The prison boss rose through the ranks after allegations of abuse

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The prison staff didn’t know much about the new acting warden. Then, they say, he made a bizarre and startling confession: Years ago he beat up inmates and got away with it. Thomas Ray Hinkle, a senior official in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has been sent to restore order and trust in a women’s prison ravaged by a deplorable scandal. Instead, workers say, he left the federal dungeon in Dublin, Calif., even more broken. Staff viewed Hinkle as a bully and viewed his presence there in the wake of allegations that the former warden and other staff had sexually assaulted inmates as hypocrisy from an agency that publicly pledged to put end to its abusive and corrupt culture. So, at a staff meeting in March, they confronted the then director of the Bureau of Prisons and asked: Why, instead of firing Hinkle years ago, did the agency insist on continuing? to promote it? “It’s something we need to look at,” Michael Carvajal replied, according to people in the room. Three months later, the Bureau of Prisons promoted Hinkle again, putting him in charge of 20 federal prisons and 21,000 inmates from Utah to Hawaii as acting western regional director. Among them: Dublin.

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