The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday, March 26, it has launched a federal investigation into whether two California women’s prisons are unconstitutionally housing and providing preferential treatment to biologically male prisoners.
The investigation centers on the constitutional rights of female prisoners housed at the California Institution for Woman in Chino and Central California Women’s Facility in Madera County, which have a maximum capacity of 1,400 and 1,990 prisoners, respectively.
A letter of legal notice was sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday informing him of the investigation, according to a Justice Department news release.
An aerial view of California Institution for Women in Chino. (Courtesy of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)
“Specifically, the Department will investigate widely reported allegations of deprivation of female prisoners’ rights, including freedom of speech under the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion under the First Amendment, and equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, in her letter to the governor.
Since California’s Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act took effect in January 2021, men in state prisons — including violent felons charged with sex crimes and who have intact genitals — can request transfer to women’s prisons based on self-identification as transgender. Since then, according to the news release, allegations of sexual assaults, attempted rapes, voyeurism and a “pervasive climate of sexual intimidation” have pervaded the women’s prisons due to the presence of male prisoners.
“These investigations will uncover whether the dangerous national trend of housing men in women’s prisons has resulted in violations of women’s constitutional rights,” Dhillon said in a statement.
The governor’s press office deferred comment to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operates and oversees California’s 31 prisons.
Terri Hardy, spokesperson for the agency, said in a statement Thursday that “any suggestion that all transgender women be assigned to men’s institutions as a matter of policy is a suggestion to violate federal law.”
“CDCR is committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people, enforcing a zero-tolerance policy as mandated by the federal legal requirements known as the Prison Rape Elimination Act,” Hardy said.
The authority for the federal investigation, according to the Justice Department, falls under two federal statutes: the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, or CRIPA, and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA.
CRIPA allows the federal government to investigate and fix systemic abuse or civil rights violations in state-run prisons, jails, and care facilities, protecting people who are institutionalized from mistreatment, while RLUIPA protects people in prisons and similar facilities, making sure they can follow their religious beliefs without unfair restrictions.
“California’s Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act has provided none of these qualities to the female inmates of state prisons who have been forced to share space with biological men who are violent felons,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. “Our Constitution protects woman from having their civil rights violated by harmful state legislation wrapped in the language of ‘equity’ and ‘progress.’ ”
The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act, signed into law by Newsom in September 2020,requires prisons to ask inmates privately about their gender identity, pronouns and preferred titles, use them correctly, and house and search transgender, nonbinary or intersex people according to their choices.
Donald Specter, a senior staff attorney at the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office and its former executive director, called the Justice Department’s investigation “absurd.” In a telephone interview Thursday, Specter said the Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act was designed, in part, to protect transgender women from being sexually assaulted in men’s prisons by, among other things, housing them in women’s prisons.
He disputes the government’s argument that transgender women pose the same threat to women in women’s prisons.
“It’s farfetched for the government to turn this into a constitutional violation for women prisoners,” Specter said. “I don’t believe anything the Trump administration says until I see it proven. I really doubt they have the evidence to back up what they’re saying.”