------from the New Inquiry-----
If You Build It, They Will Come
The New Inquiry
August 28, 2012
By Kate Redburn
Travesties like the battering of Rodney King, the OJ chase, and the
Rampart police misconduct scandal have made the Los Angeles Police
Department a national symbol of law-enforcement racism, incompetence,
and corruption. So it was a strange sight last April to see LAPD
suddenly receiving accolades from the likes of Huffington Post and the New York Times.
The cause celebre: announcement of plans to open a new jail facility
exclusively for transgender people. As jail division commander Dave
Lindsey explained to the Los Angeles Times, “This
is a major change” allowing for “an environment that’s safe and secure,
as there’s been a history of violence against transgender people.”
The irony of that statement was
apparently lost on the good captain. His words reflect a painful truth
outside the carceral context -Trans people face inordinate obstacles to
accessing housing, employment, health care, and education, rocketing
upward their likelihood of being arrested and jailed. To suggest that
building them a special cage could move us closer to righting that
historical wrong is absurd.
It’s certainly telling that no one has
even bothered to count how many trans people are currently imprisoned in
federal prisons or California jails. We do know, however, that trans
people are far more likely to be incarcerated than nearly any other
group of Americans. In a 2011 survey from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality,
16 percent of trans respondents reported detainment in either a jail or
prison at some point in their lifetime. Compare that to 2.7 percent of
all Americans who will ever serve prison time in their lifetime, according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
It’s
important not to construe these statistics as being directly
comparable. The government does not include jails in its statistics, so
the comparable number would likely be somewhat higher than 2.7. It would
still not approach 16 percent. The
difference is heinous. And lest there be any doubt about the reason for
the vast discrepancy, the same survey showed that fully 7 percent of
respondents had been arrested or detained only as a result of their gender identity or presentation.
Once caged, disparate treatment of
trans prisoners is equally abhorrent. In 2007, the California Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) found that 59 percent of
transgender inmates had experienced sexual assault, compared to 4.4
percent of the general population. Corrections officers were aware of
60.6 percent of general incidents, but knew about only 29 percent of
sexual assaults on trans prisoners. In other words, sexual violence
against trans prisoners is 13 times more likely to occur, and twice as
likely to go unnoticed.
In part, that’s because corrections officers are often the perpetrators.
“Rapes, very nasty physical assaults, and beatings take place, by other
inmates and by the very same prison personnel who are sworn to protect
each and every inmate,” explains formerly incarcerated New Yorker Candi
Raine Sweetalso identified as Clifton Goring in the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.
“Violence toward us occurs but nothing ever happens, rarely if
anything, to the ones who attack us,” Sweet continues, “We face long
periods of isolation a lot, because of non-acceptance and fear of being
harmed, and we even fear of death.” As a Chicago doctor reported to the New York Times,
such assaults result in increased incidence of self-harm among the
incarcerated trans population, including transwomen attempting to
castrate themselves when denied gender-affirming medical treatment.
Historically, prison policy has ignored the threat of violence from
corrections officers, attempting to protect trans prisoners by
separating them from general population into isolated “protective
custody.” To the uninitiated, simple separation sounds like a decent
accommodation. But prison is not a decent place.
Conditions of
protective custody vary between facilities, but it always entails some
greater degree of isolation than general population. Sometimes isolation
lasts 22 or 23 hours per day, inhuman confinement usually reserved as
punishment. Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s (SRLP) groundbreaking study of
trans incarceration, “It’s War In Here” reports that the isolation of
protective custody makes it that much easier for officers to abuse trans
prisoners. In fact, the study found that 50 percent of sexual violence
against trans inmates was perpetrated by staff, not other inmates. Candi
Sweet concurs, writing that “we all have one very strange fear in
common, which is the fear of being harmed by the very ones who are there
to protect us.” The SRLP report also cites complaints that protective
custody prevents inmates from accessing educational and recreational
programs. In a country where discrimination against formerly
incarcerated people is rampant, blocking access to these programs for
trans people creates yet another major barrier to survival once they are
released from jail.
In New York City, the question of what to do with sexual and gender
minorities has swung in both directions, revealing the insurmountable
contradiction of attempting to protect anyone who is already in a cage.
When the gay liberation movement of the 1970s brought to light
mistreatment of gay and lesbian prisoners, a separate facility was
opened for them at New York’s jail complex on Riker’s Island. In order
to be housed there, an inmate could declare that they were homosexual, or “appear” transgender to admitting officers. Whatever
progressive intentions were embodied in that open door policy didn’t
work. Queer and trans prisoners in gay housing were still victimized by
other inmates who used the gay tank as asylum from enemies in general
population, or were in fact intending to inflict violence on a
population perceived to be weak. When the facility finally closed in
2005, then-city corrections commissioner Martin Horne reported that “the very units that should be the most safe, in fact, had become the least safe.” At
the same time, queer and trans legal advocates criticized the change,
citing the long hours of solitary confinement prisoners would likely
have to endure in the name of safety.
The
LAPD plan is history repeated. It’s worth pointing out, however, that
some of those same advocates who defended gay housing at Rikers are
amongst the vocal opponents of the LAPD plan. As SRLP
attorneys have noted, relative safety in general population or
protective custody varies greatly on a case-by case basis, depending on
the particular emotional and physical needs of the inmate. Transphobia
applies inside prison just as on the street, and an incarcerated trans
person’s safety may depend on whether they are perceived to be trans.
Prison safety, for trans people in particular, is a contradiction in
terms.
All of this should be beside the point. As long as trans people are
incarcerated, it remains crucial that allies fight for their protection
and well-being. But as a matter of policy, incarceration cannot be taken
as the primary site of intervention on behalf of oppressed communities.
The threat of staff abuse within prisons is only one facet of the
pervasive injustice trans people face throughout the judicial system,
and indeed, throughout society. Constructing more jails for trans people
will not affect the fact that compared to other Americans, they are
four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, four times as likely to
be infected with HIV, and twice as likely to be unemployed. It wont
affect the fact that one fifth of trans people have experienced
homelessness, that 16 percent have been compelled to work in the
underground economy, or that an astonishing 41 percent have attempted suicide. All
these vectors of discrimination against trans people in the public
sphere lead to disproportionate interaction with law enforcement. Add to
that toxic mixture police profiling of trans people as deviant and
inherently criminal, and it’s little wonder that trans people are so
much more likely to end up in jail than other folks. The only thing
ensured by building prisons for trans people is that they will be full.
If we wanted to do something about this, if we wanted to address this
most egregious social justice catastrophe, we would need to set our
sights higher than the prison walls, and seek to abolish transphobia
from our hearts, our laws, and our institutions. Only then could we
imagine justice for someone like Cece McDonald, a transgender woman of
color who pled guilty to second degree manslaughter for the death of
Dean Schmitz in early June 2012. A year earlier, McDonald had been
brutally attacked by a pair of white people while walking with friends
to the grocery store in Minneapolis. Schmitz and his friend Molly
Flaherty shouted transphobic and racist epithets at McDonald and slashed
her face with a bottle. Although McDonald did not respond to the
initial attack, Schmitz and his friend pursued, and Schmitz received a
fatal stab wound in the fight that followed. Despite clear evidence that
McDonald acted entirely out of self-defense, she was charged with
Schmitz’s murder and pled down to man two in exchange for a reduced
sentence of 41 months. The gross miscarriage of justice in this case is
not alleviated one iota by the prospect of separating McDonald from the
general population because of her transgender status. Not that it
matters: McDonald will be serving the remainder of her sentence in a
men’s prison.
