A former discipline hearing officer at the now-closed FCI Dublin women's prison has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two women and to lying to federal investigators, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.
David Perez was charged on Sept. 16 and is scheduled to be sentenced on March 25. The terms of his release have been sealed. Court records show he has been represented by attorney Matthew Dirkes, who did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Perez has also been named in several civil lawsuits.
Perez is the 10th correctional officer at the Dublin facility to plead guilty or be found guilty by a jury since 2022, in what has become the nation's largest sex scandal at a single federal prison. Ten former officers have been charged with sex abuse crimes, and all but one have been found guilty. The remaining officer had his charges dismissed after two hung juries.
Perez worked for the Bureau of Prisons from 1994 to 2019, spending the last five years of his career at FCI Dublin. In his role, he decided on disciplinary actions for women accused of misconduct while in custody.
According to prosecutors, Perez found one woman guilty of misconduct four times in 2014 and 2015. At times he sent her to the Special Housing Unit, known as the SHU, and took away her good time as punishment. In the following two years, prosecutors said, he met with her alone in a room called the "captain's complex," where he kissed her and touched her breasts.
Prosecutors said that in 2016, Perez found a second woman guilty over her behavior and sent her to the SHU for more than two weeks. After her release from segregation, he asked her to come to the captain's complex and requested that she show him her breasts. At least once, he told her he had the power to add or subtract time from her sentence, prosecutors said. On two occasions when they were alone, he kissed her and grabbed her breasts and buttocks, and on another occasion he digitally penetrated her.
When Perez spoke with federal investigators in 2024, prosecutors said, he lied about how many times he had touched any women.
Perez's LinkedIn profile says he stopped working as a discipline hearing officer at the Federal Correctional Complex in California in 2019 and is now retired. It lists past work as a criminology instructor, a diversity instructor and a correctional lieutenant. He described himself there as a "dedicated, consistent and resourceful professional that has given 25 years to the Federal Bureau of Prisons."
FCI Dublin closed in 2024. The Bureau of Prisons director at the time said she could not turn around the sexualized nature of the prison, and U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had ordered an unprecedented consent decree, which put a special monitor in charge of oversight. The women held there were sent, mostly by bus, to other prisons across the country. The facility has been vacant since, and it is unclear what will become of it.
It also remains unclear why prosecutors brought this case so many years later, or whether more former FCI Dublin officers will be charged in the future.
