Mara Keisling And Cecilia Chung Discuss How The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PR

[Shana A]

Mara Keisling And Cecilia Chung Discuss How The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Affects LGBT People

Posted: 08/11/2012 9:38 am Updated: 08/11/2012 9:38 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/11/mara-keisling-cecilia-chung-prea_n_1749269.html

Today we bring you a chat between Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, and Cecilia Chung, a member of the San Francisco Department of Public Health Commission and a board member at Just Detention International.

Below Keisling and Chung discuss the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which was passed in 2003 and for which, now, after nearly a decade of study and review, the U.S. Department of Justice has recently issued final regulations to implement.

[...]

Mara Keisling: NCTE believes in this work because it affects our community so directly. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey that our organization did with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force showed that there are a lot of trans people who have experienced incarceration at some point in their lives -- much higher rates than non-trans people. A lot of that is people who faced arrest because they were trans and then a lot of people who faced arrest because being trans caused them to have economic circumstances that put them into criminalized activities that caused them to be arrested. Fifteen percent of the people in our sample who had been in prison had been sexually assaulted while in prison. That's a shocking amount and we don't believe that Americans want anybody to be sexually assaulted. That's not part of the sentence and that should never be part of the sentence.

Cecilia Chung: In addition to that I think that most of what we have learned, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is that LGBT people are 12 times more likely to be sexually abused in prison. According to the BJS there are 216,600 people being abused every year and most of them get sexually abused more than once during the course of the year. This means a whole lot of LGBT people getting abused a whole lot of times.