Sex Offender Rapes Teacher Left Alone In Prison Room

A dedicated Arizona teacher was viciously stabbed and raped by an unsupervised sex offender after being left alone with him, say documents obtained by the Associated Press.

In January, the unnamed female teacher was conducting a high school equivalency test at the Eyman prison in Florence when five of the six inmates left the classroom. Reports say the remaining inmate, Jacob Harvey, asked the teacher to open the bathroom and then used a pen to stab her in the head before forcing her to the ground and raping her, the AP reported.

There were no guards stationed near the prison classroom before or during the attack at the facility's Meadows Unit. The teacher called for help but no one came.

Harvey tried to use a radio that was left in the room to call for help, but it was on a channel the prison guards do not use, according to the AP. Reports say Harvey eventually let the teacher use a phone.

At the time of the incident Harvey was serving the first year of a 30-year sentence for raping another woman in 2011. He was originally designated a "Class 4" security risk (on a scale of 1 to 5) but later classified at a lower level - even after he violated several prison rules, the AP reported.

Officials say the prison's lack of security measures led to the teacher being placed in a vulnerable situation.

"Here you've got a guy that commits a hell of a crime...and he's put into an environment that actually gives him an opportunity to do his criminality because of a lack of staffing," Carl ToersBijns, a former deputy warden at the prison, told the AP.

But a Department of Corrections spokesperson told the AP that no prison staff was disciplined and that not posting a guard near the classroom "follows accepted corrections practices nationwide."

Authorities charged and convicted Harvey in May for sexual assault, kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. The teacher filed a workers compensation claim against Arizona, but declined to speak to the AP about the incident.