Edit Prison sex abuse goes largely unchecked

January 22, 2026

To the judges:

Over an 11-month investigation, InvestigateWest reporters Whitney Bryen and Wilson Criscione filed 120 public records requests and spoke to more than two dozen current and formerly incarcerated women to create the most thorough accounting of alleged sexual abuse in Idaho women’s prisons to date.

The story, “Staff sexual abuse in Idaho women’s prisons goes largely unchecked,” summarizes the most important findings of our “Guarded by Predators” series. The reporters identified at least 37 prison workers accused of sexual misconduct toward incarcerated women since 2015. Less than one-quarter of those workers were fired; a majority were allowed to resign shortly after the alleged misconduct or after it was reported. Only three of them were charged with a crime stemming from the allegations, and only one was given a prison sentence — which he ultimately avoided after completing a rehab program offered as an alternative.

The backbone of this project was a database we created that contained names of all known Idaho prison guards in the last two decades along with their employment status and reasons for departure. This database combined several different employee rosters that we requested from both the Department of Correction and the state’s law enforcement certification agency, with each roster having varying levels of detail.

Once combined, we were able to refer to this list to confirm names of officers alleged to have committed sexual misconduct based on our interviews or other records. We could track whether the officers resigned or were fired, if it came shortly after allegations were raised, if their license was suspended or revoked, and if they found another law enforcement job in Idaho afterward. We also used this list to track how many victims or witnesses had made allegations against each officer we were looking into. A number of guards were accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Ultimately, this is what led to our most significant findings of the series, which broke down a shocking number of officers who resigned immediately after being accused of sexual misconduct.

This required Bryen and Criscione to reconcile numerous gaps and discrepancies between records provided by different Idaho agencies. For example, missing names and other discrepancies required reporters to combine employee rosters provided by the Idaho Department of Correction and Idaho Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission, a task that took significant time and attention to detail.

To combine these large datasets, we used Tableau Prep, which allowed us to create a single Excel spreadsheet. That spreadsheet was transferred into software called Airtable, which was more interactive and allowed reporters to more easily organize the data remotely. Airtable made it easier to add names of accusers, link to other relevant records, create new filtered views and generally prioritize reporting tasks. For example, one of our Airtable tabs was a list of names of accused officers, and each row for the officer included names of victims/witnesses, with a link attached that showed that victim or witness’s allegations and any other officers they may have named. Meanwhile, we had a separate tab of all of our sources, sorted by whether they were an expert, a victim, a witness or some other kind of source, and that tab similarly had a column that linked to relevant guards.

This novel database, combined with extensive interviews with current and formerly incarcerated women, exposed how the Idaho Department of Correction and the state justice system allowed abusers to escape discipline, while victims faced retaliation, disbelief or punishment.

InvestigateWest is proud to nominate this series for the Idaho Press Club’s Data Driven Journalism award.

Sincerely,

Jacob Fries

Executive Director

InvestigateWest

bestinmedia.com

Edit Prison sex abuse goes largely unchecked