Month: August 2022

At TPI, some of the people we work with in the prisons are advocates in a variety of ways. Our correspondent Courtney Sargent participated in research by The Marshall Project related to prison economies. In Texas and five other states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina), incarcerated persons like Courtney earn $0 for performing work in prison. That means folks who don’t have financial support networks on the outside have to hustle to get food and clothing and other necessities like hygiene beyond the minimal necessities provided by the state.

My family and friends send me money and food packages. If not for that, I’d starve. They don’t feed us very well. For example, today’s breakfast was a boiled egg and a peanut butter sandwich. Lunch was one small bean burrito, beans and corn. Dinner was a baloney sandwich, applesauce, overcooked vegetables. For a grown working man, this is not enough. On weekends, there are only two meals a day: breakfast and dinner. For people who have no family or friends, it is heartbreaking.

— Courtney Sargeant

You can read the full article, or jump to the segment based on Courtney’s experience here.

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It is curious that rape in prison is not generally considered rape in our supposed “justice” system, at least in terms of how it is documented in data.

TPI has contributed to a national program that documents sexual violence against LGBTQ and HIV-affected persons, but one issue we have brought up is that they never include any data on sexual violence in prisons. They have said they would consider it, but so far the issue has not been addressed in any substantive way.

TPI is not the only organization that objects to the intentional obscuring or covering up of prison rape. Paul Wright notes in his “From the Editor” discussion of the October 2021 issue of Prison Legal News:

For decades the Human Rights Defense Center and other activists have urged the FBI to include prison-based rapes in their crime statistics. They have declined to do so. Including prison rapes in official statistics would likely mean that more men than women are officially raped in the U.S. each year. Based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report that estimated 139,380 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2018. As this month’s cover story points out, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicates each year roughly 200,000 prisoners are victims of sexual assault.

Here, Prison Legal News is only referring to persons according to how they fit into the coercive gender binary of the prison system, which means that almost all trans women in the prison system are counted as “men” in the data. We know that trans women are imprisoned disproportionally, so this also means that accurate data here would also likely show extremely high proportions of trans persons, particularly trans women, in national sexual violence data.

Justice system biases and general cultural stigma determine what and how we document, and those biases certainly result in misrepresentation of the actual rate of violence against trans persons.