OAKLAND, California — Former Bureau of Prisons correctional officer David Perez pleaded guilty on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, to sexually abusing two female inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California, and to making false statements to federal investigators, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced. Perez is the tenth correctional officer to have either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial in the long-running federal investigation into sexual abuse of inmates at FCI Dublin, the low- and minimum-security federal prison for women in Dublin, a city in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of California
Perez entered the plea in federal court in Oakland. He had been charged by Information — a charging document filed with a defendant's consent — on September 16, 2026, with three counts of abusive sexual contact, one count of sexual abuse of a ward, and one count of false statements to a government agency, according to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG). His case, number 4:26-cr-00464-YGR, is before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Perez was released on bond after his guilty plea, prosecutors said.
Source: DOJ Office of the Inspector General
The hearing officer who held the keys to punishment
According to the plea agreement described by prosecutors, Perez worked for the Bureau of Prisons from September 1994 to August 2019 — a 25-year career. From about October 2014 until August 2019, he served at FCI Dublin as a Discipline Hearing Officer, known as a DHO. In that role, he adjudicated disciplinary cases against inmates accused of misconduct inside the prison and issued punishment when he found them guilty. Those punishments could include time in the Special Housing Unit — the SHU, the prison's segregation unit — and loss of good-time credit, which directly lengthens the time an inmate serves. In other words, for five years Perez was one of the officials who decided how much longer a woman at Dublin would stay locked up and under what conditions.
Prosecutors said that between 2014 and 2015, Perez presided over four disciplinary hearings for one female inmate. Each time, he found her guilty and assessed sanctions, which sometimes included SHU time and loss of good time. Then, between August 2015 and September 2016, Perez repeatedly met that same inmate alone in a room in the Captain's Complex at the prison. During several of those meetings, prosecutors said, Perez kissed the inmate and touched her breasts over and under her clothing. The inmate is not named in court releases, and Awaaz Punjab does not identify victims of sexual abuse.
A second inmate came before Perez in July 2016. He found her guilty and sentenced her to a little over two weeks in the SHU, among other sanctions. After her release from the SHU, prosecutors said, Perez began calling her to meet him alone in the Captain's Complex. During those meetings, he complimented her looks, asked her to show him her breasts, and on one occasion told her that he had the power to add or subtract time from her sentence. On two occasions when he was alone with this inmate, Perez kissed her and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. On another occasion, prosecutors said, he digitally penetrated her. The OIG charging summary dates the conduct covered by the Information from about August 4, 2015 to about December 8, 2017, and states that the women were in official detention and under Perez's custodial, supervisory and disciplinary authority.
A false denial to federal investigators
The false-statements count concerns an interview years later. On October 8, 2024, Perez spoke with special agents of the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During that interview, prosecutors said, he falsely stated that the only time he had ever touched any female inmate was when he escorted them to and from discipline hearings — and, in the OIG's summary of the charge, that he never touched any inmates inappropriately. His guilty plea this week admits that denial was false.
Prosecutors stressed that any sentence will be imposed by the court after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal sentencing statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3553. Perez is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew Paulson, Sailaja Paidipaty and Molly Priedeman, and the case is the result of an investigation by the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and the FBI.
Eleven officers charged: the Dublin scandal in full
Perez's plea is the latest chapter in one of the worst staff-abuse scandals in the history of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The Justice Department says 11 FCI Dublin officers have now been charged over sexual abuse of female prisoners at the facility. The roll of earlier cases, published by the U.S. Attorney's Office alongside the Perez announcement, includes Warden Ray J. Garcia, convicted on all counts by a jury on December 8, 2022 and sentenced to 70 months in prison; Chaplain James Highhouse, who pleaded guilty on February 24, 2022 and was sentenced to 84 months; correctional officer Andrew Jones, sentenced to 96 months; officer Nakie Nunley, sentenced to 72 months; officer John Bellhouse, convicted at trial and sentenced to 63 months; and officer Jeffrey Wilson, sentenced to 52 months. One officer, Darrell Smith, had his charges dismissed on December 22, 2025 after two hung juries. An Associated Press investigation had earlier reported that inmates and staff referred to the prison as the 'rape club' because of the culture of abuse and retaliation women described there. FCI Dublin was closed in 2024.
The Perez case shows why the Dublin abuse was so hard to escape from inside. Federal law makes it a crime for custodial staff to engage in any sexual act with a person held under their authority — the 'ward' statute Perez pleaded under exists precisely because an inmate cannot meaningfully consent to the official who controls her discipline, her housing and her release date. Perez did not merely work at the prison: as hearing officer, he personally found both women guilty, personally set their punishments, and — by his own plea — then used private meetings in the Captain's Complex, and in one case an explicit reminder that he could add or subtract time from a sentence, in the course of the abuse. For Bay Area readers, the case lands close to home: Dublin sits in the East Bay, within the same Northern California region where tens of thousands of Punjabi and South Asian families live and work, and its federal court in Oakland is where the region's biggest public-corruption and abuse-of-power cases are heard.
Perez remains free on bond. He returns to federal court in Oakland on March 25, 2027, when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will sentence him; the court will weigh the Sentencing Guidelines and the factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553 before fixing the term. The Justice Department describes its FCI Dublin investigation as ongoing, so further charges or related civil settlements cannot be ruled out.
No victim is named in the federal releases in this case, and the women involved have never been publicly identified by prosecutors. What is now on the court record, in Perez's own admitted plea, is narrower and damning enough: the man who decided punishment at Dublin used that office to abuse two of the women under his authority, and then lied about it to the investigators who finally came asking.