TPI is posting advocacy letters we have written to provide examples of violence against persons in prison, primarily against trans and queer persons in Texas prisons. Personal identifying information has been removed for all incarcerated persons, and named staff or other persons causing harm is removed on a case by case basis.
Content warning: Some of these letters describe threats and incidents of violence that may be disturbing. We will note whether each letter is considered a low, moderate, or high risk for being disturbing. We consider this letter to be moderate risk.
TPI submitted an initial complaint in early March 2022 concerning an unauthorized and abusive body cavity search. Although the complaint could have alleged sexual abuse, there is a US Department of Justice (DoJ) interpretation of allegations against staff for committing sexual violence where if the sexual violence happened while carrying out one’s job duties, intent of sexual violence must be proven. Intent like that is next to impossible to prove in prison settings, so we sometimes choose to address these allegations as staff misconduct. To be clear, TPI believes that what was reported to have happened WAS sexual abuse, but we know that reporting it as such, the report would only be dismissed and would stand less chance of finding any misconduct.
The TPI complaint was not sent to the PREA Ombudsman (which would investigate sexual violence), but the TDCJ Ombudsman forwarded it to the PREA Ombudsman as a means of manipulating our compliant, relegating it to a certain finding of “unsubstantiated” as sexual abuse instead of investigating staff misconduct.
The letter provided here is a subsequent complaint about that malicious manipulation of our complaint, with documentation we have about this and similar manipulation that we believe indicates willful negligence in addressing staff misconduct and unconstitutional violence against persons in prison. The letter was copied to the DoJ.
In the 2021 Texas legislative session, HB 1598 and SB 1980 proposed creating a new independent ombudsman office separate from TDCJ as an oversight agency. TDCJ seems to have responded by creating their own “independent” ombudsman office, which we are directly addressing in this letter, probably to make the argument that an actual independent agency is not needed because they already have a supposedly independent oversight group. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of TPI’s responses from the “independent” ombudsman simply repeat the findings (and excuses) of staff at the units where the incidents occurred.