31 August 2022
Behind a closed chapel office door inside a federal women’s prison in California, a chaplain forced inmates seeking his spiritual guidance to have sex with him — exploiting their faith and their powerlessness behind bars for his own gratification, prosecutors said.
James Theodore Highhouse, who pleaded guilty in February and is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday, would tell women he abused at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, that everyone in the Bible had sex and that God wanted them to be together, prosecutors said.
Highhouse, an Army veteran, pressured one inmate into having intercourse with him on Veterans Day by telling her she needed to serve her country and on Thanksgiving by telling her she needed to show her gratitude for him, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors are seeking a 10-year prison sentence for Highhouse, who’s among five workers at the Bay Area lockup charged in the last 14 months with sexually abusing inmates.
In a sentencing memorandum, they implored a judge to deviate from federal guidelines, which call for less than three years in prison, and deliver “a just punishment for this particularly vile conduct.”
While Highhouse, 49, was charged only with abusing one inmate, prosecutors say he engaged in predatory conduct with at least six women from 2014 to 2019 — including one he counseled at a veterans hospital where he worked before joining the federal Bureau of Prisons, where allegations were routinely ignored.
Highhouse, enabled by a toxic culture of abuse and coverups at the prison — known to many as the “rape club” — warned victims not to report him, telling one of them “no one will believe you because you’re an inmate, and I’m a chaplain,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
At the same time, prosecutors wrote, a prison counselor would rail about inmates “snitching” on employees, suggesting they instead “tell Trump about it,” referring to then-President Donald Trump.
Source AP
