Category: Transformative justice

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.

Over the past several years, TPI has learned a lot about the justice system and how it impacts the trans community. Our experience began in efforts to work with existing justice systems. Those efforts included police and emergency responder training, working with system liaisons to report problems, advocating for system enhancements like hate crimes laws, and writing policy for both the Dallas sheriff and police.

But we saw our training used abusively as an excuse to claim discrimination doesn’t happen because “we have training.” We saw the police liaison refuse every effort at reporting discrimination and abuse and problem—not some, not most, but every single effort. We saw the sheriff try to cover up keeping a trans person in solitary confinement, which is nothing less that torture, for nine months and deny it until the abused person said she was willing to testify about it. That and pressure from the the Department of Justice helped us get the first trans policy passed within the Dallas sheriff’s office. However, we saw policy passed, but not enforced.

These experiences combined with ongoing communications with increasing numbers of incarcerated trans and queer persons, mostly in Texas, but some across the country, helped us learn the true colors of the “justice” systems as currently implemented. This work was eye-opening, and it prompted our interest in prison abolition, restorative justice, and more broad transformative justice work. We saw the routine abuses, and began documenting violence in a system set up not to rehabilitate in any way, but to simply extend what the justice system claimed was an initial violence with more violence performed under state operations for the profit of those in power.

Our experience led to reading and learning about a growing and evolving approach to social harm—actually a collection of approaches—known as transformative justice. Transformative justice is not a solution to social harm in the way that our current retributive justice is a solution that locks people away and hides the issues from the general public. Transformative justice is more a framework that identifies larger causes of social harm and address those while acknowledging immediate harms, seeking accountability from the person causing harm, and seeking support for the person experiencing harm.

Starting in 2022, TPI will be posting both short and long pieces about these topics in three main subject areas: 1) the system that we currently have and how we got here, 2) how this system adversely impacts trans and queer persons, and 3) culturing a transformative justice framework. These won’t be discussed in order, but we will always identify where the discussion fits in the overall collection. We hope some of these will be of interest, and will encourage you to learn more about the system we currently have, and how to help participate in moving us all forward toward a more humane concept of justice that actually reduces harm.

This work is necessary for trans liberation. It is necessary for the liberation and empowerment of all marginalized communities. If you disagree now, we hope you will join us in this journey exploring the topics, and eventually join us in the work. In solidarity.