Female prison workers can sue IDOC over inmate obscene acts

By Scott Holland | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

A federal judge will let female Pontiac Correctional Center workers proceed with their class action accusing the state and Illinois Department of Corrections contractor Wexford of falling short of obligations to protect them from exposure to inmates’ obscene acts and sexual harassment.

The original litigation dates to June 2021 and now includes five named plaintiffs who worked for IDOC and Wexford as mental health professionals and nurses from as far back as May 2014 with two currently employed. Named defendants include Wexford Health Sources, the IDOC, agency Director Latoya Hughes, former Pontiac wardens Leonta Jackson, Teri Kennedy and Emily Ruskin, current warden Mindi Murse, former IDOC psychology administrator Kelly Renzi and Wexford Mental Health Services Director John Sokol.

In an opinion filed March 10, U.S. District Judge Jonathan Hawley, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, granted a motion to certify the complaint as a class action seeking “relief for themselves and other female medical and mental health employees of IDOC and Wexford at Pontiac for allegedly being forced to endure exposure to masturbation and other vulgarities and sexual harassment on a regular basis as a term and condition of their employment.”

According to the complaint, the reported incidents occur nearly daily. Workers accused the defendants of opting against corrective action and affirmatively acting to cause or increase attacks. The women say the situation constitutes violations of Civil Rights Act Title VII protections against sex discrimination and hostile work environments.

Hawley resolved a dispute over class and subclass definitions by including the word “female” before “employees” in definitions and further replacing the original term “nonsupervisory” with “non-executive.”

The workers say the proposed class as well as the subclass — those who worked at Pontiac medical or mental health departments through Wexford but not IDOC directly — each include more than 100 women. The IDOC challenged the sufficiency of the class size, but Hawley said the complaint meets required thresholds.

Regarding whether the class members had sufficiently common claims, both Wexford and IDOC invoked a 2021 U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, Howard v. Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which also involved female correctional facility workers and sexual harassment from inmates. The individual defendants relied on a 2012 Seventh Circuit opinion, Bolden v. Walsh Construction, a racial discrimination suit.

Hawley said although those opinions did turn on questions of whether harassment was pervasive or ambient along with the subjective experiences of individual litigants, the Pontiac workers are more specific in their allegations.

“First, they do not rely on an indirect theory of ambient harassment as the putative class was subjected to direct harassment by masturbation attacks from inmates at Pontiac,” Hawley wrote. “In contrast to the Howard class members, the class members here performed similar job duties to one another, performed those duties in the same locations in Pontiac (not a swath of females employed in notably different capacities), traveled throughout Pontiac during their shifts (not throughout dozens of buildings), worked with the same male maximum security population of inmates (not female and male inmates, maximum and minimum security, etcetera), and were allegedly subjected to the same singular crisis of sexual misconduct, namely masturbation attacks (not generalized inmate misconduct). Those are pertinent facts of this case applicable to the entire proposed class and subclass for the fact-intensive inquiry demanded for hostile work environment claims.”

Hawley further said the Wexford defendants’ contentions about whether the claims are common “cross the line into the territory of excessive consideration of the merits” of the case, which isn’t appropriate while ruling on certification. He likewise said IDOC failed to reliably demonstrate relevance of differences in the Pontiac case “between IDOC and Wexford employment, between mental health and medical employees, between assignment locations and inmate demographics, between training, between chain of command for reporting incidents of sexual misconduct, between duties among different classifications of medical staff, and more.”

IDOC also, Hawley said, distorted the typical tests of class validity “as articulated by the Supreme Court and Seventh Circuit. For example, IDOC argues class members experience alleged masturbatory attacks in different ways: some cell-front, some in group or individual therapy sessions, some in different locations altogether. The common thread is the crux of the issue — a ‘masturbatory attack’ — and, moreover, all the locations listed are located in the same place – Pontiac Correctional Center.”

In support of their commonality claims, the workers noted the formation of only one Sexual Misconduct Workgroup to address their concerns. They say that bolsters their allegations of “a singular, systemic crisis that has impacted the entirety of Pontiac,” Hawley wrote, also rejecting the defendants’ arguments insisting the class claims lacked typicality.

The individual and Wexford defendants didn’t challenge the adequacy of the named plaintiffs, but IDOC said one woman should be excluded for being a supervisor and labeled the group inadequate “because they do not include all 16 different types of medical and mental health professionals in the putative class,” Hawley wrote. “They more specifically argue that the proposed class includes employees in positions with the discretion to direct other potential class members to perform tasks that increase the risk of exposure to sexual misconduct, and it also includes class members who either blatantly disregarded directives to document sexual misconduct by inmates or rarely or never experienced it.”

Hawley rejected the argument, noting the workers’ allegation no one in either class was authorized to substantively address the crisis. He also said it was premature to decide the plausibility of the workers’ requested court orders and injunctions and said the defendants’ various arguments against predominance represent a persistence “in arguing difference the court has already concluded are not dispositive in their favors.”

Hawley referred the matter to a magistrate judge for further proceedings.

The female Pontiac prison workers are represented in the case by attorneys with the firms of Hertz Schram, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Hawks Quindel, of Chicago; and Dolan Law, of Chicago.