It was what she considered the final humiliation of a degrading act that may have helped Dorothy Carrigan make a case against a prison guard who she says raped her in her cell.
After he was done, Ms. Carrigan said, the guard tossed his used condom on her bed and told her to flush it down the toilet. Instead, she turned it over to prison officials.
To human rights and prisoner rights groups, what happened to Ms. Carrigan on March 6, 1995, at the Delores J. Baylor Women's Correctional Institute near here is part of a growing and troubling trend: the sexual harassment and assault of female inmates by male guards.
Prison officials and prosecutors say Ms. Carrigan agreed to have sex, but they have charged the guard under a law in Delaware, similar to ones in other states, that prohibits any sex between prisoners and correctional workers because of the temptation to take advantage of female inmates.
Many female inmates have taken legal action themselves, and in recent years prison officials in California, Georgia and the District of Columbia have reached out-of-court settlements in class-action suits brought on behalf of women who said they were sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by guards while incarcerated.
Since 1990, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has won convictions in seven cases involving male employees at various Federal, state and local detention centers who raped female inmates or coerced them into having sex. The department is now investigating allegations of sexual abuse in prisons in Michigan, said a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The increased legal activity has come with the huge growth in the number of women incarcerated in Federal and state prisons and local jails, to almost 116,000 last year from 25,000 in 1980.
''What is growing is the potential for the problems, because you have more women in prison and more often than not you're going to have male officers guarding them,'' said Dorothy Thomas, director of the Women's Rights Project for Human Rights Watch, which just released a report on sexual abuse of women in American prisons. ''Given our sense that correction authorities are ignoring the problem, there is a possibility it may get worse, and it's already bad.''
Just how bad is a matter of dispute. There have been no systematic surveys of the problem in the country's 50 state prison systems and hundreds of local jails. Most of the evidence is anecdotal or, as in the case of the Human Rights Watch report, is extrapolated from an investigation of a few states.
Given the lack of precision in documenting the problem, prison officials have tended to say that while any sexual assault or sexual harassment by guards is unacceptable, the problem is not large.
''I don't know that it is as pervasive as people think it is,'' said Harold Clarke, director of the Nebraska Department of Corrections and president of the Association of State Corrections Administrators. ''In my home state we haven't had one complaint, and I'm certain that other agencies can say the same thing. I'm not sure how extensive the problem is, but it is a problem that should be studied.''
Still, the issue is causing enough concern to be the subject of a panel discussion at a recent convention in Dallas of Mr. Clarke's group. And Dr. Allen Ault, director of the National Institute of Corrections Academy, which trains prison personnel, said he had been asked by several state prison systems to advise them on dealing with the problem. Dr. Ault, whose institute is part of the Justice Department, would not identify which states sought his counsel.
''I know all the directors,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''Certainly they don't want this, nor the adverse publicity or the scandals that evolve around this.''
The Human Rights Watch report, the result of a two-and-a-half-year investigation, looked at five states -- California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and New York -- as well as the District of Columbia.
Based on interviews with more than 60 current and former inmates, the group determined that male correctional employees had raped, sexually assaulted and abused female prisoners. Further the report said guards had also ''used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for having done so.''
Interviewing inmates, lawyers and prison officials, investigators from Human Rights Watch determined that female prisoners were being subjected to sexual advances from guards at several New York prisons, including Bedford Hills and the Taconic Correctional Facility.
While some of the sex is forcible rape, the report said that female inmates often engaged in sex with guards to obtain cigarettes, shampoo, sanitary napkins and other items. To some people concerned with the corrections field, the willingness of guards to take advantage of women who are willing to trade sex for necessities is another type of coercion.
''The system creates a need to get things,'' Elaine Lord, the superintendent at Bedford Hills, told Human Rights Watch. ''There are too many things to be bargained for.''
This year, New York enacted a law declaring that an inmate is not capable of consenting to have sex with a guard or parole officer. As a result, any sex that occurs between them would be akin to statutory rape and punishable by a maximum sentence of four years for the guard.
Some prison officials and human rights groups say that a source of the problem is the large number of men guarding women. The Human Rights Watch report notes that the majority of guards in women's prisons are men and that in some states, like Illinois, male guards outnumber female officers in women's prisons 3 to 1.
''We don't think that just because they are men, they will be abusers,'' Ms. Thomas said. ''We feel the real problem is that male officers are being called upon to guard female inmates without adequate training and without safeguards being in place. It's like playing with a loaded gun.''
But changing such staffing is difficult. Three years ago when Georgia tried to shift more female guards to female prisons and male officers to male institutions, it was sued by female corrections officers who said they were being discriminated against because of their sex.
Lawyers who represent female inmates in class-action lawsuits intended to halt the sexual abuse of female prisoners say the problems go beyond rape or even consensual sex. They say that female inmates are often strip-searched in front of male guards. Officers in the Orleans Parish Jail in New Orleans were enticing female inmates to expose their breasts in exchange for cigarettes, an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union found. And some female inmates in several prisons have complained of a lack of privacy from male guards.
''The guards walk in our rooms, they don't even knock,'' said Valerie Daniels, 26, another inmate at the Baylor prison. ''We could be in there with no clothes on and they'll just walk right in.''
But Ms. Daniels's complaints go beyond lack of privacy. She says that the day after Ms. Carrigan was attacked, she was raped by a different male guard. In Ms. Daniels's case, as in the case of Ms. Carrigan, prison and state officials contend that the sex was consensual.
Last December, Ms. Daniels, who had been in prison for more than two years, gave birth to a boy, after refusing what she said were entreaties from prison officials to terminate her pregnancy.
''They were trying to get me to get an abortion,'' said Ms. Daniels, whose soft voice and retiring demeanor make her seem younger than 26. ''They said if my family couldn't pay for an abortion, they would pay for it.''
In both Ms. Carrigan's and Ms. Daniels's cases, the guards accused of assaulting them have resigned. State authorities have indicted Peter Davis, the guard accused by Ms. Carrigan, under a Delaware law that makes even consensual sex in a detention center a felony.
The two women, however, say that after reporting the incidents, they were subject to retaliation by prison officials. Ms. Daniels says officials told her that the guard in question, Rudolph Hawkins, had denied raping her and that if she pursued the matter she could be prosecuted for having had sex in prison. But she is pursuing the complaint anyway.
Prison officials had paternity tests performed but would not disclose the results.
Ms. Carrigan said that immediately after making her accusation of rape, she was transferred from the minimum-security section of the women's prison to maximum security and placed in solitary confinement. She said in an interview that she had been beaten twice since the incident -- both incidents are being investigated -- and that she had been constantly harassed by guards.
The pressure has been so intense, she said, that she jumped from the second-floor tier of cells in the prison. The incident led prison officials to place her on a suicide watch.
''I got beat up the other day,'' she said. ''I don't care what anybody tells me, because I wasn't doing nothing. I got beat up behind this case.''