WOMEN'S PRISONS TROUBLED BY SEXUAL HARASSMENT, ABUSE OF INMATES.

Byline: Steven A. Holmes The New York Times

It was what she considered the final humiliation of a degrading act that may have helped Dorothy Carrigan make a case against a prison guard who she says raped her in her cell.

After he was done, Carrigan said, the guard tossed his used condom on her bed and told her to flush it down the toilet. Instead, she turned it over to prison officials.

To human rights and prisoner rights groups, what happened to Carrigan on March 6, 1995, at the Delores J. Baylor Women's Correctional Institute near here is part of a growing and troubling trend: the sexual harassment and assault of female inmates by male guards.

Prison officials and prosecutors say Carrigan agreed to have sex, but they have charged the guard under a law in Delaware, similar to ones in other states, that prohibits any sex between prisoners and correctional workers because of the temptation to take advantage of female inmates.

Many female inmates have taken legal action themselves, and in recent years, prison officials in California, Georgia and the District of Columbia have reached out-of-court settlements in class-action suits brought on behalf of women who said they were sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by guards while incarcerated.

Since 1990, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has won convictions in seven cases involving male employees at various federal, state and local detention centers who raped female inmates or coerced them into having sex. The department is now investigating allegations of sexual abuse in a number of prisons in Michigan, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The increased legal activity has come with the huge growth in the number of women incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails, to almost 116,000 last year from 25,000 in 1980.

``What is growing is the potential for the problems, because you have more women in prison, and more often than not you're going to have male officers guarding them,'' said Dorothy Thomas, director of the Women's Rights Project for Human Rights Watch, which just released a report on sexual abuse of women in American prisons. ``Given our sense that correction authorities are ignoring the problem, there is a possibility it may get worse, and it's already bad.''

Just how bad is a matter of dispute. There have been no systematic surveys of the problem in the country's 50 state prison systems and hundreds of local jails. Most of the evidence is anecdotal or, as in the case of the Human Rights Watch report, is extrapolated from an investigation of a few states.

Given the lack of precision in documenting the problem, prison officials have tended to say that while any sexual assault or sexual harassment by guards is unacceptable, the problem is not large.

``I don't know that it is as pervasive as people think it is,'' said Harold Clarke, director of the Nebraska Department of Corrections and president of the Association of State Corrections Administrators. ``In my home state we haven't had one complaint, and I'm certain that other agencies can say the same thing. I'm not sure how extensive the problem is, but it is a problem that should be studied.''

Still, the issue is causing enough concern to be the subject of a panel discussion at a recent convention in Dallas of Clarke's group. And Allen Ault, director of the Justice Department's National Institute of Corrections Academy, which provides training to prison personnel, said he has been asked by a number of state prison systems to provide advice on dealing with the problem. Ault would not identify which states have sought his counsel.

``I know all the directors,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``Certainly they don't want this, nor the adverse publicity or the scandals that evolve around this.''

The Human Rights Watch report, the result of a 2-1/2-year investigation, looked at five states - California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and New York - as well as the District of Columbia.

Based on interviews with more than 60 current and former inmates, the group determined that male correctional employees had raped, sexually assaulted and abused female prisoners. Further, the report said guards had also ``used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for having done so.''