solitary confinement alongside the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The placements meant “extreme violence and trauma,” Pinson wrote in a 2008 legal filing, which “exacerbated and worsened Plaintiff’s mental state.” According to lawsuits she filed later, she was sexually harassed and assaulted.

When PREA went into effect in 2012, it created new procedures to keep people safe from sexual assault, but it did not create a way to sue officials when they failed to follow those rules.

“All transgender inmates interviewed reported that they were asked about their safety but felt staff did not take their concerns seriously.”

The law does require prisons to hire outside auditors to assess their compliance. But audits are often rushed and cursory, according to Abbate. Tucson’s most recent audit, in 2023, said, “All transgender inmates interviewed reported that they were asked about their safety but felt staff did not take their concerns seriously.” Still, the auditor gave the prison high marks and did not require any corrective action.

“Every supposed mandate that is included within the guidelines has weasel language that the government can use to say, ‘Well, we can’t really be held to it, we’re only required to make reasonable efforts,’” said Gregory Sisk, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota who represented a transgender woman who said she was sexually assaulted at the penitentiary in Tucson. She sued the Bureau of Prisons and lost.

Pinson learned all this the hard way. “I learned to litigate through books and I learned to litigate through filing lawsuits, and ultimately losing a lot of them,” she said. “But the thing is, I’m an incredibly stubborn individual.”

In 2012, while at the supermax unit in Colorado, Pinson was a plaintiff in a landmark class action lawsuit that challenged the use of solitary confinement for people with mental illnesses. The case ultimately led to an overhaul of the bureau’s treatment of mentally ill people, updating policies and creating new housing units and treatment programs.

She “has a brain for law,” said Deborah Golden, one of the lead attorneys on that case. Pinson was smart and organized and “by self-training and instinct she was really good at figuring out relevant facts,” she said. “Maybe in a different world, she would have been a law professor.”

In 2014, prison psychologists diagnosed Pinson with gender dysphoria—the distress resulting from her body not matching her gender identity—and she began to receive hormone therapy. Still, housed among men and being harassed and assaulted, hormone therapy alone has not adequately treated her gender dysphoria, she said. Her records include a long list of suicide attempts and self-harm, including trying to castrate herself in her cell.

Pinson has asked the Bureau of Prisons many times to move her to a women’s facility. Each time, the bureau’s Transgender Executive Council—a team of psychologists and administrators who make decisions about trans people in federal prison—have said no, arguing that Pinson needs to stay in maximum security and isn’t on the proper dosage of hormones. A lawsuit Pinson filed requesting a transfer to a women’s prison and gender-affirming medical treatments is ongoing. The judge in that case has issued several rulings in her favor, ordering the government to provide her with female undergarments and toiletries and to make housing decisions about her as they would about any other woman.

In a case brought by another trans woman, Cristina Iglesias, a judge found in 2022 that the Transgender Executive Council offered shifting and contradictory reasons to deny Iglesias’ transfer to a women’s facility and her access to surgery. The judge ultimately ordered the bureau to provide Iglesias with gender-affirming surgery, which it did last year—only the second time the bureau has ever done so.

In 2018, Pinson arrived in Tucson, where she kept landing in the special housing unit after a series of assaults. Special housing in Tucson is structured like solitary confinement with a cellmate: two people locked in a claustrophobic concrete box together around the clock, with little access to programs, work, or recreation.

Still, people build relationships in the most austere circumstances, passing notes under cell doors and talking through cages in the rec yard, and Pinson has made a lot of friends in prison. One of them, Bruce Altenburger, wrote in a recent letter to me that Pinson often spotted errors in people’s convictions or sentences and helped correct them. “There really ain’t too many remarkable individuals with such a big heart like her.”

In 2020, Pinson had been in special housing for most of the year following Mahkimetas’s assault. Officials would not allow her to transfer back into a less restrictive part of the prison, even after she filed numerous complaints. In an act of protest, she said, she used a razor to cut herself 243 times—one for each day she had been held in the special housing unit, by her count. Then, she sued, arguing officers at Tucson should not have provided her a razor blade, given her long history of suicide attempts and a rule that prohibited razors in special housing. After a two-day trial, the judge found her more credible than the officer who denied having given her the razor. That officer was Vasquez, the same man who insisted that Pinson had not warned him about Mahkimetas before she was attacked. The judge awarded her $243 in damages: one dollar for each cut.

In Pinson’s lawsuit about Mahkimetas’ assault, she argued that officials had failed to protect her by not providing a functional duress alarm. In pretrial briefs, she asked the government about procedures for responding to emergencies in a cell, but the bureau’s lawyers told her there were no such documents. In the absence of any rule requiring duress alarms, the government argued, the bureau could decide whether or not to provide one.

Because the judge agreed with the bureau, the only issue at trial was whether Pinson had warned Vasquez that Mahkimetas had threatened her, and, if she did, whether she was seriously harmed by his failure to move her.

In its closing argument, the government’s lawyers laid out other times that Pinson was injured while in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons. “She’s been stricken by a sock with a lock in it. She was attacked in the general population on the prison yard,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Linton told the judge. Then there was “a more recent incident involving an inmate swinging a rope with a sharp object at her.” She couldn’t prove that she had developed PTSD due to Mahkimetas’ assault specifically, the attorney argued—so the judge should not find in her favor.

As the trial was winding down, government attorneys handed Pinson a document. They had told the court months before that there were no documents regarding duress alarms, but after “re-reviewing” their paperwork, they said, they were turning over instructions for officers working in the special housing unit in Tucson. Amid pages of blacked-out language, one paragraph said that each cell in the special housing unit contains a duress button on the wall. The instructions continued, “In the event that the duress alarm is pushed…Staff must immediately respond to the cell.”

Pinson was floored.

She asked the judge for a mistrial. The trial had been shaped by the government’s claim that there were no rules about duress alarms, Pinson said. The judge said she would consider the request, but that closing arguments would continue in the meantime. A few hours later, the trial was over, and Pinson went back to her cell to wait for the judge’s verdict.

Two months later, the Bureau of Prisons transferred Pinson from Tucson to a more restrictive unit in rural Pennsylvania. She was locked in an 8-by-10-foot cell by herself around the clock. The bureau said the unit “is designed to support individuals vulnerable to mental health crises.” Pinson believes that the warden in Tucson was retaliating against her because of her outspokenness. Others she served time with in Tucson thought so too. In requesting the move, the warden had said Pinson was fabricating PREA allegations and recruiting other transgender people to invent complaints about their treatment by the prison’s staff. He said she was a disciplinary problem and needed more intensive supervision. The near-total isolation in her new prison cell led her to constant thoughts of suicide, she said. She also said she was sexually assaulted again, this time by a correctional officer, and filed a complaint with the Bureau of Prisons.

Bureau spokespeople declined to explain why Pinson was transferred, and wouldn’t comment on her allegation of sexual abuse. “Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action is taken if such allegations are proven true,” said spokesperson Emery Nelson.

Pinson is scheduled to be released from federal prison in 2026 after serving more than two decades. When she gets out, she will be 40 years old, free for the first time in her adult life.

In June, a prison staffer arrived at Pinson’s cell with a slim manila envelope from the court: The judge had ruled in her case.

Márquez did not grant Pinson’s request for a mistrial. She did not find that the government was negligent by placing Pinson in the cell with Mahkimetas. She did not believe that Pinson had asked Vasquez to be moved. But the judge did find the government had violated its own guidelines by not having a functional duress alarm in the cell and that if Pinson had had access to the alarm, she would have had officers there to help her within one minute.

Because it took about five minutes for staff to respond, Pinson was beaten unnecessarily for approximately four minutes, the judge wrote in her decision. With an alarm, Pinson would have still been beaten, but her injuries would have been less severe. The judge ordered the government to pay her $10,000. The bureau declined to comment on the ruling.

Pinson is gratified that the judge found in her favor, but frustrated she was prevented from making a broader point—one that was, in her mind, more important—because of how the judge limited the issues at trial. She has filed paperwork to begin an appeal.

Because she wasn’t allowed to introduce evidence of all the other sexual assaults in Tucson, she said, the judge could only weigh this one incident and Pinson was prevented from showing that her suffering was part of a larger pattern of staff disregarding PREA and not taking sexual assault seriously. In a recent call, Pinson reflected on how the experience continues to weigh on her. “The thing that has driven me crazy in this case, start to finish,” she said, “is that the bureau was never willing to acknowledge, not even at the trial, that it could have done things differently to keep me safe.”

Additional reporting by John Washington. Data analysis by Geoff Hing.

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that violence is surging. “All over the world crime is down; all over the world—except here,” he said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof.”

But the latest data seems to suggest the opposite.

In 2023, murders in the United States fell at the fastest pace ever recorded, by about 11 percent, according to figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week. And on Monday, the agency shared more good news: The number of killings seemed to keep falling significantly, by an estimated 23 percent, during the first six months of 2024.

“Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline.”

“It is an astounding feat that deserves to be studied for decades to come,” crime analyst Jeff Asher, whose reports on homicide trends have been widely cited, wrote on his Substack last week. He noted that the US murder rate is now “at or very possibly below pre-Covid levels,” and that the country hasn’t seen such a big one-year decline in killings since 1996, when murder rates dropped by 9 percent.

Overall violent crime is falling too—by about 3 percent in 2023, and by an estimated 10 percent in the first half of 2024, according to the FBI. This drop is “certainly nowhere near as fast” as the drop in murder, writes Asher. But unlike murder, he adds, overall “violent crime didn’t rise a ton in 2020.” It has “largely returned to the 50-year lows seen a few times over the last decade, and is down more than 50 percent from where it was at peak in the 1990s.”

The 2023 FBI data gives us a pretty good sense of recent crime trends, but it’s important to note that the latest figures from the first six months of 2024 are more preliminary—law enforcement agencies have until the end of the year to correct any mistakes. So take these figures with “a grain of salt,” writes Asher: It’s likely that the numbers won’t be quite as great by the end of the year.

Still, there’s a lot to celebrate right now: “Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline,” he summarizes. “Violent crime is down a fair amount…and will likely be the lowest reported violent crime rate since 1969…And property crime is down a ton thanks to the massive decline in motor vehicle theft following several years of huge increases.”

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that violence is surging. “All over the world crime is down; all over the world—except here,” he said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof.”

But the latest data seems to suggest the opposite.

In 2023, murders in the United States fell at the fastest pace ever recorded, by about 11 percent, according to figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week. And on Monday, the agency shared more good news: The number of killings seemed to keep falling significantly, by an estimated 23 percent, during the first six months of 2024.

“Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline.”

“It is an astounding feat that deserves to be studied for decades to come,” crime analyst Jeff Asher, whose reports on homicide trends have been widely cited, wrote on his Substack last week. He noted that the US murder rate is now “at or very possibly below pre-Covid levels,” and that the country hasn’t seen such a big one-year decline in killings since 1996, when murder rates dropped by 9 percent.

Overall violent crime is falling too—by about 3 percent in 2023, and by an estimated 10 percent in the first half of 2024, according to the FBI. This drop is “certainly nowhere near as fast” as the drop in murder, writes Asher. But unlike murder, he adds, overall “violent crime didn’t rise a ton in 2020.” It has “largely returned to the 50-year lows seen a few times over the last decade, and is down more than 50 percent from where it was at peak in the 1990s.”

The 2023 FBI data gives us a pretty good sense of recent crime trends, but it’s important to note that the latest figures from the first six months of 2024 are more preliminary—law enforcement agencies have until the end of the year to correct any mistakes. So take these figures with “a grain of salt,” writes Asher: It’s likely that the numbers won’t be quite as great by the end of the year.

Still, there’s a lot to celebrate right now: “Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline,” he summarizes. “Violent crime is down a fair amount…and will likely be the lowest reported violent crime rate since 1969…And property crime is down a ton thanks to the massive decline in motor vehicle theft following several years of huge increases.”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was convicted by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court jury Monday evening, the latest fallout from the state’s 2020 “ghost candidates” scandal.

Artiles was convicted on three felony counts related to $44,000 in payments he made to Alex Rodriguez, a no-party candidate whose role was to siphon votes from Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democratic incumbent. The six-member jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching its verdict. Artiles was acquitted on a fourth count of aiding and abetting a false voter registration. Artiles sat stone-faced as the guilty verdicts were read.

“They won. They were successful. They beat JJR,” public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen said in his opening argument. “They beat the incumbent named Rodriguez.” 

“They stole an election,” he said. 

Artiles’ defense attorney Frank Quintero had reminded jurors that ghost candidates are legal “so long as Florida election law is not violated.”

But that’s precisely what the jury found. 

Florida Power & Light’s then-CEO Eric Silagy had instructed underlings to make Florida state Sen. Jose Rodriguez’s life “a living hell.”

The term “ghost candidate” is used to describe a candidate who has no chance of winning, but runs to harm an actual contender’s chances. Ghost candidate Rodriguez was part of an opaquely funded 501(c)(4)—or “dark money”—effort enabled by consultants working for Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of the NextEra utility conglomerate.

Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had ordered his underlings to “make [Sen. Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” Silagy retired abruptly in January 2023 in the wake of reporting by Floodlight and its media partners about FPL’s involvement in the ghost candidate scandal.

Artiles was charged with conspiracy, making campaign contributions above the $1,000 limit, and “false swearing” for instructing Alex Rodriguez—who actually lived outside District 37—on how to fill out paperwork to get on the ballot. 

Artiles, who faced up to five years in prison per count, sat quietly throughout the two-week trial. He was flanked by his attorneys, Quintero and Frank Quiñon. Behind him in the Miami courtroom was a revolving cast of friends and family.

The charges stem from efforts to achieve a Republican supermajority in the Florida Senate by running three ghost candidates to take votes away from Democratic candidates in key 2020 races. The spoiler candidates were backed, in part, by a series of nonprofits controlled by Jeff Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix LLC, a consulting company that was working for Florida Power & Light, according to reporting by Floodlight and other news outlets

The nonprofits in question were 501(c)(4)s, which are not required to disclose their donors’ identities, and the prosecution stopped short of tracing the money back to its original source. On September 27, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, of issuing misleading statements about its political activities.

From the utility’s perspective, as noted in our earlier, in-depth story on the scandal, expanding GOP dominance—by whatever means—would help fulfill the utility’s legislative priorities:

Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. 

The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

He was defeated by 32 votes by Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump.

Prosecutors said consultants implicated in the scandal had withheld records that had been subpoenaed. Key evidence in the form of hundreds of text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez also went missing, they said.

Much of the trial revolved around the credibility of the state’s star witness, ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who admitted under cross examination that he had a difficult relationship with the truth. To buttress his credibility, prosecutors laid out the broader effort to influence the 2020 election. 

Their first witness was a reticent Pat Bainter, a north Florida peanut farmer and powerful operative for the state Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

In a pretrial deposition, Bainter, whose company, Data Targeting, did work for GOP candidates, had acknowledged he paid Artiles $15,000 a month for six months for on-the-ground research in the District 37 race, including running a spoiler candidate. Bainter also acknowledged he sent a $100,000 no-strings-attached payment to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit controlled by Artiles. 

Testimony and evidence presented at trial revealed that Bainter held meetings with Artiles and Garcia campaign consultants who had a business relationship with Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix.

“There is no other explanation for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez,” the prosecutor said.

Garcia’s campaign manager testified that Bainter held the purse strings for that campaign. Bainter, too, testified that his company worked for Garcia’s campaign.

Rodriguez took the stand late on the fourth day of the trial. Prosecutor VanderGiesen showed him totals from the 2020 race, in which he got 6,000 votes.

“Did you come about getting those votes honestly?”

“No,” Rodriguez responded. 

Rodriguez, who had pleaded guilty to election-related charges and served six months of home detention and three years of probation, also testified that Artiles offered him $50,000 to run as a spoiler: $25,000 before the election and $25,000 after.

But he was afraid Artiles would never come through on his promise to pay, so he “fabricated” a series of business deals involving construction equipment, diesel engines and COVID masks to extract money from Artiles. He also asked Artiles to help cover his rent and his daughter’s private school tuition, Rodriguez testified. 

At one point, he admitted, he invented a story about a Range Rover he was going to buy at auction for Artiles, asking the former state senator for a $10,900 payment.

His reason for all the scams? “I was concerned I wasn’t going to get the $50,000.”

The defense grilled Rodriguez, working to establish reasonable doubt about the nature of his transactions with Artiles. They portrayed the former senator as the victim in a series of fraudulent business deals and requests for financial help from Rodriguez. “The evidence is going to show that Rodriguez is a con artist, a professional con artist, a pathological liar,” Quintero told the jurors.

On the stand, Rodriguez didn’t defend himself, replying to Quintero’s increasingly forceful questions in a quiet monotone. 

The key question posed by the defense was: Could the state prove—incontrovertibly—that the payments at the heart of the case were illegal campaign contributions? 

“There is no other explanation,” VanderGiesen posited, “for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez.”

When approached by a reporter from Floodlight, Rodriguez declined to speak on the record until the end of the trial. He took the reporter’s phone number and said he would call. As he walked down the escalator, he shot the reporter a wink. 

The reporter also spoke to Artiles shortly before the verdict was handed down. Artiles called the trial “a colossal waste of time.”

“The press won’t report what’s really happening,” he said. 

The reporter replied that he’d be happy to write the whole story—if he could ever find out precisely what it was.