Dodge County, WI — 34-year-old Alex Wouts was recently found guilty of sexually assaulting three inmates on multiple occasions where he worked at the Fox Lake Correctional Institution.
To make matters even worse, Wouts was HIV positive and had unprotected sexual contact with these men, knowingly putting them at risk.
DNA evidence confirmed the accusations against Wouts, including samples taken from inmates underwear. Wouts was found guilty of five counts of second-degree sexual assault by correctional staff. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
In addition to his sentencing, Wouts is also ordered to register as a sex offender upon release. Dodge County Assistant District Attorney James Sempf called Wouts a “serial rapist” during sentencing. “The corrosive nature of the disparity in the power dynamic is a factor in what makes this offense so serious. The defendant can fairly be classified as a serial rapist,” Sempf said.
Sempf asked the court to give Wouts a 120-year sentence so he would never be let out of prison. While working at the correctional facility, Wouts would threaten inmates with punishments and offer rewards to coerce them into sexual acts. According to one of the victims who came forward, Wouts said that he had been doing this with different inmates for nearly 10 years.
One of the victims estimated that he had over 50 sexual encounters with Wouts. “When you rape someone, it doesn’t matter that you act like you are remorseful in the courtroom. It doesn’t matter that you were only caught once. When you rape someone, you do not get to pretend that you made a mistake. … You knew that I was not consenting,” the victim said.
When Wouts was first questioned about the allegations on Dec. 4, 2015, he reportedly laughed and told investigators that he was “not gay and would never ruin his reputation or his family to do something like that within the prison system.” Fox Lake Correctional warden Randall Hepp said that Wouts is one of the worst correctional officers to come through the facility.
“When an individual is sentenced to prison, it is understood that his choices will be reduced, his privileges will be restricted and his choices will be limited. However, when an individual is sentenced to prison, they are committed to our custody and entrusted in our care and they deserve and are entitled to our protection. Wouts disregarded principles,” Hepp said. Wouts still claims that he is innocent and that he has never sexually assaulted any of these men.
“Overall, if someone would do something like that to me, I’d say something now. Not in two to three weeks. I wouldn’t just decide to sexually assault inmates,” Wouts said.
This is a typical defense used by perpetrators of sexual abuse, that a person did not report the crime immediately. However, many victims of these types of crimes are afraid to come forward immediately after the attack especially in cases like this where there is such an extreme power differential.
As TFTP has reported, while independent researchers began tracking how many people are killed by cops every year, no one was tracking how many crimes were committed by cops. However, that is beginning to change, and the data shows that the problem is staggering.
Last year, a study exposed the startling fact that police officers are arrested about 1,100 times a year, or roughly three officers charged every day.
Many of these arrests are over unspeakable sex crimes. “Police crimes are not uncommon,” the study’s lead researcher Philip M. Stinson concluded. “Our data directly contradicts some of the prevailing assumptions and the proposition that only a small group of rotten apples perpetrate the vast majority of police crime.”
Although nearly 60 percent of the crimes “occurred when the officer was technically off-duty,” Stinson wrote, “a significant portion of these so-called off-duty crimes also lies within the context of police work and the perpetrator’s role as a police officer, including instances where off-duty officers flash a badge, an official weapon, or otherwise use their power, authority, and the respect afforded to them as a means to commit crime.”
According to a report from WaPo, in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse, 72 percent of the officers were fired, and more than 80 percent resulted in convictions, the study found.
There were 422 reported cases of forcible and statutory rape, 352 cases of forcible fondling and 94 sodomy cases over the seven years of the study, which Stinson called “larger than expected based on the existing research.” The data search turned up 174 examples of male officers arrested in cases of “Driving While Female,” in which women drivers were harassed or assaulted. About 82 percent of those cases ended in convictions.