employee cites a recent incident in which an inmate from a male facility raped a female in the women’s prison upon arrival. The transferred inmate, according to the employee, is incarcerated for a sex offense and has “fully functional male genitalia, a history of violence and sexual depravity in the community, and has been found guilty of sexual assault against other inmates while housed in the men’s facilities.”
“He is a proven sexual predator, having committed multiple crimes against women, yet the State of Washington had no problem moving him into a women’s facility and housing him with the most vulnerable in our population (our mental health unit),” the employee wrote.
Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer said his department has received a similar emails and a number of calls.
“What we’ve done is we’ve gotten in touch with the state patrol because it is the state’s jurisdiction out there,” he said. “We’re making sure the state patrol is aware of this information that we’ve got from a couple different sources. And our command staff and detectives will be working with Washington State Patrol to make sure that they have everything they need, and everything we’ve got, and everything that’s out there.”
Of course Washington isn't alone here. California put into law that prisoners will be housed with the gender they identify with:“Washington State Department of Corrections has established procedures to ensure equitable treatment of transgender, intersex, and/or gender non-conforming individuals when conducting intake screening and determining housing classification, programming, and supervision,” the DOC replied. “If they identify as transgender, intersex, and/or gender non-conforming, they are evaluated appropriately per this policy.”
Of course no mention of the safety of the other inmates who could fall prey to these guys.SB 132, sponsored again by San Francisco's own Senator Wiener, will allow inmates to self-select whether they wish to be housed in a men's or women's prison, based on self-ID alone. It will give people the option to house "people according to their own sense of where they will be safest." Moreover, it will make sure that inmates are addressed according to their preferred pronouns throughout their stay in California's prison system.
It seems the appropriate action here would be to house inmates that claim to be a different gender than they are, is to house those inmates in a separate facility. If you are male and identify as female, then set up a wing for those individuals. If you are a female and identify as male, then house those inmates in a separate wing as well. If you are confused and have no clue what you are, then put those inmates in yet another separate wing.
But exposing female inmates to male inmates isn't the answer. The safety of one inmate shouldn't take precedent over another inmate's safety.
