Rikers Island Closing Gay and Trans Housing Area
The section of Rikers Island designated for gay and transgender prisoners, which has space for 146 people, stopped accepting new inmates last month and began emptying out prisoners on November 28th. Fifty-six prisoners, of 126 who were housed there, remained yesterday.
The Department of Corrections plans to replace the special housing area for gay and transgender prisoners with a new protective custody system that will be available to all prisoners.
Many activists are concerned about this change:
The change has alarmed members of some civil liberties and gay rights groups, who note that the new protective housing would likely be more restrictive than the old unit.
Prisoners whose safety was at risk would be locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, rather than be allowed to mingle with other inmates. Prisoners could avoid the extra restrictions by staying in the jail’s general population, but there, they might be subject to harassment or worse, activists said.
“We’re not talking about people calling you names,” said D. Horowitz, a legal fellow at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. “People should not be punished for wanting to be safe.”
Eighteen groups sent a letter to Horn on Thursday asking him to reconsider, including the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Read more: “Jail for gay or transgender prisoners to close on Rikers Island”
i can’t stress enough how sad this makes me. the safety of prisoners seems always to be at the bottom of the list of priorities, and since these are poor queer prisoners even further down the list. i used to be optimistic that rikers could serve as a model for making jails safe and accessible to transfolk… guess i was dreaming.
This is fucked up. I know one of the people involved in advocating against this new policy (who was quoted in the NY Times article that appeared today as well) and she also succintly summed up her mixed feelings about doing such work… In light of the massive growth of the prison industrial complex which is inherently transphobic, homophobic, and deeply racist, it’s hard to be doing work to make prisons *safer* when the real work is in challenging the role of prisons in general and this country’s increasing reliance on jails. BUT obviously there are immediate and dire needs, such as the safety of LGBT prisoners, that must be addressed. The person I know who is involved in the advocacy efforts sounded decidedly pessimisitc about being able to effect any change in the new policy. Scary.