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In “Preying on Prisoners,” The Marshall Project exposed how Texas, the state with the most instances of prison sex abuse, fails to penalize prison staffers who sexually abuse inmates. In a six-month investigation, Alysia Santo found that since 2000, the state prison system referred only 400 cases of suspected sexual assault by prison employees for prosecution, of which prosecutors refused to pursue almost half. Ultimately, 126 prison workers were convicted, but just nine were sentenced to jail time, and the rest were subject to fines and a few years probation, with the promise of a clean criminal record if the court's conditions were met.