Women in prisons across the US are being recruited by sex traffickers who force them into prostitution on their release. 
 
 A Guardian investigation has found that traffickers are using government websites to obtain personal information including mugshots, release dates and charge sheets to identify potential victims while they are still behind bars. 
 
 America's outcasts: the women trapped in a cruel cycle of exploitation Read more 
 
 Pimps also use inmates in prisons and jails countrywide to befriend incarcerated women who, on their release, are trafficked into the $9.5bn (£7.2bn) US commercial sex industry. 
 
 The investigation also found cases of the bail bond system being used in sex trafficking operations in at least five different states. Pimps and sex buyers are locating incarcerated women awaiting a court date by using personal data such as mugshots and bail bonds posted online, or through corrupt bondsmen. 
 
 Traffickers are then bailing women out of detention. Once released, the women are told they must work as prostitutes or have their bond rescinded and be sent back to jail. 
 
 Over the course of the investigation, The Guardian found cases of the bail bond system being used by pimps and sex buyers in Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Mississippi. 
 
 “The pimps would use bail as a way to control us and keep us in debt bondage,” said one trafficking survivor from Tampa, Florida. She claimed she was forced to work as a prostitute to pay off her bail debt and locked inside a house and beaten if she didn’t bring home enough money. 
 
 “Once when I tried to escape, the pimp revoked my bond. He found me, threw me in a car and got me sent back to jail,” she said. 
 
 Diane Checchio, a former prosecutor for the district attorney’s office in Orlando, Florida, said the bail bond system was routinely exploited by traffickers. 
 
 Up to 80% of the trafficking cases she worked on in 2016 involved bondsmen found to be illegally passing on information about women arrested on prostitution charges to suspected traffickers. 
 
 “Sometimes women are released not knowing who bonded them out or why, or what they’ve gotten into, and now they’re being coerced,” Checchio said. “They come out of jail and there’s someone waiting saying: ‘I posted your bond – now you owe me’ … [They will] threaten to rescind that bond if the girls don’t do what they’re asked or told to do. It’s still happening now.” 
 
 Checchio said traffickers were likely to be targeting women involved in the criminal justice system across the country. 
 
 “I would find it very likely that this is happening in every state that has women’s records online,” she said. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Predators thrive off isolation and trauma, so prisons and jails are perfect hunting grounds’: Nikki Bell, head of anti-trafficking organisation Lift. Photograph: Rick Friedman for the Guardian 
 
 Once they have identified a potential target inside a prison or jail, traffickers will try to establish a relationship by using letters, phone calls and promises of money and housing when the victim is released. Prison bank accounts are also used to send money to women, establishing a debt that is used to coerce them into prostitution on their release. 
 
 “When I was in prison [in Ohio] I had pimps I knew from the streets, and men I had never met, writing to me to try and convince me to go home with them,” said Amy Williams*, who was incarcerated in state prisons and county jails in Ohio over a 15-year period. 
 
 “Some of us knew what we were going back into but didn’t feel we had any other choice, as they’d be waiting for us anyway. Other girls I knew had no idea that they would be put on the streets by this person.” 
 
 Pimp-controlled prostitution is now recognised as one of the most brutal and pervasive forms of human trafficking in the US. Trafficking is defined under US federal and international law as when a person is induced to perform labour or a commercial sex act through force, fraud or coercion. 
 
 Over the course of the investigation, the Guardian gathered testimony from more than 20 trafficking survivors in 11 states across the country, as well as correctional officers, convicted sex traffickers, law enforcement officials, lawyers, prosecutors and frontline workers. All corroborated that prisons and jails were being used as recruiting grounds for human traffickers. 
 
 There are currently 1.2 million women under the supervision of the criminal justice system in the US. Women now comprise a larger proportion of the prison population than ever before, with the number incarcerated eight times higher than in 1980. 
 
 Many women are jailed for non-violent offences, with 25% incarcerated on drug-related charges. Many of the women interviewed had been jailed multiple times and had fallen in and out of the control of pimps over a period of years. 
 
 A 2017 survey of 130 trafficking survivors by the National Survivor Network, an advocacy and campaigning group, found that 91% of respondents said they had been arrested not only for prostitution but also for the sale and possession of drugs and a range of other crimes. 
 
 “Predators thrive off isolation and trauma, so prisons and jails are perfect hunting grounds because there you have a captive population of women who often have nowhere to go, and no support when they’re released,” said Nicole Bell, a trafficking survivor and founder of Living in Freedom Together, an anti-trafficking organisation in Massachusetts. 
 
 “Now they have figured out how to work the system, these institutions have become like big fish bowls for traffickers. Incarceration takes vulnerable women and makes them more vulnerable,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Anti-trafficking campaigners said correctional facilities must do more to prioritise the safety and protection of inmates and ensure staff understand the vulnerability of their institutions to human trafficking. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest National anti-trafficking advocate Marian Hatcher has accused prisons and jails of failing women. Photograph: Richard Schultz/Handout 
 
 “Our correctional facilities have a legal responsibility to protect the women who are under their charge,” said Marian Hatcher, a national anti-trafficking advocate and human trafficking coordinator at the Cook County sheriff’s office of public policy in Chicago. 
 
 “If inmates are being targeted while inside our prisons and jails by predators, instead of being offered the chance of an alternative when they are released, then this is a systemic failing of our duty of care to some of our country’s most vulnerable women.” 
 
 The US Department of Justice declined to comment. 
 
 *Name changed to protect identity ||||| Kate had spent three years behind bars at Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida’s largest women’s prison, when the letters from Richard Rawls started to arrive. 
 
 Men had written to Kate in prison before, but this time was different. Although she had never met him, Rawls made her feel special. He wrote that he’d seen her mugshot online and couldn’t stop thinking about her. Somehow aware that she was getting out soon, he offered her money, a home and unconditional love when she was released. 
 
 The letters promised Kate a future she never imagined possible – a way out of the cycle of prostitution and incarceration that had defined her life after a childhood of chaos and abuse. Soon, Rawls stopped signing his letters “Rick”; instead, he urged her: “Come on home to your daddy.” 
 
 The Trap – the deadly sex–trafficking cycle in American prisons Read more 
 
 “When you’re in prison, all you think about is getting out,” Kate says. “The hours go by and it really hurts to know that nobody thinks about you in there. 
 
 “So when you get a letter it’s like a gift from God. He told me everything that I wanted to hear. He said I wasn’t going to be a prostitute any more, that I could go home with him and live at his house, and that he would be the love that I was searching for.” 
 
 When Kate walked out of prison, Rawls, a career criminal and convicted felon with more than 47 charges for sexual battery, child abuse, drug possession and assault, was there to pick her up. Just as he had promised. 
 
 I got in the car. He’d brought me two sweater dresses, a Heineken and a lot of crack 
 
 “When I got into the car, he’d brought me two sweater dresses, a bottle of Heineken and a lot of crack,” she says. “I went right back to smoking crack my first day out of prison.” 
 
 When she got back to Rawls’ house, Kate knew immediately she was in trouble. Instead of the comfortable home she had been promised, the house was filthy and chaotic. Cockroaches crawled up the walls. The windows were sealed shut. And hungry, chained pit bull dogs whined and barked outside. Inside the house, Kate found half a dozen other former Lowell inmates. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate was one of at least 18 women in Florida who fell prey to Richard Rawls over a five-year period. Photograph: Todd Anderson for the Guardian 
 
 “It was just crazy in there, really a living hell,” she says. “At first he gave me all the drugs I wanted, but he made sure that I watched him beat the other girls and I wasn’t allowed to leave his room. Then, after two weeks, it switched up and he started telling me that I owed him for all the drugs he’d given me, and now I had to go make him money.” 
 
 Four months later, a heavily armed Swat team blew in the windows of the house and arrested Rawls, who was later convicted and jailed for human trafficking. 
 
 An 18-month police investigation concluded that, over the course of five years, Rawls had trafficked Kate and at least 18 other women out of jails and prisons across Florida. 
 
 Play Video 1:59 ‘I went right back to smoking crack' – a clip from sex-trafficking documentary The Trap 
 
 At the time of his arrest, he was making thousands of dollars a month from prostituting the multiple women he was keeping at the house. Controlling them with narcotics, prescription pills and brutal beatings, he touted them on street corners and escort websites. 
 
 Rawls remains the only person convicted of trafficking women out of criminal justice institutions in the US. Yet his case is by no means exceptional. 
 
 A flawed system 
 
 A Guardian/Observer investigation has found that jailhouses and prison cells across the US are routinely used as recruiting grounds by pimps and sex buyers. 
 
 Exploiting gaps in the criminal justice system, predators are targeting some of the country’s most vulnerable and isolated women, trapping many in an endless loop of criminalisation and exploitation. 
 
 State to state, the recruitment methods being used to target victims are broadly the same. 
 
 
 
 The first stage involves finding potential victims. US public record legislation means that, in many states, anyone charged with a criminal offence will have their personal data posted on government websites. The information can include mugshots, home addresses and details of criminal records. In some states, details of arrests and charges are also printed in local newspapers. 
 
 This means predators can cherrypick potential targets, find where women are being held, and on what charges, and – in some cases – learn when they are likely to be released. 
 
 Information posted online can also include information on bail bonds set for women awaiting court dates. 
 
 Becki, a trafficking survivor from Cincinnati, Ohio, said that in 10 years coming in and out of the criminal justice system, she routinely witnessed pimps and sex buyers using corrupt bail bondsmen to access women in jailhouses. 
 
 “[The pimps] bail you out and when you walk out of jail that’s it, you owe them,” she says. “You’ll do anything not to go back to jail, and so you go out and you have to work it off – and more than likely, you’re then never getting away from this man. He’s got you now.” 
 
 Inside prisons and jails, the use of prison and jail commissary accounts – which allow inmates to receive money from outside to spend on food, toiletries and other essentials – is a key vehicle for recruitment. 
 
 
 
 I’d tell the girl he wanted whatever she needed to hear to get in the car with him. It was like ordering food off a menu 
 
 In many facilities, anybody can send money to an inmate.This means that many women are, in effect, financially supported through incarceration by men on the outside, who then demand repayment when they are released. 
 
 Traffickers are also using inmate bank accounts to pay in-house recruiters to scout out potential targets. 
 
 “When I was in prison I’d speak to my pimp every week and tell him about what new girls had come in and then he’d send me money,” said Chloe, a former inmate at a state prison in Ohio. 
 
 “I’d tell the girl he wanted whatever they needed to hear to make sure she got in that car with him when she left. It was like ordering food off a menu.” 
 
 A hotbed for recruitment 
 
 In a remote and dusty prison complex in Venus, Texas, Anthony Harris, a former pimp who who was convicted of compelling prostitution in 2015, laughs when he is asked if he’s heard about pimps recruiting women from prisons and jails. 
 
 
 
 “Oh yeah, I hear about that all the time,” he says. “[Jails and prisons] are good recruiting places, because they come out of jail and they have nothing, they have nowhere to go, they have no family, don’t have any money or any food. Other girls will see someone in jail and say: ‘Hey, my guy wants to talk to you’ – and the next thing, you’re putting money on her books and sending her letters.” 
 
 When women are released, pimps wait outside to collect them “like a line of cabs”, says Harris. 
 
 “They probably have never seen you a day in their life, but they become loyal to you because of what you did [for them inside]. So when they get out they feel obliged to continue to be loyal to them, so you just got yourself a new girl.” 
 
 Over the course of the investigation, the Guardian was granted access inside the Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center. It is one of the few institutions that acknowledges it has an issue with the trafficking of inmates. 
 
 Nicole Bell, a trafficking survivor and founder of Lift, a local anti-trafficking organisation, runs workshops inside the jail to prevent inmates being groomed and recruited by pimps and sex buyers. She was repeatedly incarcerated at the jail when she was in the grip of addiction and prostitution on the streets of Worcester. 
 
 Play Video 2:32 ‘I treated [my women] like queens' – a clip from sex-trafficking documentary The Trap 
 
 “I remember the feeling of dread whenever I came back here [to the jail], the feeling of hopelessness, the [sense of]: ‘How did I get back here?’” she says. “It took me a long time to recognise I was a victim myself, because society just treats us like criminals.” 
 
 The problem, says Bell, is that the women she works with don’t fit what many people imagine to be the profile of a trafficking victim. Much domestic trafficking in the US doesn’t involve people being transported across borders or controlled by organised criminal gangs. It is often very small and very local. In 2016, 37% of women who called a national helpline for trafficking victims said they had been trafficked by their partner. 
 
 “Trafficking for many of these women started with a relationship that turned exploitative, or a past that has led them to drug use – but because they’re involved in prostitution and addiction and have a criminal record, they’re treated like a throwaway population,” Bell says. 
 
 In the US, trafficking is defined by exploitation, with victims controlled through fraud, force or coercion. 
 
 “These woman have been hurt and exploited by people their whole lives, but society doesn’t care what happens to them,” says Bell. 
 
 When you get the letters … sometimes you want to believe what they’re telling you is real 
 
 Inside the jail, female inmates showed letters from men they didn’t know. In an effort to befriend them, the senders offered to send them cash and provide them with money, drugs and housing after their release. This grooming process often goes on for months. 
 
 “It gets so lonely in here,” says Jill, 24, her tiny frame swamped by a baggy regulation orange jumpsuit. This is her 22nd time in the jailhouse. 
 
 “I have a boyfriend on the outside but he lets me prostitute, so does he really love me? And he lies to me all the time. When you get the letters from these men, sometimes you want to believe what they’re telling you is real.” 
 
 She shrugs her shoulders. “When you’re in jail, you’re all alone. Sometimes, without them we’d have nobody,” she says. “My family won’t help me.” 
 
 Many of the women here know the men writing to them are pimps or sex buyers, but say that without their support they’d have nowhere to go when released. 
 
 “I know girls who survive in here because of the men,” says Katrina, another inmate. “Imagine you’re in here for a year and they’re supporting you. What do you think they want when we get out? Imagine you say you don’t want to go back to disrespecting your body. That’s just not going to fly. Nothing’s for free, I’ve learned that.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scene from The Trap. Photograph: Alex Healey for the Guardian 
 
 A matter of survival 
 
 While many women in America’s booming $9.5bn (£7.2bn) sex trade work independently, pimp-controlled prostitution is now widely acknowledged as one of the most brutal and pervasive forms of human trafficking in the US. 
 
 Prostitution is illegal in every state bar a few counties in Nevada. According to FBI data, more than 39,000 people were arrested for prostitution and related charges in 2016. It is believed that 80% of women arrested on prostitution charges are either under the control of a third party or have been trafficked at some point. 
 
 Of the 20 trafficking survivors who contributed to the investigation, the majority alleged they had been arrested multiple times for crimes committed while they were under the control of a trafficker. 
 
 “Vulnerable women who are being controlled and exploited continue to be arrested every day,” says Rebecca Bender, a national anti-trafficking advocate. She says a recent move in many states away from arresting women for prostitution has been falsely held up as a solution to the criminalisation of trafficking victims. 
 
 “There is little awareness that many women in a trafficking situation are also forced into many different illegal activities, which make them a target for re-arrest by the police,” she says. 
 
 The impact of having a criminal record often makes it impossible for women leaving incarceration to find employment and safe housing, or to regain custody of their children. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nikki Bell, founder and director of anti-trafficking organisation Living in Freedom Together. Photograph: Rick Friedman for the Guardian 
 
 “I try to help them when they get out but we don’t have a safe house, so when they’re released the traffickers are the ones who can help meet their basic needs,” says Bell. “It’s a matter of survival.” 
 
 Solutions, say advocates like Bell and Bender, have to start inside the facilities themselves, where there is an urgent need for staff training and more interventions to support women. 
 
 Since the Rawls case, the Department of Corrections in Florida has implemented anti-trafficking training and awareness measures designed to educate staff and inmates about human trafficking. 
 
 In a statement to the Guardian, the Florida Department of Corrections said it had fully cooperated with the Rawls enquiry and added: “The department is committed to preventing human trafficking and working with our partners in law enforcement to ensure any individual involved is criminally prosecuted. We take all allegations of this devastating crime very seriously, and have implemented aggressive measures to protect our most vulnerable populations from this enterprise.” 
 
 For many, however, support either in prison or outside is simply not available. 
 
 “These are some of the most vulnerable, high-risk individuals in our society,” says Bell. “At the moment, most are just trapped in a continuous loop of abuse and exploitation.” 
 
 • Living in Freedom Together supports survivors of sexual exploitation in Massachusetts
– The information is readily available online: The mugshot of a female inmate, the charges she was convicted on, and her release date. And predators are using it, finds the Guardian in an investigation. It reports that sex traffickers are both wooing "potential victims while they are still behind bars" and even preying on them before they get there by manipulating the bail bond system. The Guardian found cases where pimps paid women's bail—alerted to their situation, again, by online records or nefarious bondsmen—only to force them into sex work to "pay off" that debt in Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Mississippi. And it's not occasional, according to a former Florida prosecutor who tells the Guardian that all but about 20% of the sex trafficking cases she handled in 2016 involved these bondsmen working with traffickers. For the women already in prison, the traffickers use letters and calls to reel them in. In a companion piece, the Guardian shares Kate's story: While incarcerated at Florida's Lowell Correctional Institution, a stranger named Richard Rawls began to write to her, saying he saw her mugshot online and that it stuck with him. He knew she'd be out soon. He told her to "come on home to your daddy," that he would provide a comfortable home and all the love she needed. Instead, she was taken to a roach-infested house guarded by pit bulls; inside were other former inmates from the same prison. Rawls fed her drugs then demanded she pay him back for them by working as a prostitute. Four months later, she was freed by a SWAT team. Read the full investigation here, or more on Rawls here.