Following a class-action lawsuit, the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) will soon begin housing transgender women in all-trans facilities, and will pay a settlement exceeding $2 million to current and formerly incarcerated plaintiffs.
The consent decree was filed in September and a state judge ordered a hearing on it in early January. According to its terms, Colorado will no longer house trans women in men’s prisons. (A consent decree is a court-enforced settlement, usually involving government misconduct, in which all parties agree to a plan for improvement and any compensatory damages.) Instead, the state will establish two new units specifically for trans prisoners: the “Voluntary Transgender Unit” (VTU) at Sterling Correctional Facility (a men’s prison), and the “Integration Unit” (IU) at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. In the document, Attorney General Philip Weiser noted that a provision of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act legally prevented CDOC from establishing trans-specific facilities before, as federal law requires such facilities to be created through a consent decree.
Also included in the decree is a $2.1 million payout for all trans women currently or formerly incarcerated in Colorado who suffered “non-nominal” or worse injuries while imprisoned. The settlement classes are primarily defined by whether and to what degree a plaintiff was sexually assaulted, with minimum awards ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 per plaintiff. As a result of the decree, Colorado says it will also enact various prison reforms including more training for staff, ensuring trans women have “access to women’s canteen items,” and protecting them from “cross-gender searches.”
In the original 2019 class action lawsuit that led to the decree, 170 trans women alleged that CDOC and its officials routinely discriminated against them and “expose[d] them to harassment, rape, sexual assault, and other violence,” including alleged sexual assault by guards as well as fellow prisoners.
“We were targets for victimizing, whether it was sexual assault, extortion, you name it,” Taliyah Murphy, one of seven class representatives in the lawsuit, told CBS this week. “The guards just looked the other way.”
Since that lawsuit was filed, the number of known eligible class members has risen to about 400, CBS reported. The network also confirmed that the consent decree has not yet gone into effect, but is expected to be finalized sometime in March.
Colorado’s gradually-advancing settlement is just one battle in trans prisoners’ multi-front war to secure better living conditions, health care, and safety protections while incarcerated. Last week, more than 20 trans women in Florida prisons filed their own lawsuit against the state, claiming their healthcare has “fallen into disarray” as a result of new Republican anti-trans laws. An anonymous prisoner also sued the state of Georgia in December, claiming officials illegally discriminated against her by withholding gender-affirming medical care.
Lawsuits like these do have some power in securing prison reforms and settlements, as demonstrated in Washington State last year, when officials agreed to provide gender-affirming care to all trans prisoners. But not everyone is happy about the terms of the forthcoming agreement in Colorado, as Courthouse News Service reported in January. During a hearing, one trans prisoner said she still wouldn’t be comfortable in Sterling’s new trans unit, because she was sexually assaulted at the facility when she was 16. MaryKay Sapian Condit, an intersex person incarcerated for more than 40 years, told CNS that even though she is an eligible class member, the decree’s focus on trans women still leaves others out in the cold.
“They are disrespecting me because they are not considering my security and safety,” Condit said.
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