By Noelle Crombie
Oregonlive.com
ONTARIO, Ore. — Women who work at Oregon’s largest and most geographically isolated prison say they were reluctant to report misconduct by their colleagues, including groping and other unwanted sexual contact while on duty, out of fear their male counterparts would exact revenge and tank their careers, records show.
“The working environment is not friendly on women who speak up,” said one woman corrections officer who alleged a male coworker slapped her buttocks and kissed her in a control room.
Another said she quit because she worried about what her coworkers would do if they knew she discussed harassment allegations.
“Once you’re on the list,” she said, “you’re done and no one cares about you.”
Yet another said she would lose a shot at a promotion if other employees knew she had cooperated with a police investigation.
“Bye-bye career,” the woman told an Oregon State Police detective.
“The code of silence is very real,” she said.
The details come in two state police investigations into employee misconduct at Snake River Correctional Institution that exposed an entrenched culture among corrections officers to hide abuse and harassment.
One supervisor allegedly exposed himself to two female colleagues and was later fired. Another faced criminal prosecution for groping a female officer and a third retired while under investigation.
State police opened the investigations in 2023. Later that year, the Oregon Department of Justice launched its own investigation into racist, antisemitic, homophobic and sexist texts, images and videos sent by three tactical team officers at the Ontario prison.
The Oregonian /OregonLive reported earlier this month that the state Department of Corrections has moved to fire the men, but they all took protected leave, delaying any action.
In that investigation, Justice Department investigators met with 25 prison employees, records show. Ten refused to cooperate.
Corrections Department officials declined to make Superintendent Joe Woodland available for an interview to address complaints raised by women about the insular and dysfunctional workplace.
Corrections Director Mike Reese said in an interview that he has confidence in Woodland, who started at the prison as a correctional officer in 2001 and was promoted to the top job this year.
“This is a very large institution with a lot of staff that work there,” Reese said. “Most of them are doing exceptionally good work.”
Reese wouldn’t discuss the specific investigations and he didn’t directly respond to questions about the allegations raised by women who work at the prison.
Reese said he encourages employees to report misconduct.
“If you see something or know something,” he said, “you have a responsibility to the profession and to your organization to share that information.”
A Corrections Department spokesperson said Monday that the agency responded to the allegations in 2023 with mandatory training on harassment, discrimination and reminding employees that state policy requires them to report wrongdoing.
The prison employs about 960 people — nearly 80% Idaho residents and 72% men. It houses an estimated 2,700 prisoners at a sprawling 538-acre compound on the state’s far eastern border about 5 1/2 hours from Portland .
A majority of the population is serving time for crimes against other people, such as assaults, murder and sex offenses.
Experienced corrections administrators say the investigations underscore the importance of hiring people suited for prison work, creating an environment where employees feel free to report wrongdoing and moving swiftly to hold people accountable.
It takes only one or two people to damage the culture of a prison, said Hugh Hurwitz , a corrections administrator who spent the majority of his career in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons , including a 15-month stint as director.
“If people are afraid of retaliation, that tells me you’ve got a leadership problem because you’ve got leaders that, at least in the past, people believe they’ve retaliated, whether true or not,” he said. “If I’m the director, I’m taking a really hard look at these wardens and other leaders to figure out are they the right people for these jobs?”
Misconduct allegations
State police released their investigation into Fernando Rangel and Jose Garcia and a separate one of Jorge Garcilazo in response to a public records request from The Oregonian /OregonLive.
Rangel and Garcia were sergeants and supervised other corrections officers; Garcilazo was a corrections officer.
Police investigated allegations that Rangel engaged in “non-consensual sexual acts and harassment in the workplace” and allegations that Garcia engaged in witness tampering, records show.
State police investigated Garcilazo for “unwanted touching” of a woman coworker, records show.
Rangel and Garcia denied the allegations in interviews with The Oregonian /OregonLive; Garcilazo declined to comment.
Police redacted the names and jobs of the women that Detective Ashley Morcom interviewed during both investigations, though it appears that most worked in prison security. Nine said they experienced or saw harassment, unwanted touching by male coworkers, retaliation or other unprofessional conduct dating to 2021 and 2022, records show.
One reported Rangel bragged about his ties to captains and Woodland, the superintendent.
She said Rangel made inappropriate comments about her physical appearance and kissed her over a period of a week or two while on duty.
In an encounter in February 2022 , she said she was with Rangel in a control room and Rangel unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis and “placed her hand” on it, the report states.
The woman told the detective that “although she didn’t want to do things with Sgt. Rangel, she did not set good enough boundaries for it to stop,” the report states.
She told the investigator that Rangel used his “rank and power” to interfere with her work assignments. According to the state police report, she cited an instance when two corrections officers left her alone to guard a prisoner for about 90 minutes so they could “go hang out with Sgt. Rangel.”
As a separate human resources investigation into Rangel got underway, Rangel told the woman they “needed to have the same story” in their interviews with corrections officials about sexual contact they had at work, according to the report.
He directed her to say her frequent reassignments at Rangel’s direction were done to “accommodate institution needs,” the state police report states.
The woman said two other corrections officers were present during the conversation with Rangel.
“She felt bullied because there was a Sgt. and two other male officers in the room telling her she needed to lie for Sgt. Rangel,” the state police report states.
The ‘rat jacket’
A second woman said she drew attention from her male coworkers, including Rangel, after losing weight.
She said conversations with Rangel “would turn into some type of sexual conversation” and that he was “very flirty.” He repeatedly asked if he could touch her buttocks and she said she eventually agreed.
She told the detective she felt uncomfortable but “never told Sgt. Rangel to stop,” the police report states.
She described for the detective how in late 2022 she and Rangel were in a control room watching corrections staff deal with a prisoner when Rangel “pulled his erect penis out of his pants, grabbed her hand and placed it on his penis” and asked her to perform oral sex, the report states.
The woman “tried to keep eyes on the staff” and told Rangel “they can’t be doing this,” the report states.
She told the detective “this was not something she wanted or asked for,” according to the report.
In an interview with The Oregonian /OregonLive, Rangel flatly denied the woman’s claim.
The woman also said Garcilazo touched her, repeatedly grabbing her buttocks while they were assigned to the prison’s control room.
Garcilazo and Rangel, she said, were part of a “clique” with ties to prison administrators.
“She stated that due to this, she did not know how to handle the situation with Officer Garcilazo without making a mess of her work life,” the detective wrote.
The woman went on to say Garcilazo told her he planned to wait for her after work in his truck to “get her to have sex with him in the parking lot,” prompting her to ask another male coworker to escort her to her car “due to not feeling safe,” the state police report states.
She “broke down in tears” during the state police interview, worried that identifying Garcilazo would lead to problems.
The prison officer “stated if people at work knew she spoke about this she was going to get the rat jacket, be ostracized at work and have to do duties alone,” the detective wrote.
She said Garcia contacted her in the middle of the night on her day off to learn what she told police or human resources investigators. He urged her not to cooperate with investigators “because they do not have her best interest in mind.” He also told her he “wanted to see what side she was playing for.”
Reached by The Oregonian /OregonLive, Garcia said his phone records show it was the woman who called him. Garcia called her characterization of their conversation “absolutely absurd.”
“I told her she needed to do what was smart and she needed to do what was best for her and her family,” he said.
According to state police records, Garcia told the detective that he “willingly reached out” to the woman.
The woman said her experience at work led to a “major break down.”
“She felt people were touching her too much and people were only coming around for sexual interactions with her,” the detective wrote, summarizing the interview.
The woman’s fears about retaliation proved to be true, the report states. In a followup interview with the detective, the woman said her coworkers called her a “rat” and left her alone on a unit against standard practice.
“When she enters the break room everyone leaves,” the detective wrote.
The woman told the detective she received no “support from the high up management” after she spoke with police.
Filming sex on the job
Another woman who worked at Snake River told the detective that she and Rangel had a consensual sexual relationship that took place “both inside and outside” of the prison.
She said the two once made a video of her performing oral sex on Rangel while they worked in a control center of the prison and that they “both later deleted it due to knowing it was wrong.”
She said the relationship ended when she got a boyfriend and Rangel decided to “work on things with his wife,” the report states.
Three other women also complained to the detective about Rangel. One said he asked about her sex life. Another said he moved her to other posts so he could work alongside his “buddies.” One called Rangel “the conductor to a bunch of clowns that are always in his office.”
Another woman said she was harassed but not by Rangel. She didn’t identify who harassed her but told the detective that she quit over her treatment, saying she “had her butt smacked, boobs grabbed and nude cartoon photos” of her passed around among her coworkers, the report states.
Rangel, reached by phone, denied touching women without their consent. He said he did not have sex on the job with coworkers.
“I’m saying at Snake River, no romantic things happened, unwanted or wanted,” he said. “Nothing happened inside of work.”
Records show that it was Rangel who disclosed the offensive messages among the tactical team that led to the Department of Justice inquiry. That investigation concluded without charges.
Rangel said his coworkers then turned on him.
He said he showed investigators only a fraction of the problematic messages among tactical team members.
“There is a ton more” involving others on the team, he said.
He declined to elaborate or provide screenshots.
“Obviously, I’m not part of the clique because I turned in the clique,” he said.
‘Toxic work environment’
State police forwarded their investigations into Rangel, Garcia and Garcilazo to Malheur County District Attorney Dave Goldthorpe .
Goldthorpe declined to prosecute Rangel, writing in a July 2023 memo that he found Rangel’s conduct “completely unprofessional and inappropriate” but that the case lacked “enough evidence of anything criminal beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“He seems to have gone to great lengths to create a completely toxic work environment for all around him, which hopefully will be addressed by his employer,” Goldthorpe wrote.
Corrections Department officials fired Rangel late last year as a result of the findings in the state police investigation, a spokesperson said.
Goldthorpe also declined to prosecute Garcia for alleged witness tampering.
“It was suspected by the investigator, but my opinion was the contact did not amount to that,” Goldthorpe said in an email to The Oregonian /OregonLive.
Garcia retired early last year, according to the Corrections Department .
The prosecutor’s office pursued a case against Garcilazo for harassment, a charge connected to physically touching a woman at work, records show.
He pleaded guilty to a single count of misdemeanor harassment in Malheur County Circuit Court and was sentenced to 18 months of probation and seven days on a work crew.
The Corrections Department fired him in May 2024 for failing to maintain “a professional and harassment-free workplace,” according to a spokesperson.
Garcilazo declined to comment.
The Justice Department investigation spurred by Rangel’s disclosures eventually prompted the Corrections Department to lay the groundwork to fire three employees: Thomas White and brothers Steven and Samuel Main . White and Steven Main are sergeants.
The three men were placed on paid leave in December 2023 and continue to collect their salaries.
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