Editor’s note: The article discusses sexual assault. “Guarded by Predators” is a new investigative series exposing rape and abuse by Idaho’s prison guards and the system that shields them. Find the entire series at investigatewest.org/guarded-by-predators.
If they hadn’t met in prison, none of it would have happened like this.
On the outside, Jamie Hamilton would have been polite to Derek Stettler, maybe have had “a conversation,” she’d later tell an investigator. It probably would have ended there. She would have avoided years of trauma. He might still be alive.
But Hamilton met Stettler in 2015 at Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center, one of three women’s prisons in Idaho that shield guards like him from consequences for sexually abusing inmates.
Hamilton was serving a two-year sentence for repeat driving-under-the-influence offenses. Stettler — 5-foot-10, balding and, as she remembers him, a “good Mormon boy” — seemed kind. “Brotherly.” They bonded over nerdy jokes and video games.
“He would always tell me, ‘You’re not the type of person that should be in here,’” she says.
It made her feel special. Human, in a place with little humanity. After two years, he told her to call him when she got out. “Absolutely,” she said sarcastically, with no intention of doing so. “Top of my list.” When she returned to the prison in 2021 after another DUI, both of them were going through a divorce, and their bond grew more intense. He passed her love notes, even called her mother to try to win her over.
He flirted, groped and kissed her in linen closets away from the cameras.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked her mom on the phone from prison, transcripts show. “Am I supposed to yell? Fight him off? Put my time at risk?”
Rumors of the inappropriate relationship made it to the warden, Janell Clement, who confronted Stettler. He told police later that it was his “chance” to come clean that he wished he’d taken.
There was no further investigation by the prison. His fixation on Hamilton continued.
In November, Hamilton was cleaning a bathroom when Stettler walked in. He unzipped his pants. The door closed and locked behind him.
“He whipped out his penis, and he grabbed my face and he pushed (me) onto it, and I looked at him with this face of just utter — like, I don’t even know. I just remember my face saying everything,” Hamilton tells InvestigateWest.
She wanted to “bite his dick off,” but both of them knew she wouldn’t, not there. “It felt like rape,” Hamilton would tell detectives.
He apologized after, pleading that she keep it quiet.
‘A big problem’
In recent decades, the number of women entering prison nationwide has skyrocketed even when compared to the rate of men — a result of stricter drug laws like mandatory minimum sentences for low-level crimes. But few states, if any, have committed to the mass incarceration of women more than Idaho, where the population of imprisoned women increased by 50 times since 1980, far outpacing population growth in the state, which doubled in that time. Today, Idaho incarcerates women at a rate higher than any other state, three times the national average.
And a year of reporting by InvestigateWest has uncovered the unjust reality for those roughly 1,300 women currently in Idaho prisons: Once thrown behind bars, they’re kept there by guards—mostly men—who control every aspect of their lives; who can harass, grope, and sexually assault them with confidence that it will be kept quiet; and who, if caught, receive a kind of leniency from wardens, police, and judges that the women — most serving time for nonviolent drug convictions — could only dream of.
This culture was described to InvestigateWest by more than two dozen women who say they were sexually abused or harassed by Idaho prison staff. And a review of prison records, police reports and court documents reveals how the prisons bury allegations of staff misconduct, leaving women vulnerable to retaliation within a system that views them as criminals even when they’re the victims of a crime.
In a statement, the Idaho Department of Correction disagreed with the notion that it has a culture problem.
“Protecting the safety and dignity of the individuals in our custody is a top priority, and we remain committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment for everyone in our facilities,” the statement said.
Idaho agreed to adopt the Prison Rape Elimination Act 10 years ago. The federal standards consider any sexual contact between a prison worker and an inmate to be sexual abuse, even if the inmate is willing in the moment. It calls for any potential criminal abuse or harassment to be investigated by law enforcement.
Yet wardens and departmental leadership routinely allow guards to quietly resign without treating the abuse as the crime it is according to federal and state laws, InvestigateWest has found. Most accusations of staff sexual abuse are never referred to law enforcement by the Idaho Department of Correction, according to public reports compiled by the state prison system in accordance with the federal standards.
Former employees told InvestigateWest that the department pressures guards to resign in exchange for dropping an investigation or avoiding one altogether, leaving their employment records clean and enabling them to take jobs at facilities in other states.
These patterns can be found in men’s facilities, too. But women in prisons across the country are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse: A 2020 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found they are more likely than men to be sexually abused and harassed either by other inmates or by staff.
In Idaho, sexual abuse by staff is reported at higher rates in women’s prisons than men’s, according to an InvestigateWest review of annual reports that the department compiles for a federal auditor. Reports of staff-on-inmate abuse at Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center, the largest women-only prison in the state, were filed at about three times the rate of men’s prisons from 2021-2023.
There’s no centralized database comparing state-by-state rates of staff sexual abuse in women’s prisons. And the official numbers don’t capture the totality of the problem.
The Department of Correction provided only 24 cases when reporters asked for all sexual misconduct complaints against women’s prison workers in the last five years—a number that conflicts with the department’s own count in its annual reports mandated under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. After reporters asked about the discrepancy, the department provided a new list of reports, which still did not match the annual reporting data. Through police and court records, InvestigateWest identified more cases that had in fact been documented by the Department of Correction, but the department either could not find those records or withheld them from reporters.
“That’s a big problem,” said Julie Abbate, a D.C.-based attorney who spent 15 years investigating sexual abuse in women’s prisons at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Abbate helped write the standards of the Prison Rape Elimination Act and is a certified auditor. Prisons, she said, are supposed to retain that information and have the records for misconduct allegations readily available.
More concerning for Abbate is that InvestigateWest identified 59 documented allegations in Idaho women’s prisons since 2020. That number totals allegations recorded either by the department or other law enforcement agencies, and given how frightening it is for an imprisoned victim to file a report, it’s almost surely the “tip of the iceberg,” Abbate said.
When an investigation is launched, department policy allows victims to be moved away from other inmates and into segregated housing. In practice, many women said they were moved to the “hole” —small cells where prisoners are confined up to 23 hours a day like a maximum-security prison. Victims said it felt like punishment. The department says “restrictive housing is very seldomly used to house potential victims of sexual abuse.”
Of the 25 victims InvestigateWest spoke to for this story, many confirmed that they did not report their experiences for fear of retaliation. Others said they attempted to report misconduct through an “inmate concern form,” only for nothing to come from it.
Hamilton, too, initially chose not to report it. But what happened next briefly lifted the curtain of the typically opaque Idaho prison system. Hamilton wasn’t the only woman being sexually abused by Stettler. And Stettler wasn’t the only guard at Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center who was getting away with it.
Widespread abuse
Accounts from several former inmates and guards suggest that seemingly everyone around Hamilton and Stettler knew something was going on between them in 2021. But few saw Stettler as the perpetrator.
That reflects a common mindset described to InvestigateWest within Idaho’s prison system: that male guards are the victims of women manipulating them with their sexuality.
Former employees of the Idaho prison system often referred to abusive staff as being “compromised” by women under their charge who use flirting as a way to get what they want. Tim Higgins, who worked for the department for 30 years, oversaw all prison investigations statewide and conducted many of his own involving alleged staff sexual misconduct. He said inmates, especially women, view sexuality as a “game” to use against guards. Some women who perform sexual favors receive special treatment or contraband smuggled in by guards.
“They would do things like expose themselves intentionally right towards the door,” Higgins said. “That’s why I never worked in a female facility, and I only worked in the female housing units when I absolutely had to, because I did not like those games that were always being played. It was difficult. It was hard.”
Stettler saw it the same way. “I know that 99.99% of what they tell me is a lie because they are trying to manipulate me,” he’d later tell police.
But he also knew what he was doing with Hamilton was wrong.
“I’m an instructor, I literally teach people not to do this,” he said.
Hamilton’s mother could see the imbalance from the outside: Her daughter was a Ferrari, she said. Prison was Stettler’s only chance to drive one.
Hamilton emphasized that she never received any contraband from Stettler. Still, “people started saying it was my fault … that I was asking for it.”
One guard who also worked in the kitchen, Jennifer Urban, documented in her reports how obvious the relationship was becoming. Other inmates felt uncomfortable because Hamilton was “purposely putting herself” near Stettler, according to an Aug. 27, 2021, report. Urban declined to comment for this article.
The next day, Urban wrote that “the kitchen is in an uproar” about the rumors of a relationship with the two. Urban, according to the report, told Stettler to be “vigilant on where he positions himself” but told Hamilton that “her mannerisms are inappropriate.” Hamilton insisted she wasn’t trying to do anything like that on purpose.
Both reports were reviewed by the warden, Clement. (The warden declined to comment for this story.)
A few months later, in November, Hamilton said she sought help from Urban after Stettler followed her into the bathroom and forced her to perform oral sex.
“She pretty much shut me down, called me a liar and said that it was probably my fault and that I asked for that kind of behavior,” Hamilton said.
Urban, however, later wrote in a report that no one had acknowledged or talked to her about her previous reports of the relationship.
“I assumed it either wasn’t a big deal, or it had been looked at and the issue been dropped,” she wrote in the November report. She then detailed several examples she witnessed of inappropriate behavior, including an instance in which Hamilton followed Stettler into an office. “I finally had to tell her to stop following Stettler around like a puppy-dog,” Urban wrote. But she added that she has told Stettler on “several occasions” to stop putting himself where there are no cameras.
It was around this time in late 2021 that Clement had a conversation with Stettler about the suspected relationship, according to Stettler’s statement to police. The Department of Correction, however, did not provide records of this conversation. Hamilton said she remembered being told twice that year there was some kind of investigation being done into Stettler, but then nothing came of it. Whatever inquiries occurred did not involve interviewing her, she told InvestigateWest.
The prison finally launched an investigation the following spring on March 12, 2022, when Urban filed a fourth report, and another inmate reported that Hamilton and Stettler had been “in a relationship.”
The Idaho State Police soon followed with its own investigation. Together, the investigations revealed evidence of widespread sexual abuse in the prison that the state had let disappear without further inquiry.
The investigators discovered Stettler was sexually abusing a different woman in the summer of 2021. In addition, Hamilton told state police detectives that she knew of another sexual relationship between an inmate and a sergeant who resigned roughly one year after she gave her statement to police. Another witness in the investigation said a different officer had a sexual relationship with an inmate a few years earlier, with the witness saying that officer and Stettler would cover for each other. That officer had already resigned by the time the Stettler investigation had launched. InvestigateWest identified two other officers who were fired or resigned shortly after they were accused of sexual misconduct in 2022 and 2023.
In 2021 and 2022, the Department of Correction’s annual reports showed nine allegations of sexual abuse by staff, and all of them were deemed “unfounded” or “unsubstantiated.” That’s despite two officers, including Stettler, being charged criminally with sexual contact with a prisoner for incidents during that period.
The second charged officer, Pocatello prison guard Alveris Tomassini, was arrested after touching an inmate’s genitals through a cell door in 2022. The victim, Korena Weymouth-Bell, tells InvestigateWest that she had a romantic relationship with another guard at the prison named Brennan Horton. The pair passed notes back and forth for six months before Weymouth-Bell’s roommate reported it, she said. Horton, who could not be reached for comment, had also been named by a witness in the Stettler investigation who accused him of trying to follow her into a closet. Horton resigned on Oct. 7, 2022, for “personal” reasons, according to department records.
“There’s been quite a few, and it’s not just me,” Weymouth-Bell said, referring to sexual relationships between staff and inmates. “It happens quite a lot, actually.”
The Department of Correction declined to answer any questions regarding the Stettler investigation.
Marnie Shiels, a former Justice Department attorney adviser who specialized in the Prison Rape Elimination Act, says the federal law does little on its own to change prison culture around staff sexual misconduct. Each prison can choose its own federal auditor, and some of those auditors simply read the prison’s policies instead of talking to victims and digging into how those policies are actually implemented.
Idaho prisons, she added, are not alone in holding victims responsible for their own abuse.“It’s a consistent problem,” Shiels says. “I’ve seen policies that even have that language referring to them as criminals. And it’s like, yes, in some other contexts, they’re criminals. But in this context, you’re talking about a victim, or an alleged victim.”
In the dark
The flurry of allegations that arose around Stettler surfaced through investigatory records from the Department of Correction and Idaho State Police.
But Pocatello isn’t the only Idaho women’s prison to see clusters of guards resign following alleged sexual misconduct. Former inmates and employees describe similar periods of upheaval due to staff sexual misconduct at South Idaho Correctional Institution and South Boise Women’s Correctional Center.
The accusations against most of those guards, however, never came to light. An Idaho prison policy, known as “resignation in lieu of discipline,” suspends the disciplinary process for misconduct once an employee quits. When an employee chooses to avoid a discipline by resigning, Idaho’s prison system notes the decision in its personnel files, which are not public record, leaving victims without justice and future employers in the dark. Officers, meanwhile, avoid facing rape allegations.
The department says “we do not encourage employees to resign. We encourage them to participate in the investigation,” and it says those reviews continue even if the employee resigns and is no longer obligated to answer questions. If misconduct is found, it is “documented,” though the department would not release those records, or say where it is documented or who has access to that information.
InvestigateWest has identified at least 18 prison guards who resigned or retired after allegedly sexually abusing incarcerated women since 2015. Eight others were fired. The Department of Correction said it could not provide complaints or investigations regarding officers.
Prison investigation records are included in criminal files if law enforcement investigates, but the prison system refers very few sexual abuse allegations to police, despite federal standards that say all allegations should be investigated criminally. Only three women’s prison guards have been criminally charged with sexual contact with an inmate since 2015.
Abbate, the certified prison auditor and attorney, said all of this points to a “really, really troubled culture.”
“The indicator that 18 of the workers resigned shortly after the misconduct was reported is super telling. Folks don’t tend to resign if there’s not something there,” she said.
Co-workers or superiors of the accused are typically the first to investigate abuse complaints. Prison employees deem some allegations serious enough to tap the department’s Special Investigations Unit to avoid a conflict of interest. All complaints, including those accusing an inmate of sexual assault, should trigger a notification to the Department of Correction’s Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator. (That role is currently vacant after Teresa Jones, who previously held the job, left the agency in August.)
If it’s an inmate accused of sexual abuse, the coordinator will refer it to police no matter what, substantiated or not, the annual report says. If it’s a prison worker, not an inmate, accused, then the coordinator will only refer it to police if the prison’s own investigators find evidence to substantiate the abuse, according to the department’s most recent annual report.
That falls short of the federal standard, and prison staff hardly investigate allegations before closing cases and deciding not to tell police. Of all the staff sexual abuse or harassment reports that the department provided from women’s prisons since 2020, more than three-quarters were marked “unsubstantiated” or “unfounded” with little evidence of an investigation done, records show.
Idaho isn’t alone in allowing accused abusers to quietly leave their jobs and avoid facing more severe consequences. Nationwide, nearly one-third of substantiated incidents of staff sexually abusing inmates resulted in the prison worker resigning before an investigation was complete, a 2024 Department of Justice report shows. In 38% of substantiated incidents, accused staff were fired or otherwise lost their jobs, according to the national report which analyzed 2019-2020 data.
Higgins, the former lead investigator for the Idaho Department of Correction, said prison investigators “are much more aggressive and much more able to find out the truth than they would be someplace else.”
He pointed to video evidence from cameras placed throughout Idaho prisons and the swiftness and ease of conducting interviews, searching inmates’ cells and confiscating personal items for evidence without a warrant.
“If somebody wanted to search your house at home, they would have to get a warrant,” Higgins said. “With an inmate, I say, ‘I want you to go remove John from his cell and put him into the rec yard right now and then … I want every piece of paper removed from his property. I want to look at every piece of paper.’ And I could take all day and do that, and I did that without a warrant. It’s a warrantless search, because it’s our job to provide oversight.”
But staff know where the blind spots are, women told InvestigateWest. Several current and former inmates said guards used closets, vehicles, staff break rooms or offices without cameras to intimidate and coerce them. To unearth evidence in those cases, investigators may need to lean more on the victim’s account. But victims say they’re not always given the chance to provide information that might prove their allegations.
Five women who filed complaints against prison workers in the summer of 2024 told InvestigateWest that they were never interviewed by investigators or updated on the results of an investigation. A year later, in July 2025, a guard who was monitoring inmate emails saw a message from one of those women, Donya Tanner, telling an InvestigateWest reporter that no one had investigated her complaint. A week after that, the guard informed Tanner that an investigation had occurred, but it was closed.
The Department of Correction either could not find or withheld those investigative records requested by the news organization.
‘Culture of retaliation’
When the Pocatello prison began investigating Stettler in spring 2022, Hamilton was transferred to South Idaho Correctional Institution in Boise. Within months, prosecutors charged Stettler with rape.
Hamilton was ostracized by other inmates who called her a “rat” or “teller” after Stettler got fired. She was unable to go to the work center, a minimum-security area. She remembers a lieutenant one day telling her it was because of her “indiscretions at previous facilities,” and that staff was not supposed to be alone with her because she “might claim that they raped” her.
In December, an arrest warrant was issued for Stettler after he missed a court hearing. Detectives went to his house to investigate and found his car in the driveway covered with snow. Another guard and Stettler’s son also lived at the house, but they said they hadn’t heard from Stettler in two days, according to a police report. Detectives searched a shed in the backyard and found Stettler dead—an obvious suicide. His death made the news, and word spread throughout the prisons.
Hamilton was blamed by staff.
“I was called a murderer,” she says. “A black widow.”
“A lot of the higher up officers were ruthless, just absolutely ruthless with her,” said Joslin McNeece, who was an inmate at South Idaho Correctional Institution then. Monica Bowman, a fellow inmate at that time, said prison staff “definitely treated (Hamilton) differently than the rest of us.”
Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick, promoted this year from her previous role as deputy director, said accounts like Hamilton’s don’t represent reality for most women in state prisons. If you were to ask random female inmates about their experience, she says, “you’re not going to find a culture of retaliation.”
She adds, however, that “there’s much more we could be doing to shift the environment and the interventions that we provide for women.” She says the prison system has largely been designed around men, and the department as a whole needs to recognize that women enter prison typically for different reasons.
“There’s a whole gender-responsive initiative that we’ve been kind of working on, on a slow burn, that I think could be scaled up,” Derrick said. “As it relates to (the Prison Rape Elimination Act), I think one of the main things that I would say we should do is, obviously, have a little bit more transparency around what the heck is happening.” Hamilton is convinced there needs to be bigger changes.
Before she was in prison, Hamilton was studying forensic psychology, preparing to become a lawyer.
Since her release, she has gone back to school and is finishing a doctorate in psychotherapy. She hopes to become a therapist for those in the correctional system suffering from trauma.
She sued the Department of Correction for failing to protect her from Stettler, and the state settled the case for $62,500. Much of it went toward attorney fees, Hamilton said. She says Idaho prison officials argued there “wasn’t enough evidence to prove I didn’t bait” Stettler.
It’s one of many reasons why she’s moved far away from Idaho. It’s also why she’s cynical about what it would take to enact real change in Idaho’s three women’s prisons. “An act of God,” she quips. Everyone from the ground up would need to be replaced, she says.
“In one way or another, it was known in all three facilities, all the way up, what was going on,” she says. “And they chose to overlook it.”
InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates. This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Pulitzer Center.