Prison movies don’t exaggerate, says former Rikers Island inmate Stefanie Rivera: Life behind bars is just as cut-throat, just as nasty, just as terrifying as it’s often portrayed on the big and small screen. But it was much worse for her, Rivera tells the Blade, because she was a transgender woman in a men’s facility.
“I was literally in the belly of the beast,” says Rivera, 29. She said she was often sexually harassed, frisked for guards’ amusement and forced to maintain a relationship with an abusive protector while she was incarcerated at Rikers, from 2001 to 2004, on an attempted arson conviction.
“There were plenty of nights that I contemplated taking my own life,” she adds about the ordeal.
Rivera is one of 12 former or current transgender inmates of the New York State and City prison systems whose stories are compiled in a new report from the Manhattan-based transgender advocacy group, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP).
It’s War in Here: A Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons contains disturbing accounts of mistreatment of transgender people, particularly trans women, who are incarcerated based on their genitalia rather than the gender they identify with. They complain of harassment, humiliation, rape and other forms of physical violence at the hands of correctional officers and fellow prisoners, unnecessary searches and excessive punishment, forced prostitution, ostracism, and being denied trans-specific medical care.
It’s a problem that has been getting an increasing attention in recent years. The documentary, “Cruel and Unusual: Transgender Women in Prison,” focused on the topic (the film was nominated for a Gay &Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation award). And the subject is the basis of a number of lawsuits, including a case last year of a former Orange County Jail inmate who received a settlement of $50,000 from the county.
The situation is far from where advocates would like it to be, but there are signs that prison officials and lawmakers are finally responding to pressure to make time behind bars less harrowing for transgender inmates.
“I would say that this issue, five years ago, wasn’t on anyone’s map, it wasn’t on the radar,” says Alex Lee, director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, based in Oakland, California. He is one of a coalition of organizations in mainly California and New York – the states with largest populations of transgender inmates – that help bring the issue to people’s attention.
In California, advocates are working with lawmakers on legislation to protect the civil rights of transgender and intersex inmates. Locally, Eric Kriss, a spokesperson with the New York State Department of Correctional Services, boasts of a state prison program that provides inmates with counseling and hormone treatment and of successful efforts to reduce sexual assaults behind bars. Kriss admits that housing transgender inmates is a “tricky issue” but adds, “If you put an inmate who looks like a woman but who has male anatomy into a women’s prison you may be inviting other problems.”
The SRLP’s [Sylvia Rivera Law Project] report recommends that transgender inmates be allowed to choose their place of incarceration.
“Officials should not automatically place transgender people according to their birth-assigned sex,” says the report, “but allow them to determine the most appropriate place based on safety concerns and gender identity.”
The organization compiled the report because of the large number of complaints it was receiving from clients, says Gabriel Arkles, SRLP’s staff attorney.
“From the time SRLP opened out doors five years ago, we have been bombarded with requests for all types of help; some of the most heartbreaking requests we got were from prisoners who really have nowhere else to turn,” says Arkles.
The first-person accounts in the report make for chilling reading.
“I have been harassed verbally and have had others grab my female breasts and ass because they knew I was transgender and figured they could get away with such actions – which they do most of the time due to the fact that no one cares what happened to us transgenders inside,” Glaysa, an inmate in a maximum prison in upstate New York, is quoted as saying.
The report recommends a number of institutional changes, like improving prison grievance procedures and staff accountability. But it puts priority on changing the conditions that make transgender people, particularly those of color, land behind bars in disproportionate numbers.
Stefanie Rivera’s story is typical. Of Puerto Rican heritage, she was a victim of child abuse, a high school dropout, and the subject to harassment and threats of physical violence as she walked the streets of her hometown Los Angeles. She began having run-ins with the law from a very young age, turning to the adult film industry and prostitution because it was an easy and more accessible way for transgenders to earn money. She landed in jail after moving to New York, when, in a blind rage, she tried to burn down the bar where she was just relieved of her jobs as bartender and exotic dancer.
“Whatever dreams I may have had at one time, they died a long time ago,” she says, adding that she nevertheless accepts full responsibility for her actions.
But transgender advocates say Rivera’s scenario occurs too often for the solution to rest on individual accountability and punishment.
“There needs to be a holistic approach to this,” says Ariel Herrera, director of Amnesty International-USA’s LGBT human rights program. “We need to be looking beyond law enforcement. We need to begin to address the severe social-economic marginalization of members of our community that causes them to be caught in this cycle of violence, poverty and homelessness.”
