Bodily autonomy is a cornerstone of women’s rights in California. But behind prison walls, incarcerated women can face a very different reality in which the state holds enormous power.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice delivered a damning assessment of California’s two state prisons for women. Federal investigators concluded that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and its two women’s prisons — the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and California Institution for Women in Chino — are violating the Constitution by failing to protect female prisoners from sexual abuse and harassment by staff.

Investigators found a long-standing pattern of staff sexual misconduct, inadequate safeguards, flawed investigations, and insufficient accountability, concluding that CDCR, CCWF, and CIW fail to adequately and effectively implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Washington now faces its own test: The Justice Department gave California 49 days to satisfactorily address its findings before the attorney general may initiate litigation. With that window closing in early October, the Trump administration should insist on measurable protections for incarcerated women, and Congress should demand answers about why its landmark prison-rape law remains so poorly implemented.

For a state that prides itself on women’s rights and criminal-justice reform, that should be intolerable. And California cannot claim it wasn’t warned. In 2023, the state paid millions to settle claims involving former prisoners who alleged sexual assault by CCWF correctional officer Gregory Rodriguez, who was later convicted of dozens of sexual-abuse charges. This year, California agreed to pay another $1.9 million to 13 women who alleged prison staff retaliated violently against them for reporting sexual misconduct.

It was not an isolated incident. In 2024, the federal government agreed to pay nearly $116 million to 103 survivors of the now-shuttered federal women’s prison FCI Dublin in the Bay Area that became so notorious for staff sexual abuse it was nicknamed “rape club.” In 2023, an Illinois federal jury awarded $19.3 million to a former Logan Correctional Center prisoner who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a prison counselor; an appeals court later upheld liability findings against prison officials but ordered a new trial on damages. In 2021, New Jersey agreed to pay nearly $21 million to resolve sexual-abuse and misconduct claims involving the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.

Congress passed PREA in 2003 with a clear mandate: eliminate sexual abuse in the nation’s detention facilities. More than two decades later, California’s own prisons show how far reality has fallen short of that promise and how disproportionately women bear the gap. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of substantiated incidents from 2016 to 2018, women made up just 10% of the combined U.S. prison and jail population, yet accounted for 27% of all victims of staff sexual misconduct. The same BJS data show incarcerated women are roughly three times as likely as incarcerated men to be sexually victimized by staff. Twenty-three years of federal law have not closed that gap.

The Justice Department’s notice of required remedial measures for CCWF and CIW includes expanded camera coverage, enhanced confidential reporting channels, strengthened investigative protocols, improved staff training and monitoring, and implementation of PREA-compliant safeguards. Companies are working to fill that gap. Texas-based LEO Technologies recently launched Verus Vision AI, which turns correctional cameras into real-time monitoring systems through agentic AI, capable of detecting behaviors and conditions that may signal developing threats.

LEO Technologies’ products give correctional officers another set of eyes where humans cannot possibly watch every camera, corridor, and cellblock simultaneously. The company frames the tool as flagging risk before harm occurs to enhance the ability of human judgment to take the proper course of action, not to replace the human component of the process.

That distinction matters because technology is not a substitute for accountability. Two decades after PREA became law, California still hasn’t been able to improve its implementation. Cameras go unmonitored, incidents go undocumented and uninvestigated, and reports vanish into a bureaucracy without consequences.

California is home to some of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world. It should be equally sophisticated about protecting the women whose safety it has taken into its own hands. PREA set the standard in 2003, but California is still failing to meet it. When incarceration is the punishment, sexual abuse should never be part of the sentence.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), once the venerable, today far less so, conservative daily of Germany, has declared Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) dead. It is nothing less than announcing the demise of the main people’s party in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The paper illustrates this terrible assertion on its front page with a defeated Chancellor Friedrich Merz, looking down into the depths of the abyss that has opened beneath his feet. The CDU is dead, Germany needs another party.

Well, I am going to contradict the FAZ, whose historic editors and columnists, in its days as the absolute authority, defended the political positions, values and virtues that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) defends today. Today the paper, ever less influential in its progressive drift that would shame its founders and legendary bylines, does nothing but attack the AfD and defend those who, fewer and fewer, refuse the logical alliance of the forces of the right that would form a large majority. Germany does not need another party, but rather the alliance of the one that lost its way, the CDU/CSU, and the one that emerged to recover it, the AfD.

Together they can carry out all the reforms that the CDU has promised and cannot deliver because it has condemned itself to being the eternal ally of the left. The AfD leader, Alice Weidel, has just offered it again from the position of political leadership across all of Germany, because she is 10 points ahead of the CDU in the federal polls.

The CDU has to ally itself with the AfD to help Germany climb out of the cesspit into which the CDU has plunged it with its accursed alliances with socialists and Greens, under the disastrous leadership of Angela Merkel and with its socialist, ecological, climate and multicultural idealisms and fanaticisms. If the CDU does not do it, it will disappear, and the Alternative for Germany will have to do it alone.

The Congressional Budget Office is charged by Congress to carefully examine the spending implications of government funded programs including those in the Department of War. Some decades ago, CBO assessed the cost of the nation’s nuclear deterrent particularly the Triad of strategic bombers, submarines and the sea launched ballistic missiles they carried and the land-based ICBMs in silos. The CBO also estimated the cost of the warhead and nuclear laboratories maintained by the Department of Energy (now the National Nuclear Security Administration within DOE) and the cost of our Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3). One early report garnered a lot of national attention because CBO headlined its report with the startling estimate that the nation’s nuclear deterrent was going to cost $1 trillion. Even in Washington, D.C., that was a lot of money.

But CBO played a few clever tricks to get to that number. First, CBO said this was the cost of “nuclear modernization” or the new nuclear weapons systems. It was that but a lot more. All the current legacy and very old system costs were also included, systems that now are from 40-70 years old, hardly what one would include under the rubric of “modernization.” Second, CBO also included all 100 strategic B21 bombers although only 20 of the bombers were going to be in the deployed nuclear arsenal. Third, CBO arbitrarily decided that the estimated costs would be for three decades, triple the length or duration of budgets usually presented by an administration in February of each year when the Federal budget proposals are required to be submitted to the U.S. Congress. And fourth and finally, CBO decided to add a 3% inflation kicker over the three decades which mathematically more than doubled the actual costs of the nuclear modernization enterprise.

So, in their 2013 report, for example, CBO trumpeted that nuclear forces would cost $1 trillion (over the next 30 years), generating headlines across the news media, engendering the shock and awe they wanted to create, hoping strong opposition in Congress would develop that would cut back significantly on the modernization effort. And just so Congress would get the message, another favorite regular past time of CBO was to do a regular excursion of killing the land based silo ballistic missiles to examine what force alternatives would provide what kind of budget savings.

CBO was strongly criticized for these sleight of hand magic tricks and eventually CBO made two key adjustments—they estimated the bomber costs at the 20 not 100 to be in the force. And CBO admitted that modernization should not include the ongoing sustainment and maintenance of the current legacy force.

Nonetheless CBO as one senior USAF general told me got its “bumper sticker and press release headline” and made nuclear investments look out of line with the rest of government requirements. The nuclear abolition enthusiasts took the number and ran with it and even came up with their own estimates near the $2 trillion mark by making the same mistakes that CBO was making but also adding even more of their own.

Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota (R-ND) put things in perspective two years ago when he explained that as a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee in the Senate, he had a front row seat when examining the nuclear portion of the defense budget. And yes, the Senator supports in his state two elements of the U.S. nuclear Triad—150 Minuteman missile silos and B52 strategic bombers, the only state with two parts of the nuclear Triad. Senator Hoeven laid out in late 2024 that the entirety of the nuclear Triad modernization cost for FY2025 for the nation was $18.6 billion annually for the B21 bombers, the Columbia-class submarines and companion upgraded D-5 missile and the Sentinel ICBM. One could add the costs of the associated NC3 and warheads, but whether or not the U.S. modernized the Triad these other elements would have had to be acquired irrespective of whether for the legacy or modernized force.

Now to be fair those Triad costs are now upwards of $26 billion as the country moves toward full annual production of each of the Triad elements. As acquisition costs increase, research and development costs decline. Also, sustainment and maintenance of our legacy forces continues, with some of those costs rising as much as 17% annually. What is remarkable is that despite being 55 years in service, the 20th USAF commanders have been able to sustain the Minuteman III force at a 98% alert rate, an extraordinary achievement, and a tribute to the leadership of 20th USAF that has recently changed hands with the retirement of USAF Maj Gen Stacy Huser. [And hats off to our Ohio-class sub and B52/B2 bomber folks as well.]

CBO largely misses any acknowledgement of such challenges to sustaining the U.S. legacy nuclear force. After the collapse of the USSR, CBO went on many alternative defense budget excursions that had at their core an assumption (often reflecting the tenor of some Congressional initiatives) that U.S. restraint and minimum investments in defense including nuclear forces was the way to proceed. This included a parallel and nearly zero attention to the looming threat of China as a possible nuclear peer competitor. [Although the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission regularly and fairly examined the national security dangers facing the U.S. due to China’s rapid and accelerating defense and technology investments.]

In looking into the future, CBO also largely missed another aspect of the entirety of the budget requirements for the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The Columbia class submarine and the Sentinel ICBM forces will both remain in the force through 2080-5. That means these two elements of the nuclear Triad will have to be replaced, under currently projected conditions, but not for half a century or more. Using the current estimates for the research, development, and acquisition costs of Sentinel ($140 billion) and Columbia ($138 billion), plus $15 billion for the requited new and life extended warheads, the costs now to the U.S. taxpayers for each of the next 30 years comes to roughly $9.76 billion a year, which is more than what Americans spend for food on the 4th of July ($7 billion) and 1/122nd of what Americans spend on insurance each year. And for 80 years that nuclear insurance policy called deterrence has never had to cash out.

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