Prisoners of Lust: Inmate-Officer Relationships

This segment originally aired live on July 8, 2015. An edited version was included in a best-of episode of The Brian Lehrer Show on September 7, 2015. The unedited audio can be found here.

Brenda Smith, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University and project director for the United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections Cooperative Agreement on Addressing Prison Rape, discusses the fairly common but problematic sexual relationships between female prison officers and inmates. The most recent of these incidents gained national attention after two convicted murderers, Richard Matt and David Sweat, escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Upstate New York with the help of Joyce Mitchell, who worked as an instructor at a tailoring shop in the prison. Mitchell allegedly had a relationship with both prisoners, and says she had sex with one of the prisoners inside the maximum security facility.