Ramsey County has agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit from a woman who was raped by the driver of a private prisoner transport firm.
The county had hired Arkansas-based Inmate Services Corp., to retrieve people arrested in other states to Minnesota to face outstanding warrants.
Rogeric Hankins, who worked as a driver for Inmate Services, raped the woman at a Missouri rest stop in 2020 while he was transporting her from Olympia, Wash., to St. Paul to face a DUI charge. Hankins was convicted of the assault in federal court in 2023 and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Although the woman is named in her lawsuit and public county documents, the Star Tribune typically does not name survivors of sexual assault.
“[She] is a brave and strong woman who has been through a lot,” said J. Ashwin Madia, an attorney on the case. “This settlement can’t undo what happened to her, but at least allows for some closure as she moves forward with the next stage of her life.”
The lawsuit argues that Ramsey County should have been aware of the “pattern of constitutional violations” Inmate Services Corp. was accused of condoning prior to hiring the firm. The complaint said the company did not properly train its employees and they were unaware of detainees’ constitutional rights.
Lawsuits and complaints from detainees painted a troubling picture of Inmate Services Corp. workers’ conduct before Ramsey County first contracted with the firm in 2018. The company typically charged on a prisoner-per-mile basis and the county paid it more than $90,000 a year, according to the lawsuit.
Workers faced repeated allegations of mistreating the pretrial detainees they were transporting. The lawsuit says detainees were shackled and “packed like sardines” into the back of vans that “zigzag across the country for days or weeks at a time,” picking up prisoners and dropping them off.
