In the spring of 2023 Jennifer Barela returned to her cell at the Central California Women’s Facility (ccwf) in Chowchilla to find “a large man” sitting there. Her new cellmate had been sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for murder, had changed name, self-identified as a woman and been transferred to ccwf.
Other female inmates have had similar experiences since California passed law sb132 in 2020, allowing prisoners to be housed according to self-defined “gender identity” not biological sex. The law does not require them to change their body before transferring, and then lets them request their cellmate.
But some female prisoners claim that inmates from men’s prisons are gaming the new system and that a small but growing number of men convicted of violent and sexual crimes are being locked in cells with women. Some women’s groups warn that other proposed laws could turn this initial trickle into a flow. A bill at committee stage in New York state would “presumptively” house inmates based on their self-declared “gender identity”.
cdcr responds that all requests “are reviewed by a multidisciplinary classification committee chaired by a warden”. It adds that “cdcr has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse.” But the inspector’s report admits that, if a person with a history of raping women applied to transfer to a women’s prison, the wording of the law “may prohibit the department from denying the person’s transfer request” based solely on their “history of raping women”.
A freedom-of-information request in May by Keep Prisons Single Sex, another campaign group, found that 48% of the 1,433 inmates in federal male prisons who identify as women are there for sex offences, nearly four times the share in the general prison population. (The share is also high in Britain, where 74% of those in male prisons who identify as women are in for sex offences or violent crimes; and in Canada, where, in 2017-20, 86% of “gender diverse” inmates were violent offenders and 33% had a history of sexual crimes.) Furthermore, inmates identifying as women in federal male prisons are three times as likely as the general prison population to be classed as high-security.
The women’s groups point out that women are vulnerable, too, and should not be put at risk in order to protect vulnerable inmates in men’s prisons. Studies in 2016 and 2017 found that nearly 90% of women in American prisons are victims of previous sexual assault. Help from civil-rights groups is scarce. In response to an inquiry about inmates moving from male to female prisons in Washington state, the aclu sued to block release of the data.
Source: America’s growing row over policies for transgender prisoners