Years after passing laws allowing men to opt into women’s prisons based on “gender identity,” California and Maine are under investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced the investigations on X:
“Under my leadership, the Civil Rights Division will not allow women incarcerated in jails or prisons to be subject to unconstitutional risks of harm from male inmates,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. “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.”
The states were sent notification letters that they are under investigation:
In California, the Justice Department will investigate widely reported allegations of deprivation of female prisoners’ rights, including the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison.Under California law, 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.In Maine, the Justice Department will investigate allegations that Maine has allowed a biological male inmate to remain housed with women despite complaints that the male inmate has assaulted or harassed several female inmates.
DOJ also announced the Single Sex Prison Initiative, a “national initiative to examine the housing of biological men in women’s prisons,” and encouraged individuals with information to contact them.
California is a natural target for this sort of investigation, with some of the obvious, easy-to-anticipate problems with housing men in women’s prisons in California having been made public, for example, reporting on alleged pregnancy and rapes here and here. In the first year following implementation of the “gender identity”-based prison housing law in California, 1/3 of the men seeking to transfer to women’s prison in California were registered sex offenders.
Among the men housed in the women’s prison in Maine is Andrew Balcer, who has been accused of harassing women there.
Other states, such as New Jersey, which saw multiple pregnancies when men were moved into the women’s prison there, are ripe for similar investigations.
Amanda Stulman is a Senior Researcher and Attorney at the Legal Insurrection Foundation
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