I would note, as a point of personal privilege, Senator Lankford, that Senator Grassley and I have the Prison Camera Reform Act. It has passed the Senate unanimously.

What we found in the course of this investigation is that in two-thirds of the Federal prisons that have housed women in the last 10 years, there has been sexual abuse of female prisoners by BOP employees.

I think it sends a powerful message to the Department that there is strong bipartisan will to address this crisis.

the buck now stops with you.

Clearly it sounds that you engaged in and change is necessary.

I think you probably have an idea.

I want to encourage you again to embrace the possibility that you can turn this agency around.

We cannot turn our face from it. We have to face this. We have to do everything we can to eliminate it.

Access and proximity to your family. How did they play a role in your fear of retaliation and the retaliation that you experienced?

It is the government's duty to incarcerate individuals, to punish people for crime, for keeping dangerous people away from the general public.

this process is badly, badly broken, and as a result the tool that you are going to have to rely on... is not currently functioning

It is generating false negatives at facilities where, as the inspector general said--and Mr. Horowitz, if I am correct, your comments to the effect that if the warden and the chaplain are engaged in widespread sexual abuse of inmates…

I believe in good government, I believe in transparency, and I know we cannot do this work alone.

I want to respectfully tell you that I believe your tenure will be judged by whether you succeed in eliminating the sexual abuse of those who are in your custody.

I think we need to understand how this tool can be so ineffective that at Dublin, for example--and here is the 2017 Dublin audit--it was found that the facility met the standard of 'zero tolerance of sexual abuse and sexual harassment.'

Do you think it would be helpful to have more women working in facilities that incarcerate women?

I find that that situation is absolutely egregious, and it is about the systemic change.

What kind of retaliation did you fear?

Today's hearing will examine the findings of our 8-month bipartisan investigation into the sexual abuse of women in Federal prisons.

Do these audits work?

Investigating the abuse of incarcerated women by BOP employees, I want to return to some questions about management, accountability, what has gone wrong for the last 10 years such that there has been no systemic effort to address this…

I have been genuinely encouraged by the tone of your tenure thus far.

It is not a pleasant responsibility. But it also the responsibility of government to make sure when we do incarcerate individuals that they are safe.

Your testimony is that it is entirely the responsibility of IHSC to assess the propriety of the proposed intervention.

This investigation has been bipartisan from start to finish.