"Deliberate Indifference": Challenging State-Sanctioned Violence Against Transgender People in Carceral Spaces.

Prison sexual violence in the USA was first addressed in 2003 with the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The act was intended to protect all people who are incarcerated from sexual violence, but the reality is that transgender people in the carceral system are sexually assaulted at rates much higher than their cisgender counterparts. Drawing from theories of institutionalism, critical victimology, and feminist and queer criminology, we see that PREA policy legitimates unequal risk of victimization in the criminal justice system by institutionalizing and naturalizing cis-normativity. After establishing a more expansive definition of violence, I present PREA housing risk screenings as an illustration of how PREA policies constitute violence. No one, including transgender people, can be protected from violence in institutions that are themselves a form of violence. Activists and scholars should center prison abolition in their efforts to protect transgender people in the criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]