Editor’s note: This article contains sexually explicit language, images and graphic depictions of sexual assault.

Over the course of several months in late 2019, correctional officers at a Maryland prison put Brandon Bowden through hell.

Targeted by white supremacist gang members, Bowden was desperate to move to a different tier at the Maryland Correctional Institution Hagerstown. The officers in charge of Bowden’s fate agreed to transfer him, but only after making him sexually humiliate himself in a variety of ways. They forced Bowden to say degrading “passwords” to go nearly anywhere in the facility and ordered him to tattoo an image of an ejaculating penis penetrating a cartoon heart on his leg, among other abuses, according to trial testimony.

Ultimately, Bowden said, he was forced to perform oral sex on one of the COs, Stephen Harbin of West Virginia, who was criminally charged after an internal investigation by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Harbin denied forcing Bowden to perform oral sex on him but pleaded guilty to other abuses. An administrative law judge nonetheless found Bowden’s claim of sexual abuse to be credible.

In addition to charging Harbin, the corrections department’s investigators sustained administrative charges against several other officers, including two sergeants, who were found to have participated in or been made aware of the sexual abuse but failed to stop it or report it. None of them were fired, and some went on to be promoted, according to court filings. Harbin was allowed to resign instead of being terminated.

With the help of his attorneys, Bowden secured an $800,000 settlement from the state, thought to be one of the largest monetary amounts ever given to a prisoner through the administrative grievance process in Maryland. He also recently walked free from prison after prosecutors from Wicomico County agreed to modify his sentence. Bowden had served 12 years and was facing an additional 20.

For Bowden, however, justice has yet to be “fully served.”

“The majority of the COs involved were allowed to remain in prison with authority over prisoners,” Bowden said. “The main one [Harbin] only ended up with a slap on the wrist.”

Harbin did not respond to messages seeking comment on Bowden’s allegations and the resulting settlement.

Cary Hansel, one of Bowden’s attorneys, said he was “appalled by the failure of the disciplinary process to weed out all of the officers that were involved.”

“But, sadly, I wasn’t shocked,” Hansel said. “I’ve been a civil rights lawyer for 25 years. The failure to appropriately discipline officers is rampant in the Maryland correctional system and has been for the entire time that I’ve practiced law.”

The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said in a statement that the “handling of misconduct surrounding Mr. Bowden’s case” occurred under the previous administration, in 2019.

Its Intelligence and Investigative Division sustained findings, the department pointed out, “but it was held at the warden level and did not reach executive leadership.”

“This is one of the changes the department has addressed,” the agency said, referring to tweaks the current administration has made to the disciplinary process in the wake of Bowden’s case.

Though the window has closed for the department to initiate new disciplinary proceedings against officers involved in Bowden’s case, it could look to hold decertification hearings for those involved.

The department declined to answer questions about potential hearings, saying it could not comment on personnel matters.

A cruel twist of fate

In August 2019, Bowden was in the midst of serving a lengthy prison sentence stemming from a series of home burglaries.

On the G-2 Tier of the Protective Custody Unit, Bowden was the tier representative, working two jobs and taking “every class that was available to him on the inside.”

“He did everything possible to stay out of trouble,” Bowden’s attorneys wrote in a post-trial brief. “He had one objective: to accrue as much good time as possible to get home to his family as quickly as he could.”

The correctional officers in the Protective Custody Unit, the attorneys continued, “knew this about Mr. Bowden.”

Bowden’s nonconfrontational demeanor made him a target for white supremacist gangs on the tier, his attorneys wrote, so he asked to be moved to a nearby tier with single-occupancy cells and no gang members, according to trial testimony. A lieutenant who agreed to transfer Bowden later went on medical leave due to health issues, leaving the tier to be largely supervised by two midranked correctional officers, one of them Harbin.

After Bowden, a gifted artist, failed to produce a tattoo design for one of the officers, they began making him say a sexually degrading “password” to go anywhere in the prison, according to Bowden and admitted to by Harbin during the trial. Harbin ordered other officers to make Bowden say the password, and several other officers on the tier admitted during the trial to observing or participating in the practice.

The two “officers-in-charge” of the tier then made Bowden write out a list of other prisoners he supposedly performed oral sex on, using it to control and threaten Bowden, his attorneys wrote.

With Bowden increasingly desperate to get off the tier, the abuse worsened. Harbin and the other officers told Bowden they would allow him to transfer out of the tier only if he tattooed an image of an ejaculating penis penetrating a heart on his leg. Bowden resisted at first, then complied, and the officers transferred him onto the other tier that same day.

At trial, several officers, including two sergeants, admitted to seeing the tattoo and knowing it was part of an agreement between Bowden and Harbin. In a statement to corrections department investigators, one of the sergeants questioned whether it was “her place to question what they’re doing in their unit.”

‘Classic grooming behavior’

The abuse went on for months.

Bowden was called degrading names, made to lick an officer’s boot and constantly threatened that, if he didn’t go along with it, things would get worse, according to trial testimony.

At one point, Bowden tried to anonymously submit an internal complaint, known as a “grievance,” about his abuse, but Harbin intercepted it, confronted Bowden with it and never turned it in to the chain of command, according to Bowden’s attorneys.

Left at the mercy of his abusers, Bowden faced escalating torment. During the move to the next tier over, Bowden’s television broke, so he requested a rental. In exchange, Harbin made Bowden agree to wear a T-shirt that had the explicit tattoo design of the penis piercing the heart. He was told he would have to wear it every Friday, during recreation time in front of the other prisoners, all day long, according to Bowden’s testimony at trial.

Bowden delayed creating the shirt at first, and it was during that time that he was called into the G-2 tier office, according to his attorneys.

“Harbin was getting onto Mr. Bowden for not having the shirt done,” Bowden’s attorneys wrote in the post-trial brief. “He was also making comments about how easy it would be to have someone stabbed and how prisoners would do anything for Suboxone.”

Bowden was changing trash cans at the time, he said, and when he turned around, Harbin forced Bowden to perform oral sex on him, according to Bowden, who said Harbin threatened to have him killed if he told anyone.

The sexual assault left Bowden “completely broken,” his attorneys wrote in the post-trial brief. They described Harbin’s collective actions over the second half of 2019 as “classic grooming behavior.”

“When a sexual predator is unchecked, this is what happens,” the attorneys said. “They slowly and relentlessly break their victims down until their victim doesn’t even know how he got down to his knees.”

‘That place of hell’

In recommending an outcome of the grievance trial, Administrative Law Judge Daniel Andrews recounted how Bowden became “overwhelmed with emotion” and wept while describing his sexual assault, expressing “shame and embarrassment.”

Andrews also noted that the corrections department did not dispute that the interactions between Harbin and Bowden occurred or that other correctional officers knew of the conduct and did not report it to supervisors.

“To some extent, the DOC’s case was about mitigating the potential remedy, including financial award, by demonstrating how the officers’ conduct violated DPSCS policy and went beyond their duties as COs,” Andrews wrote.

In discussing the potential monetary settlement, Andrews wrote that the circumstances of the case were shocking even by the estimation of veteran corrections employees who testified at trial. The sexual harassment went on for nearly half a year, he wrote, intended to “demean and humiliate” Bowden.

“The resulting effect was to break down the grievant [Bowden] to a point that he had no choice but to comply with officers’ demands, including the sexual assault by Mr. Harbin,” Andrews concluded.

He recommended a monetary award of $1 million.

Reflecting on his time in prison, Bowden said he would not let that period of his life define him, “nor will it stop me from being the father and man God intended me to be.”

“I am just wholeheartedly thankful that I am out of that place of hell,” Bowden said, going on to express gratitude for his attorneys at Hansel Law. “I owe them my life because I truly believe it would’ve gotten a lot worse had they not intervened.”

When he was living in fear for his life, Bowden made the calculation not to report his sexual assault for months, until he finally, through the help of a fellow prisoner well versed in the legal process, acquired attorneys.

In coming forward with his case, Bowden said, he hoped “my suffering keeps others from enduring the same thing and prevents staff from hurting anyone else.”

“I just hope bringing things into the light helps make change for the better,” he said. “I am ashamed and extremely embarrassed, but if I don’t tell my story then how will people know what goes on? Shame is a small sacrifice for the greater good.”