Today the White House hosted 150 formerly incarcerated LGBTQ people, policymakers & advocates to discuss unique challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and people living with HIV (PLHIV) in the criminal legal system.
September 20, 2016 (Washington, DC) — Today the White House hosted 150 formerly incarcerated LGBTQ people, policymakers & advocates to discuss unique challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and people living with HIV (PLHIV) in the criminal legal system.
Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) thirteen years ago in an intense, if short-lived, outbreak of bipartisan support for efforts to end sexual violence in our nation’s prisons, jails, community confinement centers and immigration detention centers. Thirteen years after the passage of PREA, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people continue to endure rape at alarming rates while in the custody of the state.
With exactly two weeks remaining until the U.S. Justice Department’s May 15 deadline for the governors of all 50 states to confirm that their state is in compliance with the national standards set by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), Lambda Legal urges Texas Governor Greg Abbott to adopt the PREA standards unconditionally and acknowledge that rape and sexual assault can no longer be accepted as part of the sentence served for any crime.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (“TDCJ”) announced that today it will place Lambda Legal client Passion Star in Safekeeping as had been requested in an emergency motion filed earlier this month to protect her from further sexual assault and threats to her life. Passion Star is a transgender woman currently incarcerated in a TDCJ male facility.
Lambda Legal launched a petition drive calling on the state of Texas and Texas Gov.-elect Greg Abbott to implement and abide by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), the federal law signed by former President George W. Bush to address the problem of prison rape across the country. Texas is one of only seven states that has refused to comply with PREA. Texas is also home to five of the 10 prisons with the highest rates of reported rapes in the country, as documented in a 2013 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
