(NewsInsights.org) – President Joe Biden’s policies are endangering incarcerated women, according to a new opinion from two prominent ethics experts. Conscience Project Director Andrea Picciotti-Bayer and Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow Eric Kniffin argue that the administration’s focus on gender ideology has eroded legal protections for female prisoners, exposing them to unnecessary harm.
Picciotti-Bayer and Kniffin accuse the current administration of failing in their duty to enforce the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). This federal law, which was first enacted in 1980, gives the Department of Justice the power to investigate and, if necessary, litigate reports of violations that occur within state-run institutions — including prisons and jails.
CRIPAs goal is to safeguard inmates from unintentional harm, including violent attacks and sexual assaults. Picciotti-Bayer and Kniffin claim that President Biden’s day-one executive order on gender identity discrimination weakened these protections by prioritizing the rights of transgender citizens over the rights of biological women.
They specifically point to the ensuing tidal wave of policy changes that rolled out in the wake of that directive. Facilities all across the country began housing transgender inmates based on their self-identified gender rather than biological sex in the months afterward. That approach raises the risk for female convicts and prisoners to experience sexual assaults at the hands of inmates who may still have male anatomy, according to Kniffin and Picciotti-Bayer.
There is at least some evidence to support their theory already. Incidents involving transgender inmates have been reported at multiple institutions across the United States in recent years.
The ACLU brought a civil rights case involving transgender prisoner housing titled Sonia Doe v NJ Department of Corrections in 2021. The state agreed to begin housing prisoners by gender identity instead of their biological sex. Less than a year later, a female inmate filed a lawsuit against the now-defunct Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton. The woman said she was assaulted by a transgender convict — and staff did nothing to stop it.
In another case out of California, a male-to-female transgender three-strike offender was indicted for sexually assaulting a biological female convict in the shower. Tremaine “Tremayne” Deon Carroll’s rap sheet reportedly contained crimes involving allegations of kidnapping, robbery, and “oral copulation in concert by force.”
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