Case: United States v. New Jersey (DOJ CRIPA Investigation of Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women)

On August 10, 2021, the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division announced that it had reached a settlement with the New Jersey Department of Corrections regarding conditions at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women. At the same time, it filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, requesting that the court approve and enforce the purposed consent decree. DOJ had opened a Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) investigation into the facility in April 2018 based on allegations that the prison failed to protect prisoners from sexual abuse by prison staff in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The proposed decree would revise policies around sexual assault, prisoner supervision, camera management, staff and inmate relations, reporting sexual assault, prisoner education, cross-gender searches, protective custody, retaliation prevention, responses to sexual assault, referrals of sexual assault and staff reporting of personal relationships. Jane Parnell would be appointed as Monitor. Edna Mahan would provide the new policies to the DOJ and Monitor for feedback and thereafter adopt them within 1 year of the effective date of the consent decree. The consent decree would last for three years.

The court has not yet approved the consent decree and the case is ongoing.

Contemporaneously with the DOJ settlement, several plaintiffs who had previously been incarcerated at the facility reached a monetary class action settlement in New Jersey state court against the Department of Corrections. That case is in this Clearinghouse as A.F. & M.D. v. New Jersey Department of Corrections; Marianne Brown et al. v. New Jersey Department of Corrections; Tamasa Nobles et al. v. William Anderson et al.