In a post about San Diego’s Equality Town Hall Meeting last week, I mentioned a presentation by Geoff Kors, Executive Director of Equality California, on upcoming GLBT legislation in the Golden State. Coincidentally, Dan Aiello, writing at the Bay Area Reporter, has an update on the progress of Assembly Bill AB382, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of factors that should be considered in safely classifying and housing prisoners.
From the Bay Area Reporter:
LGBT prisoner bill clears first hurdle
A bill by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) that seeks to create a safer environment in state prisons for transgender inmates cleared its first hurdle Tuesday, March 31 when it passed out of the public safety committee on a bipartisan vote of 7-0.
Committee Chair Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim) called the testimony of Shelly Resnick, a transgender woman who served time in state prison, “compelling.”
Resnick, 38, a legal advocate for the TGI Justice Project, spoke of her experience as a 19-year-old transgender woman incarcerated at California’s Tehachapi and later Kern Valley state maximum security prisons for men.
“I was 19 years old and basically thrown in with prisoners with histories of violence on a level four maximum security facility without regard to my safety needs as a transgender woman,” Resnick testified.
[ ... ]
[Ammiano] cited a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation study that found 67 percent of LGBT prisoners report being sexually assaulted by another inmate, “a rate 15 times higher” than the overall population, explained Ammiano.
Aiello points to a 2007 University of California Irvine study that showed, “transgender women in California’s prison system are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison, and that half of all transgender women in prison in this state have been raped.”
Equality California is aggressively working on a full slate of GLBT legislation. Check it out.
