Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

Prison That Didn’t Report Sex Abuse Allegation Against Staffer to Reopen as ICE Camp

A whistleblower says the warden didn’t make a federally required disclosure. Now the company is turning the Arizona prison into an ICE jail.

This story was published in partnership with LOOKOUT News.

Rumors were spreading for weeks in the spring of 2022. At Arizona State Prison–Marana, the talk centered on an employee of Management and Training Corporation, or MTC, the Utah-based for-profit prison company that ran the facility. A clerk at the commissary, Alicia Simmons, had been carrying on an illicit sexual relationship with an incarcerated person.

In April, the situation exploded onto the radars of top prison officials. A fight broke out between two prisoners that two former MTC employees who spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept later said was over Simmons. After the fracas, according to a state-level investigation, Simmons admitted to having sex, sometimes four times a week, with an incarcerated person. She was let go by MTC and served with a search warrant for her phone and car. The Arizona Department of Corrections Special Investigations Unit conducted an official probe.

According to an internal report on the sexual abuse allegations filed at the prison in the wake of the affair, a high-ranking prison guard at the detention facility prepared a “PREA packet,” an initial recitation of allegations and evidence made in compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

The PREA packet cleared the way for information about the allegations to become public: Its existence would be noted the following year in a legally mandated PREA audit. The audits must be published by all carceral facilities covered by the law at least once every three years and must list all incidents and allegations of sexual contact between staff and incarcerated people.

The whistleblower said that he had direct conversations about the sexual abuse allegations with the warden.

The whistleblower said that he had direct conversations about the sexual abuse allegations with the warden.

And yet, a year later, Marana’s PREA audit said nothing about the allegations against Simmons.

“There was no reported incidents of sexual abuse or sexual harassment reported within the last 24 months,” according to the final October 2023 PREA audit.

Now, a former employee of MTC who worked at the Marana prison is speaking out for the first time about what top officials at the facility knew ahead of the PREA audit’s publication. The whistleblower, Alex Randall, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that he had direct conversations about the sexual abuse allegations with the warden, other officials, and Simmons herself. Randall said he was not the only MTC employee the warden discussed the matter with.

“I was sitting in with my manager, me, and the warden when the warden told us all about what happened,” Randall said of the day Simmons was issued a warrant and let go from her position.

Randall’s account — including of what prison leadership knew about the allegations — was corroborated by another former employee at Marana with direct knowledge of the warden’s conversations. The second former employee spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. An Arizona Department of Corrections Information Report prepared by a prison staffer on the day of the incident also said information about allegations of sexual contact between a staffer and an incarcerated person was provided to the warden.

The incarcerated person denied having sex with Simmons, according to a later Department of Corrections investigation, and Simmons was not referred to outside law enforcement for criminal prosecution.

Despite widespread knowledge of the allegations and the official paper trail, the warden at the time — Jeremy Casey, who is listed as the primary contact in the audit — verified in the published report there were no reported incidents of sexual abuse or harassment. (Simmons, MTC, Casey, and the Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

There were at least two other incidents of sexual abuse reported during the period covered by the 2023 PREA report, according to Arizona Department of Corrections investigative reports obtained through public records requests. One was from August 2022 about an employee allegedly kissing an incarcerated person and having an email correspondence with him that was “sexual in nature.” In another case, just weeks before the 2023 PREA audit was conducted, the corrections department’s Criminal Investigative Unit conducted interviews about an allegation that a prison guard had encouraged an incarcerated person to perform oral sex. Those allegations also should have appeared on the subsequent PREA audit but did not.

In 2023, Arizona State Prison–Marana was closed and languished in dormancy until it was sold to back to MTC in 2025 — just as the Department of Homeland Security was looking for more bed space to detain immigrants.

Reopening as ICE Camp

Randall’s insider account of the lapse in PREA reporting and other conditions are resurfacing Marana’s checkered history at a critical moment for the prison.

Last year, after selling the prison back to MTC, the Marana facility is slated to reopen as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Federal officials, according to government documents, want to nearly triple the prison’s capacity to roughly 1,300 beds, according to a Department of Homeland Security floodplain notice. It is unknown when the prison is set to reopen.

“ICE is pursuing all available options to expand detention bedspace capacity, including partnerships with state and local governments to house detainees at existing facilities,” Fernando X. Burgos, a public affairs officer for ICE, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept.

The plan is facing significant oppositions from local residents and officials who say they are being cut out of any oversight for reopening the prison.

“The whole business model is taking an inherently expensive proposition and skimming a profit off the top.”

“The whole business model is taking an inherently expensive proposition and skimming a profit off the top.”

Critics of the plan say the failure of MTC to properly deal with the sexual abuse allegations and other problems, including those stemming from what insiders say were staffing and resource issues, raise serious questions........

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