Once released, the women are told they must work as prostitutes or have their bond rescinded and be sent back to jail. He found me, threw me in a car and got me sent back to jail,” she said. Rawls remains the only person convicted of trafficking women out of criminal justice institutions in the US. 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. “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. 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. “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. “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. 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. “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. 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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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. “These are some of the most vulnerable, high-risk individuals in our society,” says Bell.
– 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.