Gregory Rodriguez faces 96 counts including rape, sodomy, sexual battery and rape, prosecutors say

A former correctional officer at the biggest women’s prison in California has been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting at least 13 inmates over the past nine years, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Gregory Rodriguez, who worked at the Central California Women’s Facility, faces 96 counts including rape, sodomy, sexual battery and rape under color of authority, the Madera county district attorney’s office said in a news release.

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people work in US prisons as part of their sentences, often without basic protections and for little to no pay

For more than two decades imprisoned in California, Samual Brown worked more than a dozen different jobs and was transferred between penitentiaries throughout the state – earning less than a dollar per hour. At the beginning of the pandemic, he worked as a healthcare facility worker tasked with disinfecting areas where inmates with Covid had been held. He wanted to quit his job – he had asthma and risked his life – but was told he “had no choice”. By the time Brown was released in December 2021, he had paid just $3,000 of the more than $37,000 in restitution he owed the state.

“That is tied directly into the same type of practices from slavery,” Brown, who is co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project, says. “That’s the same practice, the same energy, the same spirit that you see in this prison setting. A person can be on one plantation, and then they’ll be moved to another plantation, and you’ll never see the people who you were with ever again. They can separate you from your wife, separate you from your children, from your family. It’s the same way in the modern-day carceral setting.”