Nearly 5,000 transgender people are incarcerated in state prisons, but we know very little about their lives before prison or their experiences during incarceration. To add to this limited body of research, we’ve analyzed the Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016 data, released in late 2020, which provides a glimpse into this overrepresented but understudied population. The small number of trans respondents to the Survey of Prison Inmates — only 29 trans people — limits our ability to generalize the data; however, the results from this study are worth exploring given the lack of information about trans people in prisons. Our findings help give greater visibility and understanding about the respondents’ lives, experiences, and challenges before and during their incarceration.

Because of the small sample of 29 trans respondents, we elected to avoid presenting percentages that could lead to misleading generalizations and instead focused on the raw data we could access from the Survey of Prison Inmates.

Here’s a glimpse into what we were able to learn from these 29 individuals:

  • Most of the trans people surveyed were people of color, lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB), and relatively young.
  • The trans people surveyed reported experiencing a variety of adverse experiences before turning 18, such as homelessness, foster care placements, arrest, and incarceration in juvenile facilities.
  • Many of the trans people surveyed participated in job training and educational programming, likely to make up for missed opportunities before incarceration (such as educational exclusion and higher risk for unemployment).

We know trans people in prison exist at the intersection of a number of oppressed identities. But beyond that, before this data was released, what we knew about the trans population in prison was limited to the reports published by the National Center for Transgender Equality. The Survey of Prison Inmates data adds to this previous work to provide a clearer picture of the actual lived experiences of incarcerated trans people, giving us a window in which to observe — and subsequently address — what trans people face behind bars and what factors may contribute to the likelihood trans people will come into contact with the criminal legal system.

Read the full article about trans people in state prison by Tiana Herring and Emily Widra at Prison Policy Initiative.