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The B.C. government’s “long-term, systemic misconduct” enabled the sexual assault of hundreds of prisoners by a single corrections officer over two decades, a lawsuit filed Tuesday in B.C. Supreme Court alleges.

The notice of civil claim, filed on behalf of 61 former Vancouver-area inmates who allege they were victims of sexual assault while incarcerated, names the attorney general of B.C. and a former jail guard, Roderic David MacDougall.

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MacDougall, who was criminally convicted in 2000 of sexual assault and received a 3½ year sentence, is believed to be living in Burnaby.

The B.C. government has previously admitted liability for his misdeeds while he was a public employee. But there has never been, the new lawsuit states, any thorough “judicial scrutiny of the province’s own systemic misconduct, which facilitated the sexual assaults.”

The new court filings make public, for the first time, allegations that MacDougall’s fellow corrections officers believed MacDougall “was sexually misconducting himself with younger inmates, and these concerns were brought to management” as early as 1980 — 17 years and an unknown number of victims before MacDougall eventually quit his job in 1997. When MacDougall resigned from B.C. Corrections, the new lawsuit alleges, he wrote in his resignation letter: “It was nice while it lasted.”