Fraternities and sororities – but mostly fraternities – have faced decades of scandal nationwide: hazing deaths, binge drinking, sexual assault, among other problems.  Colleges respond with suspensions, alcohol bans and reforms, yet problems keep resurfacing like the recent allegation of a gang rape by fraternity members at Cornell.  Members and alumni argue that frats and sororities offer friendship and connection that are vital in an age of loneliness. But others contend colleges should just ban Greek life. 

Guests:

• Doug Belkin, higher education and national reporter, The Wall Street Journal
• Jana Mathews, English professor, Rollins College, author, “The Benefits of Friends: Inside the Complicated World of Sororities and Fraternities”
• Max Marshall, author, “Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story”
• Nicholas Syrett, chair and professor, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison; author, “The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities”

Airdate: Friday, October 9, 2026 at 10 AM

Youth sports once gave opportunities for all kids to play, but the rise of club teams — which come with higher costs and are often backed by private equity — are pricing out many participants. California families spend some $2,000 a year for just one child to play a club sport, and nearly 60 percent of families nationwide say the costs have caused financial strain. What will it take to keep lower income kids on the field? We hear from reporters covering the issue across California, and a youth sports advocate who helped with the passage of California’s Youth Sports for All Act.

Guests:

• Katie DeBenedetti, reporter, KQED
• Alexander Nguyen, multimedia producer, KPBS
• Tom Bùi, coach at City Heights Soccer League in San Diego
• Renata Simril, ceo and president of the LA84 Foundation, president of the Play Equity Fund

Airdate: Friday, October 9, 2026 at 9am

In his new book, “Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State” author Michael Lewis profiles seven civil
servants who tried to stop Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, as it took a chainsaw to the inner workings of the federal government. As Musk slashed departments and jobs claiming he could cut 2 trillion of the almost 7 trillion dollars of federal spending, Lewis found dedicated federal employees struggling to protect their work. We’ll talk to the Berkeley based author about the IRS employee who kept sensitive tax data from being exposed, the security guard who blocked DOGE from entering a federal building and taking over the US Institute of Peace and other acts of workplace resistance.

Guest:

• Michael Lewis, author, most recent book is “Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State”, other books include “Moneyball” and “The Big Short”

Airdate: Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 10 AM

Californians in this fall’s election will consider Proposition 39, which asks whether voters should be required to show ID when they cast a ballot. Supporters argue the rules are common-sense safeguards essential for restoring public confidence in elections, while opponents contend they pose identity theft risks and disproportionately disenfranchise low-income, minority, and young voters. We’ll unpack the cases for and against Prop 39 with KQED’s Guy Marzorati and Marisa Lagos.

Guests:

• Guy Marzorati, correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk
• Marisa Lagos, politics correspondent, KQED, co-host of KQED’s Political Breakdown

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. The president has aggressively pushed for voter ID mandates and restrictions on voting by mail in an effort to rein in an election system that he claims, without evidence, is rife with fraud. So is California’s Proposition 39, which would impose stricter identification requirements on voting in person and by mail, an outgrowth of that? Or is it a common-sense measure to restore confidence in elections, as its supporters say?

Joining me to break it all down as you fill out your midterm ballots, Marisa Lagos, correspondent for KQED’s Politics and Government Desk and co-host of Political Breakdown.

Marisa Lagos: Good morning.

Mina Kim: Also with us is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s politics team as well. Hi, Guy.

Guy Marzorati: Hey, good morning.

Mina Kim: So start us off, Guy. What would Prop 39 do if passed?

Guy Marzorati: So Prop 39 would have put in place new requirements for voting in California. For voting in person, it would be presenting a government ID when you vote. But for the vast majority of Californians who vote by mail, it would be a little bit different. You’d actually have to write down a four-digit number from one piece of government ID. So that could be a driver’s license. You’d write that down on the outside of the ballot.

But there were a lot of outstanding questions about how that would actually work. Each of us would have to, if this passes, choose which government ID we’re going to be using as part of that vote-by-mail ID program. And so, in essence — and this would have to be worked out in some form or fashion — you’d have 23 million registered voters all basically having to re-register, pick which identification they’ll be using, so that when they do write down that four-digit number on their ballot envelope, it can be double-checked once the vote is cast.

Mina Kim: Would it also add requirements with regard to auditing or, you know, checking voter rolls?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, there’s another provision in this ballot measure that asks both state election officials, the secretary of state and county election officials to double-check whether the voters on the rolls are citizens. And it says they have to do so using, quote, “their best effort.” But that’s another area of this proposition that would have to be defined in the future by the state legislature. What does that mean for these election officials to be using their best efforts to check whether the folks on the voter rolls are actually citizens? I think —

Marisa Lagos: I mean, something they would argue they’re already doing.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, and the legislature would have to define that. And they could. It’s a Democratic-controlled legislature. The vast majority of members don’t even think that this proposition should be made law. You could easily end up in a situation where, if this does pass, the legislature basically signs off on the work that election officials are already doing as a way to confirm, under the way this measure is written, that folks on the rolls are citizens.

Mina Kim: Well, Marisa, who put this measure on the ballot?

Marisa Lagos: I mean, the main proponent is Carl DeMaio. He’s a longtime San Diego kind of politician. He hosted a radio show. I don’t know if he was quite a shock jock, but like sort of in that, like, right-wing radio, you know, and he really came to prominence in San Diego like 20 years ago when he was on the City Council and was kind of leading the fight to try to strip public employees of some of the retirement benefits. This was during a lot of concern about pension benefits being over-generous. And I think a lot of people, including Democrats, had concerns and felt that it needed to be reined in.

But DeMaio really angered a lot of public employee unions because he tried to actually claw back benefits that had already been promised to people instead of sort of making it moving forward. He went on, as I said, to kind of gain right-wing prominence with his radio show and then eventually has come to the state legislature. And he’s really the main person behind it, but it really is this coalition of him, other legislative Republicans. And then now we’re seeing a lot of support from national figures from, like, the MAGA movement who are pouring in money and supporting this.

Mina Kim: And what does DeMaio say about why this proposition is needed?

Marisa Lagos: You know, I think DeMaio understands the politics of the state better than probably the president. So I will say this is a far less sort of extreme measure than what Trump has been pushing. But he’s making the same arguments, right, that there’s fraud in our system, that we need to ensure that, you know, everybody who’s voting is a legitimate citizen. And I mean, it’s the same argument we’ve been hearing from Trump, I would say.

Guy Marzorati: But to Marisa’s point, DeMaio has, you know, gone on media throughout the state making the pitch for Prop 39. And I think in a lot of forums, he’s presented it as a way to kind of silence critiques about voter fraud. I mean, in one instance, he said, if you want to shut up the people who are raising these conspiracy theories, pass Proposition 39 and then they won’t be raising them anymore. Which would be still open. I don’t think he’s, you know, run that by the president. You know, I think that’s still an open question. But he’s, I think, in trying to appeal to folks beyond Republicans, have said, look, all this discussion about trust in elections and voter fraud will end if we pass Prop 39. I think there’s a lot of research that points to voters’ feelings about the security of elections being driven much more by bipartisan messaging than by actual voter laws.

Mina Kim: Is this measure, you know, in coordination with President Trump?

Guy Marzorati: President Trump has not explicitly endorsed Proposition 39. He did say in early 2025, after those wildfires in Southern California, that California’s ability to get federal funding should come after the state passes voter ID. So he’s expressed support for California to enact some kind of system of voter ID. He has not explicitly endorsed Prop 39 since it made it to the ballot.

Marisa Lagos: And I would argue that that’s intentional. Right? Trump’s historically unpopular here in California. I think that there’s a real sense that him — he is already so associated with these efforts that I think if you look at the polling and the way Democrats are responding, they’re probably making that connection anyway. But I think it’s likely that folks like DeMaio were sort of like, maybe just stay out of this one.

Mina Kim: So then let’s talk about the opponents. What do they say is wrong with requiring voters to show ID when they cast a ballot or to write that kind of information on a ballot envelope that they’re mailing in, Guy?

Guy Marzorati: I think the most common argument you hear against Prop 39 is that it’s a solution in search of a problem. We don’t have voter fraud occurring throughout California. Why is there a need, then, they would argue, to enact a new system that is purported to crack down on that fraud?

I think you also hear arguments about how this would add — you can call it hassles, you can call it hurdles — to actually voting by mail. I think that the piece of this that relates to in-person voting is much more simple and straightforward, right? Right now, when you go to vote in person, you usually sign the poll book next to your name. That’s not really checked. This would actually make it more secure in that case to vote in person because you’d be presenting ID.

But again, the vast majority, 80% in our last general election, voted by mail. So when you’re talking about this in California, we really have to talk about this through the lens of vote by mail, and it would create new systems to vote by mail. Again, writing down that four-digit number, where is that number coming from, having people pick that — it would add these new complications and these new systems to voting by mail. So it’s a very different conversation when you’re talking about voter ID in California than in the rest of the country, where we don’t have as much prevalence in a lot of states of vote by mail, and you see most states in the country do have some sort of voter ID.

Mina Kim: So it would be the last four digits of a Social Security number and your entire driver’s license number, or?

Guy Marzorati: So it could be any government ID. You would get to pick that, which ID you use.

Mina Kim: But you would have to stick with it, which is, I think, part of the concern. Yeah, the other reason I’m asking is because opponents have also raised concerns about identity theft related to this.

Guy Marzorati: Right. Because this number would be on the outside of your ballot envelope. So there are concerns that if you’re writing down the last four digits, let’s say, your driver’s license, with your signature there, could that open the door to identity theft?

I also think when you’re talking about this through the context of vote by mail, there are already a lot more security checks with vote by mail than voting in person. Again, when you vote in person, you sign that poll book. No one’s really double-checking that. When you vote by mail, that signature that you sign on your ballot envelope is being checked against your signature on file. That’s part of why it takes longer to count the vote in California.

But those security measures are already in place, and I think opponents of Prop 39 would say, well, then why do we need this whole new system involving writing down this number on the envelope?

Mina Kim: Yeah. The other thing that they raise are issues about voters of certain groups being disproportionately affected, right? Low-income —

Guy Marzorati: Young voters.

Mina Kim: Talk about that.

Guy Marzorati: Absolutely. I mean, I think any time we talk about voter access and hurdles to voting, young voters are oftentimes the most impacted. And that can be for a variety of reasons, being new to the experience of voting, moving around, changing addresses.

When we talk about votes that get rejected in California, oftentimes because ballots arrive too late, or there are signature issues, younger voters are overrepresented in that pool of ballots that tend to get rejected. And so I think the concern here with Prop 39 is, again, you add potentially this new requirement of having to select a form of identification that young voters would be the most impacted by that. Maybe not following up with that first request for, hey, you need to specify which ID you’re using.

Mina Kim: Let me invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, how do you feel about Prop 39? What are your questions about it? You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Or you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Douglas on Discord writes, “I don’t see a need for it. Voter fraud is incredibly rare. This costs money. Why spend money fighting something that almost never happens?”

Discord user Steve writes, “I would support voter ID laws, but only after we make the big push, likely a multi-year effort, to get adequate IDs into the hands of everyone qualified to vote. Otherwise, it’s just another form of an illegal poll tax.”

Guy Marzorati: That’s a great point about having a universal ID for this, because the way Prop 39 is written is that any voter can request a voting ID, basically can ask the state, hey, you’ve passed Prop 39, can I have a voting ID? But it wouldn’t be just sent by default to everybody. So that’s an important point that that listener raises.

Mina Kim: And Marisa, you know, Guy was mentioning — and you were mentioning — the fact that when, you know, votes are thrown out, if it’s not for fraud, what are the most common reasons the ballots get tossed?

Marisa Lagos: Yeah, I mean, people just don’t fill them out correctly, right? I mean, the signature matching is one thing, but often registrars really go above and beyond to try to ensure that if a signature doesn’t look matched, that they follow up with voters even, which again delays the count.

But I think that you have to do things properly. There’s a set of steps you need to fill out the bubbles with a black pen, right? Like, you need not a pencil, or I don’t think blue is accepted. Is that correct?

Guy Marzorati: In some cases, yeah, ideally, yeah.

Marisa Lagos: You know, you need to put it in the envelope correctly, sign it, date it. Like, there’s just all these steps. And I think that, you know, what people who oppose these types of voter ID measures say is, like, any — it’s already so hard to get people to vote. Like, any extra barriers are going to both, you know, dissuade some people from voting at all or potentially, you know, have others invalidate their —

Guy Marzorati: And I’ll say, I mean, we can just look recently to our last election in June. Almost 2% of all vote-by-mail ballots were rejected. And the biggest reason was they didn’t arrive on time. You know, people waited a long time to vote. And in some cases, that ballot just was not postmarked by Election Day.

Mina Kim: Yes, and interestingly, that marks a pretty significant increase, too, in the number of rejected ballots. But it sounds like you’re essentially saying, Marisa, that there is a robust process in place for vote verification, and also the penalties are pretty steep if you tried to commit voter fraud.

Marisa Lagos: Absolutely. And I mean, the reason we hear about voter fraud is because it’s so rare that when it does happen, it gets prosecuted. Right. And so I think, like, that’s something people who want these type of laws make, you know, hey, I’ve — say, oh, well, look, somebody registered their dog in Orange County. Well, she did it on purpose. First of all, we can talk about that later.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati about Prop 39 and with you, listeners. Stay with us. More after the break. I’m Mina Kim.

You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Proposition 39, a ballot measure that would institute stricter voter ID requirements. Voters would be required to show ID when they cast their ballot, in addition to when they register, which is what they do now, or to show some kind of identifying information on the outside of their mail-in ballot.

Supporters argue the rules are common-sense safeguards, essential for restoring public confidence in elections, while opponents contend that they would disproportionately disenfranchise certain voters, like young voters. It could also pose some identity theft risks with you writing information on the outside of your ballot envelope.

Marisa Lagos is a correspondent on KQED’s politics desk, co-host of Political Breakdown. Guy Marzorati is also a correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation. You can tell us how you’re planning to vote on Prop 39, your questions about it, and also what you want to know about the status of mail-in voting, which is very connected to this. And there’s been some recent developments around that as well.

The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Paul writes, “I’m a fan of the if-it-ain’t-broke, don’t-fix-it camp. We’ve had safe, secure, fraud-free elections for decades. Unless someone can come up with actual evidence of a problem with ineligible people casting ballots, I see no reason to create extra expense and inconvenience for both voters and election officials.”

So I want to take just a little bit of a step back and look at the status of the president’s efforts to restrict vote by mail. Not only because more than 80% of Californians now vote by mail, which I think is pretty incredible, according to the latest Secretary of State’s office, and would be affected by the type of rules that Proposition 39 would bring if passed. But also because there have been some recent developments that we can talk more into later, that the president has sort of changed his tune on voting by mail, even though he chooses to vote that way himself.

But let’s just sort of step back and remember some of the initial steps the president took to try to restrict vote by mail. There was that executive order in March that directed federal agencies to take a series of steps on mail-in voting. Remind us what some of those were, Marisa.

Marisa Lagos: Yeah, I mean, he’s made a number of attempts. I think there’s a previous executive order in 2025 as well, and that one’s the one this year sort of built on it. Essentially, there’s a couple buckets here.

I mean, one is that the federal government has been trying to force the states to essentially share their voter rolls with the feds and run them against, you know, whatever list the federal government has created of eligible citizens who can vote.

It’s interesting, the problem with this. I was just doing an event with David Becker at the Center for Election Integrity and Research, and he was saying, you know, actually, states have much more accurate information about you and I, like, because I think some people would be like, why shouldn’t we share this with the federal government? But the truth is, like, the feds don’t have necessarily your Social Security number linked to your driver’s license number linked to other information about you. The state does.

And so there’s been a huge pushback. Some Republican states have shared this information and handed over their voter rolls. States like California and many others, including some Republican states, have really balked, pushed back, sued. The courts have upheld that. So that information has not been passed on.

You know, another bucket was, of course, the SAVE Act, which he has unsuccessfully tried to get through Congress, which would have been a very draconian voter ID measure. That would have required, potentially, basically made millions of people, or at least hundreds of thousands, ineligible to vote because you would have had to have your birth certificate match your current ID. And obviously, for women who got married and changed their name, for people — there’s a long list of people who would have been affected by that. Again, even Republicans in Congress have not been willing, or at the least in the —

The biggest fight that we see play out most recently as related to that executive order has been around the Postal Service’s role, or historic lack of role, in sort of overseeing election mail. And so the president wanted USPS to essentially have its own list of eligible voters and only send ballots to those people.

So really injecting this federal agency that has never had any sort of contact with voting and elections into this entire process. Again, that’s been litigated. The Supreme Court upheld some lower court rulings, although mostly their decision, I think this is going to come back up, because what the Supreme Court said is essentially it’s too close to this election to do it.

Lower courts have also said, look, Congress would need to delegate this responsibility to USPS. The president wanted the Postal Service to create special envelopes that would be the only ones you could use.

There’s a lot of concerns about this, most notably that this is not an agency that has any training around this. And also that we do have a very prescribed legal system around who gets to touch ballots in our country. It’s called chain of custody.

Folks probably heard it brought up in relation to that case in Riverside where the sheriff, Chad Bianco, seized tens of thousands of ballots and was slapped down by the California Supreme Court recently. You know, the reason for that is, like, we sort of consider these ballots sacred once they’re being, you know, before they’re counted, and even afterward, they are a record of, you know, what’s at the heart of our democracy. And if you break that chain of custody, it can undermine election results.

So I think the USPS stuff has really raised a lot of concerns. And again, you know, obviously, the president’s most loyal supporters are behind him. But I really think you have to look at how many of these election officials, a lot of whom are nonpartisan right on the local level, but also Republican secretaries of state in some cases, have stood up and been like, get out of here, we do not want the federal government messing with a system that goes remarkably well given how many —

Mina Kim: Vote. The other thing that’s shaken voters, right, Guy, was the fact that there was a USPS whistleblower who basically said that the agency was sort of preparing to follow Trump’s executive order to some extent even though it had not been determined in the courts whether this was legal.

Guy Marzorati: Right. To push ahead with it regardless. And I think a big question, and Marisa raised as well, is just about the information that the federal government has versus the state has. And this executive order not only would have required states to put together a list of eligible voters, it also would have given the Department of Homeland Security a role in creating a list.

Mina Kim: Have, like, approved voters, right, who would receive ballots. Right. And basically —

Guy Marzorati: Right, and basically double-checking between those two lists, what the state provides to the feds and the list the federal government puts together. And to Marisa’s point, the information that the Department of Homeland Security might have to put together such a list could potentially be incomplete.

And so then you’d have basically them going between the state information, federal government information, and a big picture giving the USPS more power over vote-by-mail that they’ve never really had. I mean, the states have always had the authority over administering elections. This would have been a real departure from that in granting the USPS this authority.

Mina Kim: And then, Guy, there was also that recent investigation from ProPublica that the Trump administration would have disrupted mail-in voting even further by requiring ballots to be delivered through certified mail. What would that have meant?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, in practice, like, how that actually would have worked, given the timelines of getting ballots out. Yeah, signing for the ballot as you would for certified mail. So, you know, I think — and especially the time — I think we have to think about, like, the timeline of a lot of these executive orders and the litigation around them. Ballots are ready, going out. I mean, in some states, they’ve been sent out. In California, this is the week where a lot of people are receiving their ballots in the mail. The court of the Supreme Court has always been hesitant to adjudicate election-related issues close to an election, and we certainly are close to election, given how many Americans already have their ballots and —

Mina Kim: Let me go to some calls coming in. Omar in San Francisco, go ahead. You’re on.

Omar: Hey, Mina. So this is just another attempt in a roundabout way of the Orange Foolius trying to create issues with the process that works. You know, absolutely great. They’re basically, and I hate to use this term, you know, Henny-Pennying or Chicken Littling the voting process to create a sense of fear or even complacency where they’re like, okay, we just don’t even wanna deal with it. And I think it’s just gotten ridiculous.

Like, we’ve been put up with this for four years once. We’re about two years through the process again. I know we’ll survive as a country. But how — how bad will we be after, you know?

Mina Kim: Well, Omar, thanks for sharing where you’re at. I think you’re not alone.

Babesh writes, “The whole issue of voter fraud is a big lie perpetrated by Donald Trump. It’s sad that we’re wasting so much national energy and time discussing a non-issue, and it’s also corrosive in the long run to our democracy by reducing the faith in elections. The problem we should actually solve is how to get more people to vote in a democracy.”

Interestingly, though, the way this is polling — and was polling initially, too — it looked like it had a lot of bipartisan support.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, the polling around voter ID is fascinating because, taken in a vacuum, the idea of requiring identification before people vote, adding that extra level of security, is popular.

Even in California, I mean, Berkeley, this is the best snapshot we have of this. In the spring, Berkeley did a survey where they asked voters about just that idea: What is being proposed in Proposition 39, voter ID at the polls and also through by mail. Fifty-six percent of voters approved of that idea.

They then said, okay, well, what if we tell you a little bit more about the arguments for and against, some of the, you know, pros and cons that we’ve discussed on this show? It suddenly dropped to about even — 37% yes, 35% no.

Then they asked, okay, well, I’m going to tell you who’s supporting this idea and who’s opposing it. All of a sudden, completely flipped. Yes down to 39%, no 52%.

So we go from 56% yes to 39% yes based on who’s actually lining up for and against this idea. That 39% yes is exactly where Prop 39 is still polling.

So more than anything, I think this measure and this idea has been incredibly red- and blue-coded. As soon as voters are aware of the groups behind it and the supporters of it, their support for the idea plummets.

Mina Kim: Well, I think Lane is sort of related here. Lane in San Francisco writes, “I think many people may have the attitude that it is not that difficult to just show identification if you want to vote,” which we may attribute to the fact that it was polling pretty evenly initially.

Lane writes, “Please clarify for listeners the many reasons why it may be difficult for some people to get ID. What about all of the fire victims that have lost their documents? What about foster children that may not have access to their birth certificates and other documents required to get identification?”

So there is a step, of course, to prove that you are eligible to vote through the registration process, but yes, there’s lots of reasons that documents are tough to get.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah. And it’s why in many states, even states that have voter ID rules, oftentimes you’ll see provisions that voters can still bring forth identification that’s not like your driver’s license. Arizona, for example, you can bring a utility bill and, like, a bank statement. Others are more strict and they really will require a photo ID requirement.

But even states that have gone ahead and enacted voter ID, I think understand in some cases that the actual photo ID as the sole document you have to provide can in some cases be challenging for people.

Marisa Lagos: But I also think we need to put this in the context of our history and the voter suppression efforts that have occurred and have often been very racially motivated. I’m thinking about, obviously, coming out of slavery and the Jim Crow era and the idea that there are states in this day and age who will say, you can use your gun license as a voter ID, but you may not use a student ID.

And so, like, I think — again, I think some of the opposition to these laws, like, yes, it sounds sort of reasonable, and in some ways it is, right, to say, and we all do show an ID, we all prove who we are when we register to vote in California. But this is a country that has a long history of using these types of laws to particularly suppress the votes of certain populations.

And I just, like, I think we have to put that in context, and I think it also speaks to why, when voters learn more about this in a state like California that is deep blue, in this hyper-partisan moment, when people are so angry at the president, it explains why people are like, mm, I’m good on this, you know?

I think, like, this is not really as much on either side in some ways about the policy. It’s about the sort of moment and the distrust.

Mina Kim: If this goes down in California, Marisa, do you think that essentially this issue — it will be the end of this issue in this state? Or do you think that there will be an attempt to try to re-energize it and bring it back up later?

Marisa Lagos: I mean, that’s an interesting question. How many times have we seen ballot measures fail and then come back? I don’t know. I do think this is a bit of a canary in the coal mine for Republicans. I’m not sure we’ll see it come back right away. If it fails, I think it would depend on how close it is, what else is going on.

But certainly we are seeing national figures donate money on the right to try to push this through. The bigger thing would be if it passes, what lessons are learned from that.

Mina Kim: Interestingly, there was a piece in CalMatters, Guy, that was saying that these big donors who are watching the Prop 39 fight in California are contending that, yes, it may not pass here, but that they’re gauging how much it loses by. Why would that information be important?

Guy Marzorati: I mean, maybe they feel like, you know, this particular election, the turnout that we expect in November is going to be pro-Democratic, right, given the national mood. The idea that they would fare better in a different electoral environment — this is not polling within the margin of error right now, right? This is like the yes side is trailing in all available public polling.

I’m not sure a signal that it’s, you know, four or five points one way or another would make them feel like, oh, if we brought this back in 2028, we’d have an entirely different result.

Mina Kim: But my sense is that it’s probably not gonna go away in other states, that’s for sure.

Guy Marzorati: Right. I mean, we are seeing — I mean, just this year, there’s Arizona, Nevada, a handful of other states have voter ID measures on the ballot. Oklahoma, in their primary, enshrined voter ID into their state constitution. So this is a live issue on the ballot in states throughout the country.

Marisa Lagos: And again, it’s interesting to me because states like Georgia and Arizona, for example, have actually higher or similar voter turnout to what we do here. And they have pretty strict voter ID laws.

Again, though, I think, like, how something is crafted matters. I do think that in this moment when there’s so much concern over how quickly we count ballots here and the resource levels of registrars already not being where they need to be to do the work, like, this is going to add another layer.

And it’s sort of ironic because I think the same people who are pushing this measure are the ones who are screaming about how undemocratic it is and how problematic it is that we take so long to count our vote here in California. Well, this would just expand that further, and I think give them more ability to attack the integrity of the election.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, that’s not being talked about enough. We have this whole separate discussion about how long it takes to count ballots. Is adding a new — you have to write a four-digit number, have that be double-checked — that could add more time. If you show up to vote and you don’t have an ID and suddenly now you have cast a provisional ballot, that takes added time on the backend to check.

I don’t see anything in this measure that’s going to speed up the ballot count, which has been a very contentious discussion.

Mina Kim: It has been. I’m just curious what you make of that discussion. You know, if you feel like there are merits to the criticism of how long it takes for California to count its votes, you know, or others who just feel like, look, we’re a big state. We have a lot of people. We have a lot of different county offices and so on.

Guy Marzorati: I mean, that is true. It is taking longer because we are a big state in which a large number of people vote by mail and return those ballots on Election Day. But that’s not to say that it cannot be faster.

If there was more, you know, money in the system, if there were more people counting the ballots, if there were more machines to count the ballots, like, it’s not — you just say, oh, well, because so many people vote by mail, throw your hands up. It has to be this. I’m not — I don’t entirely buy that argument.

Mina Kim: We’re talking this hour about Proposition 39, the ballot measure that would institute stricter voter ID requirements when casting a ballot or voting by mail. Guy Marzorati is a correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. So is Marisa Lagos. She also co-hosts KQED’s Political Breakdown.

Listeners, do you want to share how you’re planning to vote, the questions you have about 39, the reasons you’re voting one way or the other, and what do you wanna know about the status of mail-in voting? The latest restrictions, the latest developments around that.

The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And this listener — Noelle writes, “I volunteered at a vote center for the primary election in June. The Registrar of Voters has made it a priority to get all eligible voters to vote. There are so many options of how you can vote. It made me feel glad. And working with the other poll workers who are naturalized citizens and who knew other languages was another highlight for me.

“One of the poll workers lived in a senior housing apartment complex and one of her neighbors came to vote. The voter was 94 and needed help from the poll worker neighbor. And it was heartwarming to see that this person felt it was important to vote.”

So just a heartwarming story about voting and the importance of it here in California.

We’ll have more after the break. Listeners, this is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Prop 39 is a ballot measure that would institute stricter voter ID requirements when you cast a ballot or vote by mail. Supporters say the rules are common-sense safeguards essential for restoring public confidence in elections. Opponents contend that they pose all sorts of problems, including potentially disenfranchising groups of voters and increasing the risk of identity theft.

Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati have been covering this and are talking about it with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786, at the email address forum at kqed.org, and on our social channels at KQED Forum.

And this listener, Jason, writes, “Prop 39 is a terrible idea. I’m already dealing with identity theft. The last thing I need is California making it easier for bad actors by requiring me to advertise the last four numbers of a form of identification.”

You know, we were talking about some of the things that have shaken people’s confidence in the U.S. Postal Service, and also about some of the issues related to the requirements around mail-in ballots, which nearly 90% of Californians now do, or at least did in the primary election. So vast majority of Californians vote this way.

So I wanna, well, first let’s clarify. Marisa, has anything changed at USPS? Will ballots be affected by any changes at USPS this election?

Marisa Lagos: I mean, yes, not actually differently from the primary, but yes, maybe since 2024 previously. Especially if you’re in a more rural area, there have been some changes to the way ballots are essentially gathered and processed that can delay when you get a postmark.

So it’s not just because you put your ballot in a mailbox on November 2nd, the day before the election, does not mean that USPS will put a November 2 postmark on it. And so I think, you know —

Mina Kim: So they’re postmarking when it’s received at the facility, when it is processed?

Marisa Lagos: And sometimes if you’re in, say, the Sacramento area or closer to Lake Tahoe, it might be sent to like a Reno processing center before it gets sent back here. So for the postmark. For the postmark.

So the bottom line is, like, it’s first of all, if you need to vote by actual USPS mail, I think the best advice these days is try to get in the mail up to a week before the election. Like, don’t wait until the days before.

But the best thing to do is either put it in one of those county drop boxes. Those do not rely on the postal service at all. The county registrar actually comes and collects those in most counties every single day at the end of the day. And they postmark the day that they were in the box. And they will essentially count it as being received that day.

Or you can mail — you know, take your mail-in ballot, take your time at home, love it, cuddle it, whatever you need to do, and then walk it into a voting center, whether that’s on Election Day or previously, preferably previously, because the sooner you get your ballots in, the less we have to hear national folks complaining about how long our vote count takes, right?

But you can actually — it’s called naked voting, I learned recently — where you basically go in and feed your ballot in at the voting center without the mail-in envelope in it. So there’s multiple options, and I think — but again, I think the ballot drop boxes, if you wanna vote by mail and you don’t wanna be hassled with finding a voting center, are probably the best option.

And then — there’s early voting in a lot of counties too. So you can actually just go in and, like, cast your ballot in person a week or two before the election.

Mina Kim: That naked balloting that Marisa’s talking about, Guy, that sounds like just a little bit different than what you say a lot of Californians do, which is drop off their ballot at the voting site the day of the election. This would mean actually taking it out of the envelope and having them process it right in front of you.

Guy Marzorati: Right, so that the processing doesn’t happen on the back end, so that it’s more akin to voting in person and that the vote is actually processed right there. That does help speed up the vote count.

I should point folks — our colleague Izzy Bloom did a great explainer on all the changes to USPS, how that might affect voting. Encourage folks, go to KQED, check that out. She talked to the registrar of voters in Sonoma County, who said, point: we’re not encouraging people to use USPS.

I do, I agree with Marisa, there’s so many drop boxes in counties. I mean, where I live in San Jose, the drop box is closer than the post office. And I will just — I’ll second that. I think if you’re voting close to Election Day, don’t be, you know, you would hate to be that person that you spend that time filling out your ballot, you return it, it ends up getting postmarked after Election Day. Just use a drop box.

Mina Kim: And I understand if you really do want to get that postmark or make sure you see that postmark, another thing that Izzy wrote about — and you’re right, that piece is excellent, and I highly recommend people read it — that you go in and get a hand-stamped postmark right there, right in front of you. Yeah, you can go into the post office as well.

Marisa Lagos: Again, these are adding the extra steps, so I do think, you know, I think it’s also just worth just thinking about making a plan. You know, like, what is my plan? Maybe it’s setting a time sometime the weekend before the election, if you don’t have time before then, or two weekends before, to just sit down and do this.

We have a long ballot in San Francisco and California in particular. I mean, there’s 14 statewide ballot measures. I can’t remember how many city ones this year, but add another handful to that. A lot of counties, you know, L.A. has a big mayor’s race. We have congressional races. There’s a lot to pour over.

A lot of these ballot measures are confusing in some cases on purpose. And so I think that giving yourself that time and then making a plan is really important. And it’s just, like I said, to do all that work and then to find out it wasn’t counted is just incredibly discouraging.

Mina Kim: And you can track your ballot once you put it out there so that you can. And again, if you want more details about that, listeners, that’s in the piece.

This is from Berkeley writes, “I’d always assumed that proponents of restrictive voting policies wanted to preferentially reduce progressive or Democratic turnout, but a more sinister interpretation seems more likely now. A desire to reduce turnout overall, making it easier for those in power to run roughshod over public interests in favor of politicians’ interests. Are there documents from whistleblowers or leaks that explicitly clarify the genuine intentions of those behind voter ID proposals?”

I don’t know if the person who blew the whistle at the USPS —

Guy Marzorati: I would say there’s, for this one in California, I would describe probably a few different motives. I mean, this is a policy that Republicans have championed across the country. I do think this was an organizing opportunity for Republicans, specifically Carl DeMaio. I mean, he started this group, Reform California, and they’ve gone through the process of collecting signatures to get this on the ballot, fundraising. So this really was a big grassroots organizing opportunity for DeMaio and Republicans in California.

Um, so, and as far as, like, fewer people voting, that is, you know, when the Legislative Analyst’s Office analyzed Prop 39 and said, okay, here’s where it would cost the state money. Here’s where we’d save the state. One of the ways that they said it could save the state money is just fewer people voting as a result of this, though the cost would still — this would still cost the state money from having to send out these new, uh, potential ID cards and, you know, the paperwork and —

Marisa Lagos: And then the registrars would have to do more work on the back end.

Mina Kim: Well, Corey in San Francisco writes, “What’s to stop the federal government from not sending ballots disproportionately to one party if the federal government gets more information, for example?” That was the only fear that was raised. Trump not sending ballots to Democrats or minorities or women, I feel like this — that’s his end game.

Okay, can we just talk about where the efforts to restrict mail-in voting will go from here, especially since its loudest champion for restrictions, the president, has recently been changing his tune and telling Republican voters to vote by mail?

And it’s really remarkable, you know, this shift. I just want to point out, like, he has said mail-in voting means mail-in cheating, and then just recently he posted this on Truth Social.

Donald Trump: Do not wait. Go out and vote. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day, November 3rd.

Marisa Lagos: Vote often, right?

Mina Kim: How should we interpret this sort of change of message?

Marisa Lagos: I mean, cynically, I think is fair, because we’ve seen this before, right? Like, he spends, you know, a year or two years trying to undercut confidence in our elections, claiming all this fraud, and then looks around and realizes on the eve of an election that matters to Republicans that, hey, this could actually depress their vote as well.

You know, we saw this in 2024 and 2022 as well, so I don’t think it’s anything different, and I would not expect that it means a change of heart by the president. I think what we are going to see is him continue to try to push some of these attempts at making it harder to vote and inserting the federal government into the elections.

If Republicans lose the House, and especially if they lose the House and the Senate, he’s going to have even less chance of doing that legislatively. So I think we can expect more lawsuits, more executive orders, and a lot of rhetoric.

I think that’s really important to note. And this is something, like, I just want to say, because we’ve been spending a lot of time on Political Breakdown thinking about and talking about election integrity. And I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to folks, nonpartisan experts on this.

And I think what’s really important is that so much of what the president has done, I think, is really aimed at scaring people, right? When you think about things like these sort of — this idea they floated out there that they might have troops or ICE at the polls, the idea that they may try to sort of come in and take control from states and counties, none of that is constitutional.

And even if, you know, there were attempts to do it, I think that they would be very limited and very much aimed, again, at sort of intimidating people and officials, not in actually being able to disrupt the election.

So the folks I talked to who have done this work for a long time say that, you know, we should have confidence that this election will go off well. I think the thing I’m going to be watching is what happens after the election. Is there any attempts to disrupt vote counts, to seize ballots? Are there any attempts, you know, to sort of mess with things when we talk about the seating of the House on January 3rd?

And if, you know, if Republicans lose, is the speaker going to try to do something to prevent Democrats from being seated? I think that’s a pretty far-off, you know, thing. But I do think we spend so much time thinking about, like, how do people vote? I want us to still stay on our toes and be watching things after the votes come in.

Guy Marzorati: And I think also a lot of this, like, you have to look through the lens of a pre-buttle. Even before Trump’s approval dropped to how low it is, the president typically does poorly in a midterm election. And I would think it would surprise no one if the day after the election he comes out and says, well, if we had only passed, you know, stricter voter requirements, we wouldn’t have had this, you know, Democratic wins in the House, the Senate, et cetera.

Mina Kim: It sounds like you’re essentially saying that, you know, timing-wise, there’s gonna be vote by mail in this midterm election, and he does not need people not voting.

Marisa Lagos: One hundred percent. You can’t — and you can change anything related to that within 90 days of the election. Like, that is established.

Mina Kim: And I’m sure there were members of his own party telling him —

Guy Marzorati: I mean, that’s not — I didn’t see the video, but it sounded like he was reading off a script. Oh, yeah.

Mina Kim: So, you know, essentially, I think that is part of it.

Let me remind listeners first, you are listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. But Guy, to Marisa’s point, you very much covered the attempted seizure — or the seizure — of ballots and the attempt to hold onto them by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, and that, you know, the state Supreme Court had made a ruling in that. Tell us what the ruling is and whether people should feel more confident that that is unlikely — seizures of ballots might be unlikely to happen here.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, so the ruling was basically that Chad Bianco, the sheriff in Riverside County, broke the law when he seized ballots from the 2025 election in an attempted investigation into what he purported to be potential voter fraud in Riverside County.

The Supreme Court both said that he had no right to do that, that there was a clear law as far as the chain of custody for ballots. Even in the course of an investigation, those ballots should have never been taken out of the Registrar of Voters office.

And the Supreme Court also affirmed the attorney general’s power to have tried to halt Bianco’s investigation. And I think that’s an important thing to keep an eye on, too. The attorney general really does have very broad powers in California, authority over sheriffs and district attorneys.

But this was one of the first times that court really confronted that question over the limits of their power over sheriffs. And it found that it didn’t set a limit. It basically said this was in Bonta’s authority to have told Bianco, stop this investigation.

That could be something with a tail to November or October if we see some kind of, you know, action leading up or after the election on the part of local law enforcement.

Because I do think state lawmakers, vast majority Democrats, are kind of caught in this push and pull. They’re trying to fend off federal efforts to intercede more in elections, but they’re also dealing with a lot of things popping up at the local level.

You know, Riverside County was probably the most notable example with Bianco’s investigation, but the state has also been in litigation with Shasta County, where there were efforts to restrict vote-by-mail.

So I think you see Attorney General Rob Bonta really at the fulcrum here between litigating against the federal government, trying to, you know, prevent changes to vote-by-mail there, but also almost in a whack-a-mole fashion banging on some of these local officials who, you know, he feels might have overstepped their — when it comes to involving themselves in the election process.

Mina Kim: Well, interestingly, Steve writes, “Since 1999, I’ve served as a poll worker in over 20 elections in three different California counties. Anyone who thinks elections are rigged or not secure should serve as a poll worker in just one election. I’ll bet they’d have a very different perspective after that. The problem isn’t with the security of elections on the county level, Steve feels. If there’s the potential for problems, it’s going to be from the intrusion of the current federal administration.”

We have another poll worker, Ruth, who writes, “I volunteer for VoteRiders, trying to get voter IDs for people who have the right to vote but lack the ID their state requires. There are 28 million people who meet that definition. It costs $50 for a birth certificate. You need a photo ID to get a Social Security card. You sometimes need a Social Security card to get the photo ID. So it’s easy to fall into a loop where you can’t get an ID. Add in those who don’t drive, the disabled, the old, the young. This is one party trying to make sure these 28 million voices are never heard.”

Certainly, we are hearing resoundingly, at least from our listenership today who are contributing, that they very much do not support Proposition 39 and see it as essentially, as you were saying initially, a solution in search of a problem.

Let me go to Laura in Lafayette, who’s on the line. Laura, go ahead.

Laura: Thanks. Thanks for taking my call, Mina. Yeah, I just want to say, you know, there are measures in place to combat voter fraud. And a friend of mine, whose son was studying out of state, she called him, filled out his ballot, put his signature on there — her signature on there — and got a call from the registrar and said, hey, you, this is not his signature.

So just for that, it was obvious that they’re looking at the ballots, they’re the signatures, and so there are measures in place.

Mina Kim: Well, Laura, thanks for sharing your experience.

And Joan writes, “No system is perfect. So a fraction of 1% of votes having problems is as close to perfect as anyone will ever get. If we had a crystal ball, Prop 39 would raise, not lower the voting problems, especially because it is not motivated by good intentions.”

Al writes, “I have to prove my identity at Wells Fargo to make a deposit. And I am a customer. My kid had to show photo ID to take the SAT test. I had to ID to register my car at DMV. Is my vote more important? All vote yes.”

That’s the first person that we’ve heard who’s going to vote yes. Thanks for sharing where you’re at with this, Al.

Claude writes, “I’m 76 years old and have voted straight Republican for 40-plus years. Never again. Voter ID is to ensure only Republicans can vote,” in Claude’s opinion.

Marisa.

Marisa Lagos: Like, it is interesting that it’s become so partisan in this moment. And again, like, I think historically that tracks with how things have played out over decades in this nation.

Although, to be fair, you know, back during the Jim Crow era, a lot of the folks in the South were Democrats who were trying to suppress the Black vote. I don’t think in itself voter ID is the problem.

But we have not had, like, a good sort of bipartisan effort to come together and figure out a way that would both sort of allow people to have as much access as possible and also have voter ID.

I think there are states that have voter ID laws that, you know, are perfectly reasonable and, like I said, that have very high voter —

Mina Kim: Turnout.

Marisa Lagos: I think the problem is, like, we just have such a problem with voter participation to begin with in our country and our state particularly. I mean, California does make it as easy as possible. And we still lag other states often in turnout.

And so that — that is troubling because our democracy does work better when everyone’s engaged. It does.

Mina Kim: And I think you were touching on this earlier, Marisa, if I may, when you were talking about our history with it. Fundamentally, too, there just may be different views with regard to who should vote in this country. Like, who should really be determining the leadership for all of us as a nation.

Marisa Lagos: I mean, I think we’ve seen that historically. I remember feeling like that in college, that there was a sense, you know, in a lot of college towns that folks who live there permanently were mad that college students got to say as well.

I think you see this often with the way people talk about, like, yeah, who should have a role in things. And, you know, we all get to.

Mina Kim: Well, Alona in Richmond writes, “As an experienced volunteer at the polls, I suggest everyone who has doubts about the process of voting in this state also volunteer. It is so much better to make these judgments from knowledge and experience rather than from ignorance and fear.”

We’ve been talking about Prop 39 with Guy Marzorati. Thank you so much, Guy.

Guy Marzorati: Thanks, Mina.

Mina Kim: And Marisa Lagos.

Marisa Lagos: Thanks, Marisa.

Mina Kim: My pleasure. And with you, listeners, my thanks to you always for sharing where you are and how you are doing on Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Airdate: Monday, October 5, 2026 at 9am

When Aliksandria Prout was released from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla in 2022, she set out to bring the correctional officer who abused her to justice. Her story — along with many other survivors of prison abuse — is detailed in a new series from KQED’s Snap Studios called “We Are Jane Doe.” The three-part series chronicles a two-year investigation by reporters Madi Bolaños and Anna Sussman into sexual abuse and retaliation at one of the largest women’s prisons on earth. We’ll talk with Prout about her experience as “Jane Doe Number One” in the high profile case against Gregory Rodriguez — and hear from Bolaños and Sussman about how the prison system has enabled this kind of abuse to go unchecked.

Listen to the series here: We Are Jane Doe

Guests:

• Madi Bolaños, host, producer, “We Are Jane Doe” and co-host The California Report, KQED
• Anna Sussman, editor and senior producer, “We Are Jane Doe” and senior producer and managing editor, Snap Judgment.
• Aliksandria Prout was formerly incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, subject of “We Are Jane Doe”

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. When Aliksandria Prout was released from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla in 2022, she set out to expose the correctional officer who abused her. Her story, along with many other survivors of prison abuse, is detailed in a new podcast series from KQED’s Snap Studios called We Are Jane Doe. It’s the result of a two-years-long investigation by Madi Bolaños and Anna Sussman into the prison. And this morning, we’re joined by those two reporters. Welcome.

Madi Bolaños: Thanks for having us.

Anna Sussman: Thanks, Alexis.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined by Aliksandria Prout. Thank you so much for being here with us.

Aliksandria Prout: Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Ali, you know, you were sent to this facility in 2022. What was it like for you to just sort of step into that environment?

Aliksandria Prout: Well, I tried to fake it till I made it, but to be honest with you, it was overwhelming. It was like joining, walking into a Coliseum. And when you enter the yard and you see the different buildings, the first building you encounter is Death Row. And it hits you. There’s women in that building sitting on death row, and, um, you’re there for something very minor. So to have to be in the same vicinity of other women like that, it can mess with your head a little bit, and you have to not show any fear.

Alexis Madrigal: Even though you are.

Aliksandria Prout: Well, yeah, you’re a little terrified, but you know, you have to treat everyone the same, and usually when you do, it’s fine. But that is a lot to take in when you’ve never been in an environment like that and you’ve been sheltered the majority of your life, and then suddenly you’re in that kind of a place.

Alexis Madrigal: But it wasn’t really the women who turned out to be the biggest problem. I mean, just a few days into your incarceration, right, a corrections officer named Gregory Rodriguez stopped you at a checkpoint. So what happened?

Aliksandria Prout: Right. The women from all spectrums of criminal activity were very nice and respectful to me. I got along with everybody great. Yeah, it happened to be the correctional staff, and they were just very rude, condescending, and abused their power.

And it was one morning, I was on my way to a medical docket in the 805 building, which is across the yard into another yard, and he was working the 805 exchange. And I had an N95 mask on because it was during the time of COVID, and he asked me to remove my mask so he could identify me to my ID. So I said, sure, not a problem. I removed my mask, and he started making sexually, you know, objectifying comments about my eyes, about my lips, the size of my lips.

So I then became very uncomfortable. I said, “This is a complete lack of professionalism. A complete breach of your professional authority. Like, this is not appropriate for you to make these kind of comments to me as an inmate or as a woman in general.”

So I put the mask back on, asked if I could go, and he asked what housing unit I was in. I said, “I’m in quarantine. I am in 503.” So I went to the medical docket, came back, went back to my housing unit.

Well, I think it was a couple days later, I got a call saying, “Prout, you have an attorney visit,” and I actually have the docket still. It says attorney visit on the docket. So they actually fabricated and created a docket that says “attorney visit” with a time and place, BPH office.

So they handed me the dockets, and here I am thinking I have an attorney visit, and I’m incarcerated at a state prison for a restraining order violation. So I’m like, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. This doesn’t even — the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.” So I was thinking maybe my attorney’s here to figure out what’s really going on.

And so I go up there, and I’m walked up there by an additional officer named Alan, and I walked to the main yard gate, and guess who’s waiting for me? Rodriguez. And my heart just sank. Because between the comments he had made previously, him asking why I was housed, and then him waiting for me, I’m like, “Oh, great. This can’t get any worse. This can’t go any worse.”

So I am handed over to him, and he takes me into the BPH office, and he shows me two rooms. He shows me his office and says, “There’s no cameras in here.” And then he shows me the BPH courtroom. And for everyone that doesn’t know what the BPH courtroom is, it’s where lifers go before the board to try to get their life taken off and get a parole date.

Anna Sussman: Mm-hmm.

Aliksandria Prout: There’s also scheduled attorney visits that happen there, too. So when I went in there, I said, “Hi, I have an attorney visit. Where’s my attorney visit?” And he said, “No, there’s no attorney visit.”

Alexis Madrigal: So you kind of knew what was up at that point.

Aliksandria Prout: Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: And it was then that he assaulted you.

Aliksandria Prout: Yes. He had come on to me. I said, “No, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to lose my date. I just want to go home to my kids on time.” I only had like three or four months to do there. And I was terrified of catching any more time.

And he said, “You’ll go to SHU. You can get a 115 and get more time added onto your sentence.” And I was like, “Okay, what do I do?”

In my head at that moment, I just thought, do I fight this and hope that the seniority will believe me? I’m an inmate who’s been convicted of a felony. He has seniority. He’s been here for 10 years. Who are they most likely going to believe? Especially from a legal aspect, how much l — you know, how deep of a link?

Alexis Madrigal: There’s no cameras. There’s no — it’s your word versus his.

Aliksandria Prout: Right. And how much legal trouble is this going to cost them that they’re going to want to deal with? So my mind told me they’re most likely not going to believe me because they don’t want to deal with the legal impact of having to deal with him and his consequences.

So I said, “Okay, I just have to compartmentalize and do what I need to do. That doesn’t mean I consent or I’m okay with this. I’ve said no, but it’s either create more consequences for myself and create more time and go to SHU, or compartmentalize and disconnect, and just what’s going to happen is going to happen, and I can deal with this when I get out.”

So, yeah, that happened. And, you know, I remember DNA being left on the chair. So remembering that and keeping that in my memory so I could later tell the police that. And I remember saving all my ducats and hiding them throughout my entire prison stay so I could give my attorney that.

Alexis Madrigal: And you have proof of the dates and what happened.

Aliksandria Prout: And they could swipe DNA off the chair to prove it was his DNA. So while this is going on, I’m trying to build my own case internally, you know, for when I get out and can do something about it.

Alexis Madrigal: You’re listening to Aliksandria Prout, formerly incarcerated at California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Her story, along with other survivors and other people inside, are detailed in KQED’s Snap Studios’ new podcast called We Are Jane Doe.

Madi Bolaños, what do we know about how widespread Ali’s situation is? You know, women inside are in a very difficult situation, as we were all just hearing, unable to sort of be on equal footing with these corrections officers when they make these kind of sexual advances to them.

Madi Bolaños: Well, we learned through our investigation that this is very widespread, and that was confirmed by the DOJ, which also investigated the women’s facility and found that this was an unbroken pattern.

Alexis Madrigal: And by that, do we know, you know, like, it’s one officer and, like, five women? It’s, like, a bunch of officers and it’s dozens of women?

Madi Bolaños: We can’t say that it’s all officers, and we can’t say that it’s all women, but we can say that there are several officers that have been under investigation and that continue to be walked off the yard for sexual assault.

Alexis Madrigal: Um, go ahead, yeah.

Anna Sussman: I think it’s important to know — I mean, in the Rodriguez case, the prison found 22 women who they had evidence on that he had abused. Thirteen of those women ended up going to the criminal trial. Dozens more came forward later.

But it’s important to know that the Rodriguez case is not an outlier, right? Ali had proof, right, and that’s why he was able to be taken down the way he was. It’s very hard to collect evidence and to get proof the way that Ali was able to.

So when the question is, what do we know about how widespread this is, I think part of our answer is, it’s very difficult to know anything because it’s all behind a wall. And they do not let press in, and they do not let the public in, even though it is a public institution.

So it’s a very difficult and nearly impossible question to answer, which is part of the problem. We don’t know because we can’t see it.

Alexis Madrigal: Ali, on the inside, what did people know about this? You know, I mean, you only told one of your friends inside. But women know this happens, right?

Aliksandria Prout: Yes, they do. When I told my cellmate this was going on, she advised me not to say anything, just collect everything I could, which is exactly what I did. And, like, I drew maps of where all the camera points were.

Alexis Madrigal: Even though there’s supposed to be methods for reporting this stuff, right?

Aliksandria Prout: But there’s not, because if you file a pre-agreement, they will file a 115 against you saying you are lying against staff, so they’ll retaliate and file something back against you.

So I drew, like, diagrams. I hid my ducats. Like, I knew there was DNA on the chair, so I just handed, like, Internal Affairs a platter of, like, “Here you go, here’s everything you need.”

But my girlfriend did tell me, “Don’t say anything while you’re in here because they protect their own.”

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about this investigation from KQED’s Snap Studios called We Are Jane Doe. It’s into the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. We’re joined by Aliksandria Prout. She was formerly incarcerated at the place. We also have Madi Bolaños, who’s hosted The California Report, one of the reporters on it, and Anna Sussman, senior producer at Snap Judgment.

Are you listening, currently or formerly incarcerated? How do you think our institution should be held accountable when things like this happen? Give us a call, 866-733-6786, forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, Discord. We’re KQED Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more, right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We’re talking about a new investigation from KQED’s SNAP Studios called We Are Jane Doe that chronicles sexual abuse and retaliation at the California Central Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

We’re joined by Ali Prout, formerly incarcerated at the prison, and one of the people who came forward to hold people to account inside the prison. We’ve got Madi Bolaños and Anna Sussman from The California Report and SNAP Judgment who came together on this investigation.

Ali, there was quite a ripple effect. You get out, you’ve gathered all this evidence, and you meet with an attorney, and then suddenly more than 20 women come forward, right, also with their own allegations.

Aliksandria Prout: I got a very high-profile attorney from Stanford University. He’s great. He’s a prisoner’s rights attorney. And I started listing possible victims that could have been possible victims of this man that I knew. So I had him reach out to those women and clarify if that was true or not. And I also had him go to the prison, and people knew he was at the prison, so they felt comfortable to speak with him.

Alexis Madrigal: Um, eventually Rodriguez was found guilty on 64 counts. That was in January of 2025 and sentenced to 224 years, uh, in prison. Um, and, like, how rare is that, that this happens?

Anna Sussman: To my understanding, it’s incredibly rare this happens. Again, you have to have evidence, which is hard to collect inside a prison. You’re getting searched all the time. Your phone calls are being recorded. Your messages are being scanned. So it’s very difficult to secretly collect evidence in this place.

And of all of the women we spoke with, over 13 — except for Ali, every single one of them at one point said, “I have been assaulted and I choose not to report. I choose not to record because it’s too dangerous. I don’t feel safe.”

And they all have this kind of mantra of keep your head down, keep to yourself, do not cause trouble.

Alexis Madrigal: Well, and we’re going to talk about the retaliation that came as a result later. So there’s a reason people are afraid, right?

Anna Sussman: But an important thing that happened as a result of Rodriguez getting convicted was there was a California legislative hearing, and there was a lot of public uproar. So organizations were able to go into the prison and hold town hall meetings where they said all the women who want to talk about their experience with sexual assault can come together in a circle and speak about it.

And so the power dynamic at the prison was threatened to be shifted by Ali’s work and by what happened with Rodriguez.

Alexis Madrigal: Ali, what did it mean to you to see Rodriguez getting convicted in this way?

Aliksandria Prout: Well, I was definitely advised not to pursue criminal charges against him because of the retaliation, and for me as a woman and for other women that have been sexually assaulted and for prisoners, women prisoners that are still subjected to that, I had to make a choice. And for me, I was gonna stand up and testify.

I wasn’t going to allow somebody to intimidate me. I didn’t care who they were affiliated with. I made the decision to follow it all the way through and make my point clear that my body is not to be sexually objectified by a man. And that was your choice to do that, and now you’re gonna have consequences.

Yeah, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Um, Madi, I think now you sort of, in the timeline of the world, this is sort of where you entered the story, right? You are, I believe, sitting in this very studio.

Madi Bolaños: Yes, the chair you’re in.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah, and you received, like, a phone call with a tip. What happened?

Madi Bolaños: Yeah, so I was sitting in the studio getting ready to record The California Report when I get a call from someone inside the prison. And they basically told me that something big had happened at the facility. They described it as a riot at the time. And they knew I was a journalist and that I should look into it.

And I tried asking more clarifying questions, but they really didn’t want to say more. And so that’s when my journey started. I reached out to some advocates and our editor and tried to figure out how we were going to approach the story. I reached out to CDCR, and they were very tight-lipped at the time. And so I was really relying a lot on the women that I spoke to inside who were brave enough to share their story.

Alexis Madrigal: And you didn’t have, at that point, you didn’t know what it was, right? Just that something had happened on a particular date. And so how do you go about trying to actually find that? You just, like, file public records requests, you contact the warden and say, “Hey, did something happen?”

Madi Bolaños: I wish it was that easy.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah.

Madi Bolaños: We did file a public records request, and we asked for all the body-worn camera footage, any documentation about that incident, emails, forms that they had to write, really just, like, anything related to August 2nd, 2024.

And I also spoke to advocates who had spoken to the women inside, and they described not a riot, but something more of an attack by officers on the women.

And so there was a protest that they were holding about two or three weeks after August 2nd. And I went to that protest, and I was the only journalist who had gone to that protest. And I spoke to some of the formerly incarcerated women who described that their friends had been attacked by officers with batons, with pepper spray, with gas grenades, OC grenades, and they were afraid and traumatized.

And so I shared my number with them, and then women started reaching out to me, and I started documenting that.

Aliksandria Prout: You didn’t see the video?

Madi Bolaños: We had not seen the video at the time. The video had not gone out yet.

Aliksandria Prout: Okay.

Madi Bolaños: But you’ve seen it since, yes. We were able to get video surveillance footage of the incident.

Alexis Madrigal: Because, Ali, you heard about it from the inside, right?

Aliksandria Prout: Yes, and I’m also connected with Hector, and Hector sends me all the videos.

Alexis Madrigal: Who’s Hector?

Aliksandria Prout: He’s a formerly incarcerated — he’s the former correctional officer that is against the system now.

Alexis Madrigal: I see, I see.

Aliksandria Prout: He’s a former lieutenant. This is on YouTube. He has a YouTube channel.

Alexis Madrigal: Got it, got it. So to set this up, because we’re going to hear a little bit from some of the women who are on the inside, what happened to your right is the corrections officers go and they herded everyone into the chow hall, right? Into this sort of, like, big, what looks like kind of a high school cafeteria, you know? And then they all kind of walk in, and what starts to happen from what we’ve been able to do together?

Madi Bolaños: They wake up in the morning and they’re told that their cells are going to be searched. And so they’re escorted into this small dining hall, the chow hall, and they are left there for four hours without food, water, medication.

And then they learn that their stuff is being carted away. And this is called breaking down to six by six, six by 6 cubic feet. And that’s, like, the size of a small mini fridge. And that means that all of their personal items are put into that small container, and whatever doesn’t fit in there gets taken out, or gets thrown away, really.

And, I mean, long story short, that is not how that’s supposed to happen. It’s supposed to be a longer process, we’ve learned in our reporting. So the women were understandably upset and asking for answers and not receiving any answers.

And then after a few minutes, about a dozen officers enter the chow hall, and they have pepper spray canisters and they had OC grenades in their hands, and you see them form this skirmish line and —

Alexis Madrigal: It seems like mace, right?

Madi Bolaños: Yeah, yeah, it’s like pepper spray, yeah. And so we were able to get the surveillance video, and we saw that there was this line, and then there were some women who were standing up. A majority of these women were sitting down across the dining hall.

And at a certain point, you see an officer usher some of the women to back up, and the women begin to back up, and then suddenly the officers are spraying them all with pepper spray grenades.

Anna Sussman: I think an important thing to know about this attack is that shortly before this attack, the officers had been heard saying to some of the women on D-Yard, on Ali’s former yard where her roommate still lived, “If you don’t stop all of this reporting, if you don’t, we are going to make life difficult for you.”

And that is what was in these women’s minds when they were being herded and locked into this chow hall and then attacked.

Aliksandria Prout: Well, and there was a medical emergency. There was, yeah. One of my former cellmates, Katrina Cameron, has a pacemaker, and she couldn’t breathe and was bending over, not being able to catch her breath. And Christina was behind her trying to bring her to officers for medical treatment because she has a pacemaker.

And she’s like, “She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe. She cannot breathe because of all the pepper spray. Can you please get her medical attention?”

Well, as soon as she brought her forward to the officers, eight officers took them to the ground and just started wailing on them with batons.

Alexis Madrigal: Which you can also see in the video.

Aliksandria Prout: Yeah, really.

Alexis Madrigal: Horrible thing to watch, but it’s on KQED’s website. You can find it there. Let’s listen to some of the women from the inside describing this incident. Thank you.

Caller: It really literally felt like we was, like, in a room full of smoke, and we was just in there waiting to die. I already took my last breath in there. You feel me? I was just up in there ready to die.

Caller: I remember passing out, and I came to and I looked up and it’s an officer standing right there. And I kind of, like, just begged him, like, “Please get me out of here,” and that officer finally noticed me and picked me up, cussed me and started dragging me towards the door, and I passed out again.

Caller: People were falling out in seizures. They wouldn’t let us help our peers. A couple of people ran to my roommate to help her because she was having a seizure, and they started bombing them. So we had to fall back.

Caller: It was, it was like a concentration camp, actually, if I’m allowed to say that.

Caller: Like, it was World War II zone.

Caller: I’m not going to lie, it was the most traumatizing experience I’ve ever dealt with in my life, and I did 16 years in prison, so I clearly committed a crime and I’ve lived a lifestyle that wasn’t pleasant before, but to experience something like that was something I’ve never experienced before, and it was the most scariest thing that I’ve went through in my life.

Alexis Madrigal: There was a clip from a new investigation from KQED’s Snap Studios called We Are Jane Doe, describing a massive use-of-force incident inside the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

I mean, the obvious question that shakes out of this is, the women had these interactions with the corrections staff in which the corrections staff was saying, like, “Yeah, you better watch out if you guys keep up with this reporting.” They’ve already had one of their own convicted and all these things.

The question is, how could you prove it was retaliation? I mean, this seems like a quite difficult task. So where do you start?

Anna Sussman: We can’t be inside their minds. There were a lot of officers involved, and we can’t know all their minds. All we can do is put together the pieces of reporting that we have.

So we have women who have overheard these comments made directly to them by officers in public spaces, saying, “If you do not stop reporting, there will be retaliation.” They said there’ll be consequences, and they laid out the consequences.

We have a lawsuit which was settled by the state in which 13 women claimed that this was retaliation. They won a handful of monies.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, there were also multiple investigations, right? I mean, there was both an internal investigation and there was also an external DOJ investigation, right?

Madi Bolaños: Right, yes. The Department of Justice spent two years investigating women’s prisons in California, and they specifically looked into August 2nd as well.

And what they did is they interviewed several women and did their own investigation. I’m not completely sure about the document side of it, but their conclusion was that August 2nd was retaliation for sexual assault at the prison.

Alexis Madrigal: What about the prison itself? Did they make any mention of that?

Aliksandria Prout: The warden was actually removed from the prison and relocated to another prison at a lower level, and she was replaced with somebody else.

Madi Bolaños: Yeah, she was transferred and demoted, and they did investigate August 2nd. But our reporting found in the hundreds of documents and data that we looked over that they never really asked the question, “Is this retaliation for sexual assault complaints being on the rise?”

They really just focused on what the officers did that day and whether it was CDCR policy or not.

Alexis Madrigal: But they did talk with the person who more or less okayed and planned this operation, right? And that particular assistant warden had some things to say about the women and what they were trying to do with it, right?

Anna Sussman: She made it clear that it was about control.

Alexis Madrigal: And this is in official investigations and transcripts and stuff that you were able to — interviews, yeah.

Anna Sussman: That’s right. The transcripts we have from their internal affairs investigation said that she, and the audio that we have, she makes it clear that they felt that this unit was, quote, “out of control” and needed to be under control.

They asked her if she referred to the women with a pejorative word. She said she did not recall, but it was clear from what she said in the investigation that they needed to show the women who was in charge.

Aliksandria Prout: Can I comment on that?

Alexis Madrigal: Sure.

Aliksandria Prout: 513 is definitely the more rambunctious unit, but that is not how you’re gonna control 513. By taking all their possessions, throwing them away, and saying, “This is who’s boss. Now all your possessions are in a six-by-six container.”

Whoever thought of that as a form of control to show them who’s in charge — you provoked.

Alexis Madrigal: Because some of these people are, like, have been in for decades or so. These are, like, all their professions. They’re lifers.

Aliksandria Prout: Right, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Like 32 years, and it’s like, that’s all their possessions they’ve had over those years. So for you to come into their cell and just cart away things that are sentimental to them that they’ve accumulated over that amount of time, it’s not okay.

Alexis Madrigal: It’s not like they can just go buy another one at Target.

Aliksandria Prout: No, it’s not, and some of these are sentimental things from their families that they may not be able to replace. So for you to just come into their spaces and do that, like, that’s not even a level of mutual respect.

And if you want respect as a correctional officer, you have to still give a level of respect to the inmates or they’re not going to respect you.

Madi Bolaños: And what we learned is that that kind of search takes weeks or months to do, and usually they’re supposed to be able to pick what they get to keep and what gets thrown away. So to just have that all carted away in front of you, that’s devastating.

Alexis Madrigal: Also, it had a name, this particular operation.

Madi Bolaños: Yeah, it was called Operation Breakdown.

Aliksandria Prout: Why would you want to break these women down? And when there are — that’s the thing I don’t get. These women coming in are already broken down. They’ve lived the worst possible lives. They have nothing left to lose.

Why not, as a correctional officer, you make a difference in somebody’s life? You go out of your way to say something encouraging. You create programs that can help build their self-esteem. You encourage education or skills for these women.

They’re already coming in broken down. There’s nothing else you can do to break them down. So if you want them to mutually respect you and you want to function as a whole and listen, then you should start choosing that route instead of trying to continuously break them.

You’re not gonna break them now.

Alexis Madrigal: Um, Madi, how, you know, there were these multiple investigations. What kind of disciplinary action actually came out of this?

Madi Bolaños: So 41 officers were initially disciplined, three were fired, and the discipline ranged from temporary pay cuts to being transferred, and, like I mentioned, three officers were fired.

But these officers have the ability to appeal that decision. So over the course of our reporting, that number went down to about 30 officers, and I believe there are about five who are appealing their decisions still.

Alexis Madrigal: And the ones who were fired, it’s largely because their own body cams caught them saying or doing things.

Madi Bolaños: Yeah, yeah. They were caught saying some pretty gross things in that moment. And also, they were caught using excessive force as well. And so that, and with a couple other policy violations, amounted to them being fired.

Aliksandria Prout: Well, I’m grateful for that because my case with Rodriguez helped implement those body cams. So that makes me happy.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Aliksandria Prout, formerly incarcerated at the prison, who exposed her abuse by a correctional officer who was then convicted and went to serve time. Now, very, very long sentence.

We’ve got two reporters here from KQED Snap Studios. They have released a new investigation called We Are Jane Doe that chronicles the sexual abuse and retaliation at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. That’s Madi Bolaños and Anna Sussman.

We want to hear from you. What changes or reforms would you like to see in California’s prison system, particularly California’s women’s prisons? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. The email is forum@kqed.org. You can find us on BlueSky, Instagram, Discord. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We are talking about a new investigation from KQED’s SNAP Studios called We Are Jane Doe, that chronicles sexual abuse and retaliation at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

We have Aliksandria Prout, who was Jane Doe number one in the initial case that touched all this off. We’ve got Madi Bolaños, host of The California Report here on KQED, and we’ve got Anna Sussman, senior producer at SNAP Judgment.

Michael writes in to say, “The horrific events these women endured are the most public example of how prisoners in California are routinely retaliated against when they call attention to illegal acts or procedures used by staff against them. Abuses that are predictable and common in enclosed systems like prisons or immigration centers. As terrible as what the story reveals, we should not forget that male prisoners are also subject to further abuse by way of retaliation for complaints they legitimately lodge.

“When you give so much power to one group over another and then surround them with walls designed to keep outside eyes from looking in, there will always be more stories like this.”

I mean, given that, Anna, it doesn’t seem like there shouldn’t be reform, though, you know? I mean, there is this basic setup of a prison, these abuses occur. That is true, and that’s a whole debate that’s been going on in society about how prisons should be, or what prisons should, or if prisons should. But there’s also this question of, like, there are better and worse ways of doing this if we look around the world. Not every prison system is as abusive as ours.

Anna Sussman: That’s a great point. I think as a journalist, and having reported the story, my takeaway is about transparency.

I’ve reported on prisons in Mexico, in West Africa, and I go up to the front desk and I say, “I’m a journalist and I would like a tour,” and they say, “Right this way.” And there’s no advanced warning, and there are rules.

When we tried to enter CCWF, it was many months of requests. When they finally let us in, they told us we were not allowed to speak with any of the women inside. We were not allowed to bring any recording equipment. We’re not allowed to ask any questions.

So that’s not reporting and that’s not transparency. And like our listener says, when you have a group of folks, mostly men, who are given power over another group of folks, mostly women, and you put it all behind a big wall and say nobody can come in, you’re not keeping those people safe.

When we toured, when Madi and I toured, we had women shout out to us from their cells, “Help us. We’re treated poorly in here. We’re treated like animals in here,” and we were not allowed to speak with those women.

So for me, reform number one is about transparency. It’s a public institution. Let the public in.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, Alpa writes in to say this is such an infuriating and traumatizing situation for incarcerated women. It’s been happening despite guards being convicted or punished, so why do they still have men as guards at women’s prisons?

Madi Bolaños: I mean, that’s a great question. I think those prisons are in rural areas, and that’s one of the very few economic opportunities that they have there.

And I think just being — I’m from the Central Valley. I grew up 30 minutes from that prison. And that just, I think, there’s this idea that a prison is such a dangerous, scary, awful place, and that these people are incredibly violent, and that maybe men are the only ones that can be up to the task.

But from what we understand is that women’s prisons are not as violent as men’s prisons. They’re much less.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, Ali, from your perspective, I mean, there are women who are correctional officers as well. Were they better? Or is it kind of one system, so they all kind of are equally oppressive?

Aliksandria Prout: I think, to me, the women are better. I think women think like women. Men think like men. No offense.

Alexis Madrigal: None personally taken as the only man here.

Aliksandria Prout: So I think women can think from more of an emotional standpoint, and they have a little bit more empathy. I don’t think a woman who would have been in charge would have done that breakdown.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, well, and also just on a kind of, like, a sexual assault level —

Aliksandria Prout: Well, yeah, I don’t think — I mean, I think men primarily think, um…

Anna Sussman: I mean, I think it’s fair to say that if the officers were all women, there’d be a lot less sexual assault against the women. I mean, we don’t have the evidence, but I think that’s a fair statement.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I think so. Um, so one of the things that I was thinking about, um, as I was listening to this, uh, this story, um, Governor Newsom talked a lot about prison reform. Uh, you know, talked about this, like, humane model of confinement, you know, California model of, of, uh, of rehabilitation, not just incarceration. Um, do you respond at all to — is that everything, anything about this whole series of incidents or, or similar things?

Aliksandria Prout: I mean, isn’t he the one bringing men from men’s prisons over to women’s prisons who are causing the sexual assaults?

Alexis Madrigal: Of that, actually —

Madi Bolaños: But we didn’t know that based on our reporting. But there are two bills that were sitting on his desk, or there were two bills that were sitting on his desk recently, AB 464 and SB 337.

And 464 would have made it easier for people who were sexually assaulted while incarcerated to sue and strengthened protections against retaliation by staff. SB 337 would have required CDCR to create more strict guidelines when it comes to body-worn cameras, as well as protocols for these non-routine searches.

He vetoed the first bill, 464, and he passed 337. And for the veto, he said that it would have created too many lawsuits for the state to address. And also, because it would be a later ability to sue, there might not be the documents anymore, and survivors’ testimony or their remembering would be less reliable — their memory, if you will.

Alexis Madrigal: Um, do you think, Ali, that there is a way to create a reporting system that would be safe, confidential, and effective for women in prison to report sexual abuse, or do you think it’s just like…

Aliksandria Prout: There’s no way. Well, as of now, I know if my girlfriends have a problem, they call me and tell me they need to have a visit, which I know that means I need to get the prisoners’ rights attorney down there.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, man. I guess that’s kind of it. It’s like these informal networks of women doing this stuff.

Anna Sussman: There’s a lot of speaking in code, I would say, when you’re on the phone with women inside, because we don’t even want to open up a conversation that’s not safe for them to even participate in.

Even if I say, you know, “Do you want to talk about what happened on August 2nd?” Even my asking the question could put them in danger, according to them.

So a lot of what we have to do is say, “Are you open to me coming to an in-person visit?” And then waiting several months for approval for an in-person visit, because while — if there are officers around during an in-person visit, you can speak quietly and it feels a little safer than being recorded on the phone.

Aliksandria Prout: And you even have to be careful that it is a privileged attorney visit, that they’re not trying to record your visit with your attorney.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, given all this, you know, some of our listeners, and given you’re taking away with more transparency, you know, Art in San Francisco writes, “Shouldn’t there be a way for women prisoners to report on prison conditions to the public?” Suggests, “How about a weekly public radio program from California prisons statewide at which women prisoners can report on conditions in California prisons.”

But given that there’s this much risk in talking about these things publicly, that seems quite difficult, yeah?

Madi Bolaños: I mean, they would face retaliation, based on our reporting. That’s what we found. And so they might be able to say what’s happening, but then they would have their cell searched potentially, or, you know, it’s not as direct as August 2nd, but what we understand is that retaliation takes many forms.

And so that sounds like a great idea, but there has to be guardrails to make sure that these women are protected while they’re there and not on the radio.

Anna Sussman: And of the women we spoke with, including former Rodriguez victims, they told us if they had to do it all over again, they would not have reported, because they believe they continue to face retaliation every day. Including me.

Aliksandria Prout: I face retaliation, probably in every form, but I mean, hey, there’s nothing more you can do to me, so I’m still here, still gonna talk. Yeah. I’m gonna fight the good fight.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, right, this all lands on CDCR, right? I mean, this is the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It lands on them when you have been, you know, pressing them for responses, say on what the DOJ investigation found or some of these other things. Like, how have they responded to you?

Madi Bolaños: Oh, man. How have they responded? They have responded, which is nice. And they say that retaliation is not allowed and that they have created safe pathways for survivors to report sexual assault.

And what else, Anna, have they said? In terms of the DOJ report, they said that they looked forward to working with the Department of Justice to make things safer for the women inside.

Anna Sussman: We found just this delta between what happens on paper and what women tell us happens. So the prison, this particular prison, passes its audits for reporting on sexual abuse. They’re kind of observed and checked over every year to see, you know, is the reporting happening the way it’s supposed to happen according to protocol. And they pass that.

So the problem is that space in between the official audits and what we’re hearing from the women.

Aliksandria Prout: Yeah, I’m telling you right now. None of that’s true. They’re all liars in every way.

Madi Bolaños: Women’s getting retaliated against in the worst way. I spoke to advocates that said that those audits, which are called, like, PREA audits, which stands for, like, Prison Rape Elimination Act, the federal law — excuse me, sorry.

But that’s really just, like, a rubber stamp. And that’s kind of the floor and not the ceiling. And also that we should be, or CDCR should be implementing policies that prevent sexual assault, not just that allow them to report it after it’s happened.

Alexis Madrigal: And what are those things? I mean, those are eliminating the places, like just on a pure, like, how do you make this safer for women? If we can’t create a perfect system, CDCR has their own incentives and things. So what is it? I mean, like, the things that made this possible, for this abuse to happen for you, were that there was a room without cameras.

Aliksandria Prout: Well, there’s a lot of things that are possible. First of all, there were prior grievances and reports against him going back to 2014 that were never addressed. Nothing was ever done. So what happened to me could have been prevented if somebody would have done their job and looked into it.

If women had been listened to. If women have been listened to, what happened would have never happened. Yeah, so what happened to me? I spoke up and said something because I didn’t want it to continue to happen to other women that were there for life or doing 20 years.

I was there for four months, and I didn’t want it to continue to happen to me. But finding out in the case that this had been going on since 2012-14 and there were multiple reports that people just dismissed and didn’t look into, why are you retaliating against me?

Anna Sussman: You guys didn’t do your job. And in the case of 2014, with Officer Rodriguez, there was a report of sexual assault against him in 2014. The victim was a very young incarcerated woman.

And when that report came forward, she was the one who was put in solitary. And he continued to be on the yard and abuse women year after year after year after year.

Alexis Madrigal: Man. What about the current state of the facility? You know, this report has come out. This is, like, a lot of light shining on this particular part of the California correction system. You know, we heard earlier, Madi, you mentioned officers being walked off the yard, but it’s hard for us to know exactly what’s going on with that.

Madi Bolaños: Yes, it is hard to know that at the moment. All we know at the moment is that the warden was transferred and demoted and that several officers have been walked off, and we have also filed new public records access requests to get more information about that.

But I spoke to some women on the inside, and they did say that it’s kind of this open secret. Like, everyone knows that these officers have been walked off and that it is related to sexual assault complaints.

And actually, when the warden was walked off, one of the women told me that they started playing this, like, PREA video in some of those little housing areas, and that that’s not something that they have ever done in the 30 years that she’s been there.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, in one case, at least, right, the facility out in Dublin, you know, what was that? I can’t remember what it was called.

Anna Sussman: It was called Federal Correctional Institution.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I mean, they shut it down at a certain point, right?

Anna Sussman: Yes. They shut it down, and they moved those incarcerated folks to different facilities.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. So, I mean, I guess one of my questions, I mean, having been to San Quentin, talked with different people who’ve been, you know, inmates in different facilities, it does seem like these individual facilities do have their own cultures, though, right?

So do you think — I don’t know, would you like to see this place shut down, or does that not solve the problem?

Aliksandria Prout: Well, then these correctional officers are just going to be moved different places with these inmates, and then you’ve spread the disease elsewhere and spread the victims elsewhere, too. And then we’re gonna have overcrowding. Are they going to build a new prison? Where are all these inmates going to go?

Yeah, for CIW they shut down Folsom. I mean —

Alexis Madrigal: Is there, you know, did you all get a chance to look into whether there’s, you know, some other state, some place that has been able to prevent these sorts of problems in women’s prisons?

Aliksandria Prout: I don’t think CIW or Folsom had these kinds of issues. I don’t know why they shut Folsom down because I feel like the quality of the staff was probably a lot better up north.

Madi Bolaños: I will say CIW was a part of the DOJ’s report, and so it found that sexual assault and retaliation is just as bad there as well. I do believe CCWF kind of stole the show in that regard, takes the cake, yeah. They’re the worst.

And some of the women we spoke to also said in their first days arriving there, they were told by other women, like, “Hey, this officer thinks you’re good looking,” and, you know, it’s very common here for that to happen. “Like, do you want us to —”

Alexis Madrigal: Like, introduce you, and then, like, this person will help you. This is if you’re willing to do this. And you’re like —

Anna Sussman: Yeah, and you might get this for that. I’ll say, when we were trying to gauge the scale of this attack against other mass human rights abuses at other prisons across the country, right, like, where does this stand?

All of the other mass-documented human rights violations I found in my initial reporting were all incidents of sexual assault at women’s prisons. I was looking at women’s prisons, but when I was looking at women’s prisons, all of the human rights abuses, especially the ones on a large scale, were all incidents of large-scale sexual assault.

Alexis Madrigal: A couple people who just want to thank you for your bravery. Ali, here, one of our listeners, Rishi, writes, you know, “What a brave woman to take on her abuser and to share her heroine experience in a calm manner. Ali ought to be invited to talks at top universities and to talk to sororities and fraternities all over. How does she cope with the toll of it all and keep your inner peace?”

Aliksandria Prout: Pray, stay close to God.

Alexis Madrigal: It’s been helpful.

Aliksandria Prout: Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Another listener says, “I want to thank Ali for her courage and insight and smarts and providing proof that what we all know is actually happening is happening.”

Is there anything on the ballot in November, any kind of prison reform that could help that?

Madi Bolaños: Not to my understanding.

Anna Sussman: Not to my understanding either.

Alexis Madrigal: And one last listener comment here. Jeff writes in to say, “We have evidence about male guards. Reports from national inmates surveys show that female inmates report male staff are responsible for the vast majority of sexual abuse incidents compared to a lower percentage reported for female staff.”

Anna Sussman: Thank you for that reporting, listener.

Alexis Madrigal: Yes. Listener Jeff on the case.

You know, we have been talking about this new investigation from KQED’s Snap Studios called We Are Jane Doe, the chronicle of sexual abuse and retaliation at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. They go to Snap Judgment’s podcast feed, right, if they want to hear the full thing.

Anna Sussman: You can find We Are Jane Doe anywhere you get podcasts. It has its own feed as well.

Alexis Madrigal: Got it, it has its own feed too. Okay, so you can check out Snap Judgment, you can find it, We Are Jane Doe, its own feed.

We have been joined this morning by Anna Sussman, senior producer at Snap Judgment. Thank you so much.

Anna Sussman: Thank you for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: We’ve been joined by Madi Bolaños, host of The California Report here at KQED. Thank you.

Madi Bolaños: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: And of course, we have also been joined, couldn’t thank you enough, Aliksandria Prout, Ali Prout, formerly incarcerated at California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, exposed for abuse by a correctional officer, and touched off this entire cascade of events.

Aliksandria Prout: Of course.

Alexis Madrigal: Thank you so much for joining us.

Aliksandria Prout: Thank you for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: I’m Alexis Madrigal. Thank you to our listeners and commenters. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum ahead with Mina Kim.

Announcer: Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.