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> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault. If you

> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault. If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all? It sounds like you're arguing for mixed sex prisons, even within individual cells.

pessimizer 4y ago
> why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all? Or age segregation. Just because a 50 year old man has a penis and is 3x the weight of a 13 year old girl doesn't mean that they shouldn't be locked in a cell together. That's just your bigoted assumption that he's a violent person, you don't even know him.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  how many 13 year girls are currently serving adult sentences in penitentiaries?
munificent 4y ago
Let me take a step back and look at this another way. The initial comment I replied to looked at the issue only from the perspective of the woman in the cell. It treated it as "should a trans woman be with her: yes/no?". But that's not the actual choice prisons have to make. The choice they have to make is "which cell does the trans woman go into"? Given that there likely aren't enough trans women prisoners to put them only with other trans women, the choice is "with a cis man or with a cis woman." And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman. I could be wrong. But given what I've read about trans women being the target of sexual assault outside of prison and sexual assault among males in male prisons, I think it's a fairly safe bet. I guess the question hinges on whether you imagine a trans woman to be more "like a man" (stereotypically stronger, aggressive, and more prone to perpetrate assault) or "like a woman" (stereotypically weaker, passive, and more prone to being the victim of assault). What I know about trans women suggests the latter more than the former. Obviously, individual behavior trumps all. Any particular woman (trans or not) who has a history of violence or sexual assault towards women should not be housed with another woman. The same should be true for men (again, trans or not). The name of the game should be keeping perpetrators away from victims, and my belief is that "has a penis while other has a vagina" is a relatively poor proxy for that. Yes, there is a strong correlation, but that's a Simpson's paradox from combining the much smaller trans population with the very large cis population. If you were to separate out the datasets and consider cis men and women separately from trans men and women, I suspect you would see no or the opposite correlation.
- cluedos 4y ago
  > And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman. Why do you believe this? And, more importantly, why is it somehow the responsibility of women to be used as a mitigation for male on male violence? If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. So why should incarcerating the trans-identifying male amongst women be the solution?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. No, if a prisoner attacks a prisoner with whom they were placed, due to reasons which are reasonably foreseeable and preventable, it's a prison system issue, not an issue for the gender class of the attacker or victim, whether they are the same or different, irrespective of the basis in which gender is ascribed. Even moreso than with restrooms, it's very clear that gender segregation, whether based on ascribed gender at birth or gender identity, is not even approximately an effective protection against predatory behavior [*], so the safety issue: (1) Isn't a good defense for any model of gender segregation, and (2) Needs addressed by mechanisms other than gender segregation (one of the more effective of which is probably imprisoning fewer people, at lower levels of crowding), which, surprisingly, pretty much no one that is using the danger to argue for their preferred model of gender segregation even pretends to be concerned about. [*] Edit: and this is particularly true for women in our segregated system who face twice the incidence of inmate-on-inmate assault, as well as higher rates of staff-on-inmate assault, and far less social attention to the problem of such assaults. If anything, it's more defensible based on outcomes to say our system of segregation exists to protect sexual assault against women prisoners than to say it exists to protect against sexual assault for anyone.
    - cluedos 4y ago
      So are you advocating for entirely mixed-sex prisons or what? That's an extremely radical view. An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment. If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all? Historically, mostly patriarchal misogyny; specifically, the belief that while women were inherently more virtuous, those who had “fallen” a state subject to imprisonment had fallen further, and less correctibly than men, and that they were a corrupting influence that would impair the rehabilitation of imprisoned men (that's also why imprisoned women, originally segregated within prisons rather than in separate prisons, were often given fewer meals, not encouraged to socialize, and otherwise treated worse than male prisoners.) More recently, in order to avoid reexamining the actual policy of segregation, societies have tried to retcon a more modern rationalization, but that rationalization is not actually the reason for the policy, just an excuse for it.
- grasbo 4y ago
  That is not universally true, even if it may have applied to some parts of the US prison system in the past. In particular, influential British prison reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, promoted sex segregation as a means to prevent the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. They also pushed for many other reforms to make prisons safer and more rehabilitative environments in general. Nothing to do with patriarchal misogyny. More recently, the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, first adopted in 1955, states as one of the standards that "men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely separate". Their rationale was not patriarchal misogyny either, but rather how to maintain a safe and dignified environment for inmates.

pessimizer 4y ago

> why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all? Or age segregation. Just because a 50 year old man has a penis and is 3x the weight of a 13 year old girl doesn't mean that they shouldn't be locked in a cell together. That's just your bigoted assumption that he's a violent person, you don't even know him.

odessacubbage 4y ago
how many 13 year girls are currently serving adult sentences in penitentiaries?

munificent 4y ago

Let me take a step back and look at this another way. The initial comment I replied to looked at the issue only from the perspective of the woman in the cell. It treated it as "should a trans woman be with her: yes/no?". But that's not the actual choice prisons have to make. The choice they have to make is "which cell does the trans woman go into"? Given that there likely aren't enough trans women prisoners to put them only with other trans women, the choice is "with a cis man or with a cis woman." And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman. I could be wrong. But given what I've read about trans women being the target of sexual assault outside of prison and sexual assault among males in male prisons, I think it's a fairly safe bet. I guess the question hinges on whether you imagine a trans woman to be more "like a man" (stereotypically stronger, aggressive, and more prone to perpetrate assault) or "like a woman" (stereotypically weaker, passive, and more prone to being the victim of assault). What I know about trans women suggests the latter more than the former. Obviously, individual behavior trumps all. Any particular woman (trans or not) who has a history of violence or sexual assault towards women should not be housed with another woman. The same should be true for men (again, trans or not). The name of the game should be keeping perpetrators away from victims, and my belief is that "has a penis while other has a vagina" is a relatively poor proxy for that. Yes, there is a strong correlation, but that's a Simpson's paradox from combining the much smaller trans population with the very large cis population. If you were to separate out the datasets and consider cis men and women separately from trans men and women, I suspect you would see no or the opposite correlation.

cluedos 4y ago
> And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman. Why do you believe this? And, more importantly, why is it somehow the responsibility of women to be used as a mitigation for male on male violence? If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. So why should incarcerating the trans-identifying male amongst women be the solution?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. No, if a prisoner attacks a prisoner with whom they were placed, due to reasons which are reasonably foreseeable and preventable, it's a prison system issue, not an issue for the gender class of the attacker or victim, whether they are the same or different, irrespective of the basis in which gender is ascribed. Even moreso than with restrooms, it's very clear that gender segregation, whether based on ascribed gender at birth or gender identity, is not even approximately an effective protection against predatory behavior [*], so the safety issue: (1) Isn't a good defense for any model of gender segregation, and (2) Needs addressed by mechanisms other than gender segregation (one of the more effective of which is probably imprisoning fewer people, at lower levels of crowding), which, surprisingly, pretty much no one that is using the danger to argue for their preferred model of gender segregation even pretends to be concerned about. [*] Edit: and this is particularly true for women in our segregated system who face twice the incidence of inmate-on-inmate assault, as well as higher rates of staff-on-inmate assault, and far less social attention to the problem of such assaults. If anything, it's more defensible based on outcomes to say our system of segregation exists to protect sexual assault against women prisoners than to say it exists to protect against sexual assault for anyone.
  - cluedos 4y ago
    So are you advocating for entirely mixed-sex prisons or what? That's an extremely radical view. An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment. If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all? Historically, mostly patriarchal misogyny; specifically, the belief that while women were inherently more virtuous, those who had “fallen” a state subject to imprisonment had fallen further, and less correctibly than men, and that they were a corrupting influence that would impair the rehabilitation of imprisoned men (that's also why imprisoned women, originally segregated within prisons rather than in separate prisons, were often given fewer meals, not encouraged to socialize, and otherwise treated worse than male prisoners.) More recently, in order to avoid reexamining the actual policy of segregation, societies have tried to retcon a more modern rationalization, but that rationalization is not actually the reason for the policy, just an excuse for it.

grasbo 4y ago
That is not universally true, even if it may have applied to some parts of the US prison system in the past. In particular, influential British prison reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, promoted sex segregation as a means to prevent the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. They also pushed for many other reforms to make prisons safer and more rehabilitative environments in general. Nothing to do with patriarchal misogyny. More recently, the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, first adopted in 1955, states as one of the standards that "men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely separate". Their rationale was not patriarchal misogyny either, but rather how to maintain a safe and dignified environment for inmates.