Transgender wings? Prisons have got enough problems already
by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:
ANY right-minded individual should be pleased to hear that the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service have finally come to their collective senses and are planning to stop many transgender inmates, including sex offenders, serving their sentences in women’s prisons.
Since 2017 concern about the number of transgender deaths in UK prisons and transphobic bullying complaints led the the Ministry of Justice to revise its guidance to ensure that the ‘great majority of transgender inmates are dealt with according to the gender they identify with’.
Placating one lobby group opened the door to a real problem. Namely and unsurprisingly, female prisoners did not exactly welcome sharing their wings and cells with former men. One of these, a convicted sex offender (self-styled as Karen White though he’d retained his male genitalia) was allowed into New Hall women’s prison near Wakefield where he sexually assaulted two female prisoners.
Now, according to the Sunday Times report, the MoJ is fast executing another revision of its guidance and has already ‘made the difficult decision to move a small number of transgender women back into the male estate’.
If only that were that. But not quite. Because of the psychological ‘vulnerability’ of this group, the plan is now to ‘cluster’ trans prisoners into designated wings or sections of wings. Which would make a lot of sense were we confident that the Prison Service had the ready resources and the staff to offer this special treatment.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
