Being Transgender in Solitary Confinement
By Bessie Liu and Shiyu Xu
Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, a 27-year-old Transgender woman, took her last breath in the Segregation Unit at Rikers Island on June 7, 2019.
Polanco returned to her cell #6 at 11:38 a.m. after visiting West Corridor Clinic to discuss her hormone therapy. At 3:45 p.m., Polanco was pronounced dead.
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Polanco died of a seizure in her Rikers Island jail cell after being neglected for over an hour and a half by correctional officers, according to an investigation by the Board of Corrections.
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The report in June 2020 shows that the Department of Corrections was determined not to house transgender inmates with cisgender women in the general population of the woman’s facility. This resulted in Polanco being housed in a Restrictive Housing Unit, a form of solitary confinement, after she returned from a hospital where she received psychiatric care.
The report reveals that despite being aware of her underlying medical and health conditions, The New York City Department of Corrections still chose to put her in the restrictive housing units.
A report by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that transgender inmates in prison systems are more likely to face violence, abuse, and sexual victimization. Some prison facilities may choose to “place them in protective custody, a glorified term for solitary confinement,” a study by the Journal of Constitutional Law says.
Studies show that the long term effects of solitary confinement have detrimental impacts on humans. Transgender inmates who are placed in protective custody are locked in a small cell for twenty-three hours a day, with limited access to human interaction and other recreational activities that would be available to the general population.
According to the Office of the Bronx District Attorney's report, Layleen was arrested for allegedly assaulting a taxi driver. She was then jailed in April 2019 because she could not pay $501 in bail.
“Honestly I didn’t even know she was arrested until after she died,” said Melania Brown, Polanco’s older sister. “Two officers knocked on the door, and they told her [Brown’s mother] that Layleen passed away, didn’t give her no information no nothing. They just said she passed away and I guess to them, that was enough.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio disciplined 17 Rikers staff in connection with Polanco’s treatment at Riker’s Island in June. He also vowed to end solitary confinement for all by the fall. A year later, the promise is yet to be executed.
“I think the public has rightfully called for a pretty drastic change,” a spoke person from NYC Board of Correction said. “It would take time to figure out what the world would look like after that change, and what accountability looks like after that.”
Nearly 15 months Polanco's death, her family will receive a $5.9 million settlement. According to the city’s Law Department, that is the highest settlement in New York’s history for death in jail. But for her family, money does not bring enough justice.
“Now he [the mayor] wants to make it seem like he’s doing something by doing an internal suspension on these officers, which is not enough for what they did to my sister,” Brown said. “They took a part of me that I am never going to get back.”
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Housing Transgender Inmates
On Aug.5, 2020, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, and the law firm of BakerHostetler settled a lawsuit against Steuben County, the Steuben County Sheriff, and several officials and employees at the Steuben County Jail.
The lawsuit was on behalf of a transgender woman who was housed in a men’s facility while awaiting trial in 2019.
Jena Faith, 43, a transgender
military veteran. Photo from Facebook.
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Jena Faith, a military veteran, spent four weeks in Steuben County, NY jail awaiting trial after using a counterfeit bill. She was initially housed in the jail’s women’s facility without incident. Officials suddenly transferred her to the men’s facility, despite being legally recognized as a woman for many years, including the gender marker on her New York driver’s license and U.S. Social Security records.
In the men’s facility, Faith says she suffered sexual harassment from other incarcerated individuals, mistreatment at the hands of guards, and denial of medication prescribed by her physician.
Faith settled her suit last year for $60,000 in damages and the agreement by Steuben County to overhaul its jail policy. Under the settlement, the county commits to uphold the respect of transgender people by changing its jail policies to comply with federal and state laws.
The policy touches upon preferred names, clothing, searches, grooming items, housing, and health care for transgender and gender-nonconforming inmates.
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Faith says a lot of the transgender inmates are scared because of repercussions. “If no one wants to be that voice, I will. I’m gonna step up and make things better,” Faith said.
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With the exception of California, which recently passed a law allowing transgender inmates to be housed according to their gender identity, transgender inmates in most states are housed according to their biological sex.
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Life inside solitary - "Rape, Violence, and Abuse"
In 2003, Congress had unanimously passed a Prison Rape Elimination Act to penalize sexual abuse in prisons. A report by the University of Minnesota says it falls far short of what is needed to protect all prisoners, especially women, people of color, transgender individuals, and disabled people.
Statistics on transgender inmates are inherently difficult to trace as correctional facilities do not capture an inmate’s transgender status. Most data on transgender inmates are captured by non-for-profit organizations.
A report by The National Centre for Transgender Equality shows that one in five transgender people reported being sexually assaulted by facility staff or other inmates, a rate which is five to six times higher than the rates of sexual assault by the U.S. incarcerated populations in prisons.
Another study by the Centre for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California, Irvine, shows the prevalence of sexual assault amongst transgender inmates is more than 50% higher than cisgender inmates.
Born on April 9th, 1961, Rona Sugar Love was raised in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, under the name Alberto Rodriguez Marrero. Love says she and her twin sister were kidnapped and sexually abused three to four times a day and fed only two or three times a week. Love was rescued and moved to New York City at the age of 9.
She says the kidnapper killed her twin sister. She spent the rest of her childhood moving from one mental hospital to another until she was placed in prison in 1981 for murdering a man she says resembled her kidnapper.
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Records show that Love spent a total of 17 years in Elmira prison, where Love says that other inmates and officers sexually and physically abused her. “I was raped 12 times, eight times by other fellow convicts, and four times by the security guards who were supposed to be protecting me,” Love said.
Love was approved for parole in December 1990. Then in November 1995, she went back to prison for the second time. She was convicted for murder in the second degree and was sent upstate to Sing Sing correctional facility. Until this day, Love maintains her innocence. “I didn’t have anything to do with that murder,” she said. “I’ve tried to fight it, I’m innocent and I’m going to continue fighting it.”
Love described her time at both Sing Sing and Elmira correctional facilities as a living hell. “I’ve been physically abused very bad, this time around it was more by staff than inmates,” she said. “They kept me in one of those mental health cells for 45 days so all my bruises would heal, they knocked my teeth out, then they would falsify [a report] and say that the dentist took them out.”
When Love tried to file a report, she said she was either set up with a weapon in her cell or assaulted weeks later by the correctional staff at the correctional facility “If you report an officer, you get in trouble,” Love said. “They put a red target in your back.”
With knife marks visible on both her wrists, Love says that she tried to kill herself multiple times while incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
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Love's inmate lookup records.
Although Love’s allegations could not be independently verified, she has previously shared her story with NYU journalist Emily Liu and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
Reporters reached out to Elmira Correctional Facility and an accused officer who oversaw the alleged abuse. The facility hung up on the reporters.
Rona Sugar Love poses for a portrait outside her step sister's house in Bronx, NY.
Discrimination beyond the prison system
According to a survey by Trans Equality, nearly one in six transgender people in the U.S. have been to prison. This number is significantly higher for Black transgender people, where one in two has been to prison.
Many transgender people often turn towards sex work for survival, as they are widely discriminated against in the workplace, according to an article published in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.
Many transgender people are often profiled by law enforcement by what is now widely known by activists as the “walking whilst trans ban”. This New York State law penalizes anyone suspicious of “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution”.
Ts Candii is a Black transgender woman who is also the founder of Black Trans Nation. When Candii first moved to New York in 2017, she said she was smoking a cigarette on the street side when an unmarked, dark blue vehicle approached her.
“[They told me] we want to arrest you for loitering for the purpose of engaging in prosititution,” Candii said. “They trapped me, and basically gave me two options, ‘we [the officers] will give you $1500 to be an informant, or you have to give me and my partner oral sex’, so I did because I had no choice.”
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In a survey by Lambda Legal, where over three thousand LGBTQIA people in the United States were surveyed, 73% of the respondents reported having direct contact with the police in the past five years. Many of them reported having negative, hostile, and violent interactions.
“The housing and job opportunities and the challenges that people who leave prisons and jails face is just enormous,” Mary Stohr, a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State Professor, said. “And because trans inmates are less accepted in our culture, they have the double bind of being trans and as well as an ex con.”
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For Love, who was out on parole, securing housing and finding financial support had been difficult. She says that she has spent much of her nights sleeping out on the streets, rooftops and in parks around the city.
“I slept at Central Park more than anything, I felt safe,” Love said. “I’m not going to no shelter, I am going back to prison before I go back to a shelter. It’s not easy, they don’t make it easy on you.”
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Of all survey respondents:
73%
25%
Love has since returned to jail. She has been charged for a gunpoint robbery and allegedly shooting a man in the neck after a heated argument.
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She is currently being held at Rose M. Singer Centre on Rikers Island and appeared in court on November 12, 2020.
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Rona Sugar Love says she has been living in
rooftops and hallways since she got released from prison. Photo by Sugar Love.