Fairbanks correctional officer charged with sexually assaulting inmate in transport van

A correctional officer faces a felony sex-assault charge after Alaska State Troopers say he assaulted a woman in his custody inside a prisoner transport van in February 2024.

Troopers remanded Richard Johnson, 47, of Nenana, to the Fairbanks Correctional Center on Wednesday on a charge of sexual assault in the third degree, a class C felony. That is the same facility where the woman he is accused of assaulting was housed. The Alaska Bureau of Investigation's Special Crimes Investigation Unit said in its daily dispatch that Johnson "had sexually assaulted an adult female inmate inside a prisoner transportation vehicle in February 2024 while conducting his duties as a correctional officer." The charge is an accusation and Johnson is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

The unit opened its investigation on June 9, 2026, two years and four months after the alleged assault. The arrest came about ten weeks later. The dispatch does not say what prompted the report.

The court file is thinner than the dispatch. Case 4NE-26-00083CR was opened Wednesday in the Nenana court and is prosecuted by the Fairbanks District Attorney, with no attorney of record listed for Johnson. No charging document has been filed. Arraignment is set for August 20 at 1:30 p.m. at the Fairbanks Courthouse. A search of court records found no prior criminal case against Johnson.

The state's oversight record does not mention vans. The only Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) audit the Department of Corrections publishes for Fairbanks came from a facility visit on April 4 and 5, 2019. Its interim report found 18 standards out of compliance. After a corrective period of up to 180 days, 14 were brought into compliance and four were not: supervision and monitoring, medical and mental health screenings, sexual abuse incident reviews, and data review for corrective action. That was the final result, in December 2019.

Federal standards call for each facility to be audited every three years. The department has since published audits from 2024 and 2025 for other prisons. Neither the Fairbanks audit nor the department's 2024 and 2025 annual PREA reports use the words transport or vehicle.

In 2024, the department recorded one staff-on-inmate sexual abuse allegation at Fairbanks and classified it unfounded, meaning investigated and determined not to have occurred. Its 2025 report records another at Fairbanks, also unfounded, and lists one case there as open, held out of its tables because an investigation continues. The records do not show whether any of them is the one now in court.

The records reviewed here do not show Johnson's employment status, and the department has not addressed it. They contain no account from the woman.