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 low risk.
Property issues may seem to be of little significance to persons on the outside, but in prison, your property can be an important link to feeling human in a greatly dehumanizing environment. Property handling also becomes a kind of proxy power struggle between incarcerated persons and staff because staff have many opportunities to confiscate and destroy property, so winning property battles can be a significant personal victory, one that helps a person feel seen and acknowledged as a human being.
In this case, a trans woman follows all TDCJ policy concerning inquiries about property being sent from one prison to another when she was transferred. Even with clear documentation that TDCJ was in possession of her property and obviously lost it somewhere during the shipment, TDCJ refused all accountability, claiming she did not provide proof of ownership, when the subject had clearly stated she had receipts and paperwork for all items missing.
This advocacy attempt also illustrates an important secondary purpose of advocacy: pushing prison agencies for responses gets them to reveal operational problems. As part of our complaint, we cited the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), which outlines basic civil rights afforded persons in prisons. Among those are the right to review of their grievances, and the right to have timely responses to grievances. CRIPA states that the entire grievance process should be completed within 180 days; the subject of the complaint had yet to get a response to her Step 2 grievance after almost 220 days.
TDCJ responded to the allegation of CRIPA violations that they consulted with the TDCJ Office of General Counsel, which “advised the federal law to which you refer is a voluntary procedure in which states may avail themselves of, if they so choose. Currently, Texas has not chosen to do so.”
It is true that no specific penalties are defined under CRIPA for non-compliance, but that does not make a federal law subject to only “voluntary” compliance. And that opinion misrepresents CRIPA. The act gives the US Attorney General the right to take legal action against any party responsible for human confinement when the AG determines the failure to comply with CRIPA deprives “such persons of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States causing such persons to suffer grievous harm, and that such deprivation is pursuant to a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of such rights, privileges, or immunities.”
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.