Sex Cells

Last spring, when the Wyandotte County jail began locking down all its female inmates in maximum-security cells for twenty hours a day, the change seemed to be an attempt to deal with staffing problems at the jail. Officials had already closed two “pods” of cells in December and shipped out the inmates because the sheriff’s department and jail had too few officers on staff to properly handle the number of prisoners.

But when the sheriff’s department moved the women in March, it was also trying to reduce the “temptation” faced by male jail employees, two of whom had been sentenced for sex crimes the previous month.

“We had several officers messing with the women,” admits Undersheriff Rick Mellott. Mellott says he and the now suspended jail administrator, J.B. Hopkins, disagreed on how to handle the problem. “[Hopkins] was more concerned with arresting the deputies,” says Mellott. “But I told him, ‘Move the women inmates to one of these big pods so the opportunity isn’t there.’ The way it was set up, the temptation was there.”

In the minimum-security Pod C, where women who reported sexual abuse had been housed, inmates had been allowed out in the recreation area twelve hours a day. They were free to read, play cards and watch television. The inmates and guards mingled. But in the maximum-security pod, female inmates remain locked in their cells twenty hours a day.

Just before the crackdown, former jail nurse Wendell Berry, 37, pleaded guilty to a “sexually motivated” Class A misdemeanor: “mistreatment of a confined person.” He’d been fired in August 2000 and charged with unlawful sexual relations — a felony.

Dawn Wesselman, 33, the inmate who reported the sexual assault, told the Pitch that Berry had given her medication while doing his rounds on Pod C, then buzzed her cell shortly afterward, calling her to the nurse’s station.

Drowsy from the medication, Wesselman went. “He pulled my pants down, and I told him to stop,” says Wesselman. “That’s when he did what he did. He said, ‘It’ll only take me a minute to come.’ After he was finished, he said, ‘Pull up your pants and go back to the pod.’ I felt sick.”

Wesselman confided in another inmate with whom she had attended Bible studies; that inmate reported the assault to jail authorities. “At first I denied it because I was scared. I didn’t know how the deputies would treat me if I reported it,” she says. At the time of the assault, Wesselman had only a few weeks left at the jail before she was to be transferred to the Topeka Correctional Center to serve out her sentence on a forgery conviction. “But then I thought, ‘I’m not going to let him get away with this, because who knows who else he might do it to.'”

In February, facing a potential twelve-month jail sentence, Berry instead received two years’ probation and paid a $2,500 fine.

The same month, former deputy Ted Jones, 29, was sentenced to 41 months in prison plus three years’ probation after pleading no contest to two-year-old charges of attempted aggravated criminal sodomy and aggravated sexual battery. His original charges were rape and aggravated criminal sodomy of a female prisoner.

Wesselman served six months but did not expect sexual assault to be part of her punishment. “Sure, a lot of these women have been on crack or were prostitutes,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want with them.”

Lieutenant Walter Dobbs at Wyandotte County Jail says he investigated allegations of sexual impropriety against three deputies this past spring.

“I talked to the officers and the inmates who made the allegations. We polygraphed just about everyone and sent the findings to the district attorney’s office,” says Dobbs. “The D.A. found there wasn’t enough evidence to substantiate filing formal charges.” Instead, jail administrators handled the matter.

Sheriff Leroy Green Jr. fired one deputy caught exchanging love letters with an inmate. When two women accused another deputy of having sex with them, Dobbs ordered a polygraph of the deputy but not the inmates. (Dobbs declined to comment on the polygraph results.) The female inmates couldn’t give specific dates or times of the sexual encounters, says Dobbs, and the guard was cleared. Eventually, that deputy resigned.

Another inmate reported that a deputy had raped her in the “control tower” (also called the “tower room”), a central, glass-enclosed chamber on Pod C’s upper level. “When she was telling me the story, she was crying, the whole nine yards,” recalls Dobbs. “I thought it could be true.” But as Dobbs investigated, he found that the deputy had checked in at security stations with an electronic pass card as he went about his rounds. The records proved that he was on the opposite side of the building from the inmate at the time she said he raped her. Eventually, the woman admitted that her boyfriend, locked up in another pod, was behind the accusation. “She ended up giving me a copy of the letter from her boyfriend putting her up to it,” says Dobbs.

“Females make accusations like that all the time,” says Dobbs. “This has been happening in jails for years, but it’s hard to prove.”

One former inmate, Susan (not her real name), who was released this summer from Wyandotte County Jail after several months in custody, says that some deputies flouted the jail’s policy forbidding sex with inmates.

One morning in Pod C, Susan and two other inmates walked past the tower room.

“[The guard] had his back to us but it was pretty obvious what was taking place,” she recalls. “The girl was in front of him, kneeling down, giving him oral sex … Sometimes we’d see him slipping candy under her door.”

Another inmate flew into a rage when the same deputy didn’t give her the cigarettes he’d promised. “She started screaming,” Susan says, “telling everyone within shouting range what was going on, that he had played this girl and that girl and all of them, and she was sick of it.”

“Inmates have a con game going on 24 hours a day,” Dobbs says. “Anything they can get over on you, they will.” If both deputy and inmate are open to it, a curious intimacy may form between captor and captive, one in which each has something to offer.

“If you give [an inmate] one thing, even a piece of gum, it starts,” says Dobbs.

The sheriff’s department has a strict policy against deputies becoming overfamiliar with inmates, says Dobbs. Deputies were warned by Hopkins that if they had sex with prisoners, they would end up inmates themselves. “We all got the ‘keep it in your pants’ speech from J.B. Hopkins when we got hired,” says a former deputy. Sheriff Leroy Green has kept Hopkins locked out of the jail since July, risking criminal charges himself by defying a judge’s order to reinstate the administrator. Green says that Hopkins was fired — and later placed on paid suspension — because he was insubordinate and abusive to deputies and staff (“Jailhouse Knock,” July 26).

Dobbs insists there were other reasons for moving the women last March. In the larger pod, where female inmates are locked down longer, just one deputy from the short-staffed sheriff’s department can watch the cell doors from the control tower on the second floor. Reasons for the move were “not only about the sex, but so we can better monitor the units,” says Dobbs, who adds that none of the accused deputies is still employed at the jail.