hunter of justice

Rape endemic in immigration detainee facilities; Holder still dithers on new standards

As I have noted before, Attorney General Holder is obligated under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to promulgate national standards to curb rape in prisons and other detention facilities. He testified a year and a half ago about the cruelty of prison rape, stating that the standards were needed "yesterday." 

There are still no final standards.

And as common as rape of women and trans prisoners is in general population and maximum security prisons, there is good reason to believe that it may be even more widespread in detention facilities run by the Department of Homeland Security.  In light of that, it is outrageous that the draft standards issued by DoJ do not apply to DHS facilities. Unless AG Holder broadens the scope of the final standards, those prisons will remain uncovered. 

PREA was enacted in 2003 with a broad definition of prisons and jails and no exclusion of immigration facilities. (117 Stat. 988) Eight years later, however, DHS was created as a separate Cabinet-level agency. Attorney General Holder is electing to interpret this accident of timing as a reason not to cover DHS facilities. You can sign a petition sponsored by the ACLU urging him to reverse that position. 

From Just Detention International:

[Esmeralda Mayra Soto, a] transgender woman, fled to the US in 2002 after being raped many times in Mexico. More than a year later, she was taken into custody at her place of employment for not having a work permit and detained at a California immigration facility. During her first days there, while she was waiting to see a lawyer, an officer twice forced her to perform oral sex on him. She is now in this country legally, having obtained a form of asylum, but except in the most technical sense the US has hardly given her refuge...

Immigration detention, which is run primarily through DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE), is the fastest-growing system of incarceration in the United States. In 2006, approximately 250,000 people passed through it. This October the Obama administration, evidently determined to prove itself a strict enforcer of immigration law, announced it had deported nearly 400,000 people through the DHS system in fiscal year 2011...

Immigrants in civil detention actually have fewer legal rights than their criminal counterparts.

Bureau of Prisons changes its treatment policy for trans inmates

GLAD has settled the case it brought on behalf of Vanessa Adams, a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) inmate at FMC Butner in North Carolina who has gender identity disorder (GID). Adams sued BOP in order to receive appropriate treatment for her GID, and the settlement is based on a recent Bureau of Prisons policy adopted in response to the lawsuit.

Under the settlement, BOP is ending its so-called “freeze frame” policy in which treatment for any person with GID is kept frozen at the level provided at the time he or she entered the federal prison system. The new policy states in part:

[I]nmates in the custody of the Bureau with a possible diagnosis of GID will receive a current individualized assessment and evaluation.  Treatment options will not be precluded solely due to level of services received, or lack of services, prior to incarceration...

It further specifies that "current, accepted standards of care will be used as a reference for developing the treatment plan."