[Women Prisoner News] San Francisco Trans Community Responds to Brutal Murders

[Diana Block]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/29256-no-to-prison-industrial-complex-sf-trans-community-s-response-to-seven-brutal-transgender-murders-in-2015


<http://truth-out.org/news/item/29256-no-to-prison-industrial-complex-sf-trans-community-s-response-to-seven-brutal-transgender-murders-in-2015#>
No to Prison Industrial Complex: San Francisco's Trans Community Responds
to Brutal Murders  Wednesday, 25 February 2015 10:54  By Toshio Meronek
<http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/47891>, Truthout
<http://truth-out.org> | Report

[image: 22 JUNE, 2012- Members of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and
Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), march in the streets. (Photo: Eric
Wagner)]22 JUNE, 2012- Members of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and
Intersex Justice Project <http://www.tgijp.org/> (TGIJP), march in the
streets. (Photo: Eric Wagner
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/basetree/7430101114/in/photolist->)

*Help Truthout keep publishing stories like this: They can't be found in
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On Monday, February 2, Taja Gabrielle de Jesus was found stabbed to death
in a stairwell in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. She's one of
seven transgender women, most of whom were of color, reported to be
murdered in the US since the beginning of 2015.

Danielle Castro is Taja's adoptive sister. "Every time I think of her, I
keep imagining her fighting for her life, and I just keep getting this
graphic image of what she went through, Castro says. "And I don't want to
remember her that way."

Typical responses in horrible situations like this one include angry
demands for the killer to be locked up. More police. Stronger hate crimes
laws.

But activists like Castro believe that these are most certainly *not* the
way the community will find real safety, noting that trans people face high
rates of abuse by police and correctional officers, and are often turned
away by gendered social service operators such as battered women's shelters
and drug rehab centers.
 Mirkarimi claims, "Reducing the number of people in jail cannot be
achieved by simply reducing the existence of jail facilities."

Castro was one of the dozens of trans women of color who staged a die-in at
the San Francisco City Hall on February 10, as several hundred allies
gathered nearby. Another was Janetta Johnson of the Transgender, Gender
Variant, and Intersex Justice Project <http://www.tgijp.org/> (TGIJP). Her
organization, operating on a shoestring budget of well under $100,000 per
year as mainstream gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign monopolize
funding for LGBTQ issues
<http://truth-out.org/news/item/28430-human-rights-campaign-under-fire-in-lgbt-community>,
is one of the few resources geared toward the thousands of currently and
formerly incarcerated trans people around the country. "We're kind of like
a population of people who have been left behind," she says.

Anger is part of what spurred 300 or so people to turn up at City Hall in
the middle of a weekday to demand more attention around the extreme rates
of violence against trans people, especially trans people of color (Murders
of community members are so common that in several hundred cities around
the world, Trans Day of Remembrance <http://tdor.info/> vigils are held to
commemorate the many lives cut short each year). But the group calling
itself Taja's Coalition is fueling their rage into a call for a
not-so-typical kind of justice: safe, affordable, accessible housing and
reentry programs for trans people in San Francisco. "I'm not requesting
anyone go fishing for us, but I'm asking people to teach us how to fish,
you know what I'm saying?" Johnson says.

At the same time, Taja's Coalition is also uniting against the local
sheriff's plans for a new jail. The group doesn't believe that state
"tough-on-crime" solutions are making trans people safer.

*New jail, new jail beds to fill*

In his office, San Francisco County Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi proudly displays
a picture of Angela Davis; he claims to be the only sheriff in the country
to have a photo of the black power icon and anti-prison activist on his
wall. And in San Francisco, symbols of progressivism like these win you
points at the ballot box.
 "I think before we start building trans-specific pods, we should focus on
creating trans-specific reentry programs."

But the work of Bay Area-based Davis - who recently held a benefit for
TGIJP and is co-founder of the anti-prison organization Critical Resistance
<http://criticalresistance.org/> - is certainly not in line with
Mirkarimi's legacy project: He's busy lobbying for a state-of-the-art jail
that could cost as much as $465 million in public funds by the time of its
ribbon-cutting ceremony.

(The sheriff's current legacy: He is the law officer who kept his job after
being arrested and charged with domestic violence battery, child
endangerment, and dissuading a witness, after a fight with his wife on New
Year's Eve 2011 left her with visible bruises.)

Why do San Francisco's four jails - that by the sheriff's own count sit
about half empty
<http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Jails-Half-Empty-Sheriff-259469901.html>
- need a new several-hundred-million-dollar sibling?

Mirkarimi gives lip service to the concerns of many of his constituents in
an early statement <http://www.sfsheriff.com/newsletter_aug2013.html> on
the new jail proposal: "We must … address the mental health and substance
abuse issues that make jail the treatment of last resort, reexamine harsh
sentencing laws that disproportionately affect poor people and people of
color and provide meaningful employment and housing options for the
formerly incarcerated to keep them from returning."

But, he claims, "Reducing the number of people in jail cannot be achieved
by simply reducing the existence of jail facilities," and notes that
increasingly the SF jail serves as a holding pen for people with mental
disabilities (The Treatment Advocacy Center found
<http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&id=1538&Itemid=68>
that there are ten times more seriously mentally ill people in California
jails and prisons than in health care facilities). "The complexity of those
within our care grows significantly," Mirkarimi said.
 "A jailhouse is a jailhouse is a jailhouse. It is never safe. They want to
lock us up instead of helping people with our problems."

However, people with mental illnesses receive better care in the community
than in jail, say advocates. And releasing them from jails and prisons
could save billions. A report
<http://www.bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=VFwb7PPm7K0%3d&tabid=104>
that looked at Michigan's prison system found that locking a person up was
3.5 to 15 times more expensive than community-based treatment.

Along with more mental health services, blueprints for the new jail include
space for a "trans-friendly" pod in the new jail. According to TGIJP's
Johnson, "I think before we start building trans-specific pods, we should
focus on creating trans-specific reentry programs." Programs that would
help ex-prisoners once they're out, with housing, jobs, and more, could
help stop the revolving door of imprisonment for trans people.
 As "boutique" jail facilities that cater to certain categories of people
add to the billions the US spends on incarceration each year, police
departments regularly take the top spot in local budgets.

A study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that almost 1
in 6 trans people has been locked up at some point during their lives (for
black trans people the ratio is nearly 1 in 2). Further, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics estimates
<https://transgenderequality.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/federal-survey-40-of-transgender-prisoners-are-sexually-abused-each-year/>
that each year, 40 percent of trans prisoners experience sexual abuse by
prison staff or other prisoners.

"A new state-of-the-art facility is irrelevant if it's filled with deputies
who are abusive against us," read an open letter
<http://www.thestreetspirit.org/controversy-over-plans-for-jail-expansion-in-san-francisco/>
to the SF Board of Supervisors from women currently housed in the system.
"A jailhouse is a jailhouse is a jailhouse. It is never safe. They want to
lock us up instead of helping people with our problems."

*Policing and hate crimes laws: propping up an unjust system*

As "boutique" jail facilities that cater to certain categories of people
add to the billions the US spends on incarceration each year, police
departments regularly take the top spot in local budgets. The SFPD
estimates it'll spend $519 million on policing over the current fiscal
year. But as the NYPD work stoppage in December and January famously
showed, less policing doesn't necessarily diminish so-called public safety
<http://www.alternet.org/activism/nypds-work-stoppage-backfire-arrest-rates-plummet-no-cost-public-safety>
.
 Police are among the top committers of violence against LGBTQ people,
particularly when it comes to LGBTQ people of color.

Prison scholar and activist Eric A. Stanley, who edited the anthology *Captive
Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
<http://www.akpress.org/captivegenders.html>*, told Truthout that
transgender sensitivity trainings for police officers are a resource-suck
that "not only do not make trans people safer, but can help teach cops how
to more easily locate trans people, putting them in increased danger."

Year after year, statistics from the Anti-Violence Project
<http://www.avp.org/index.php>, which tracks violence against LGBTQ people
around the country, shape an ugly pattern: police are among the top
*committers* of violence against LGBTQ people, particularly when it comes
to LGBTQ people of color. It's no wonder many LGBTQ people don't feel
comfortable going to the police when faced with a problem.

The expansion of hate crimes laws is another non-solution, say groups like
New York's Sylvia Rivera Law Project <http://srlp.org/action/hate-crimes/>
and San Francisco's Gay Shame <http://www.gayshamesf.org>. Stanley reasons
that "even the most conservative criminologist no longer argues that
enhanced sentencing deters future harms." The ineffectiveness of increased
sentences as a deterrent, along with many indicators that show that the
prison system is one of the primary *perpetrators* of violence against
trans women of color, have brought Stanley to assert that "It's not until
we let go of our deep attachment to the US justice system as an arbiter of
redress that we can begin to ask what we want and need."

*Community approaches to stopping harm*

Plenty of studies show that *proactive* approaches to public safety that
address the reasons people commit what society classes as "crimes" are
better than *reactive* solutions like policing. Proactive solutions include
increased funding for priorities like education and health care.

Take education. As the Washington DC-based think tank Justice Policy
Institute found in a 2007 study
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.justicepolicy.org%2Fimages%2Fupload%2F07-08_rep_educationandpublicsafety_ps-ac.pdf&ei=AJPaVMTEENCboQSr1IHYCA&usg=AFQjCNF7lan80XPxhErq28k_motQg>:
"Research has shown a relationship between high school graduation rates and
crime rates, and a relationship between educational attainment and the
likelihood of incarceration." In California, the state that incarcerates
more people than any other, high school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely
to be arrested than people who graduate.

According to the California Budget Project <http://www.cbp.org/>,
California spends about $62,000 per year locking a person up, about seven
times the $9,200 it spends on each K-12 student. And prison budgets are one
of the last to be slashed, while austerity policies around the country have
meant decreasing funding for schools and astronomical rises in tuition
rates for college.

Taja's Coalition's final demand relates to a problem that much of the
country is already aware of: the rent in San Francisco is too damn high,
and as a result, people are ending up in jail because homelessness is so
criminalized. Get caught squatting in an empty building, even sitting on
the sidewalk
<http://truth-out.org/news/item/10323-being-young-and-homeless-in-the-us-could-get-even-worse>,
and you could face an expensive fine and jail time. They see local
politicians as being in the pocket of real estate and tech interests that
are fueling unprecedented gentrification in the area
<http://truth-out.org/news/item/23305-the-bleaching-of-san-francisco-extreme-gentrification-and-suburbanized-poverty-in-the-bay>.
"I'm not OK with Twitter taking over," Danielle Castro declared at the
February 10 rally, referencing the multimillion dollar tax breaks that the
tech giant and other companies received
<http://valleywag.gawker.com/twitter-getting-22-mil-tax-break-for-helping-charities-925157205>
to set up office in the central part of the city, as part of a mayor-led
revitalization project.
 "It's not until we let go of our deep attachment to the US justice system
as an arbiter of redress that we can begin to ask what we want and need."

The rising cost of living in San Francisco, fueled by municipal protections
for corporate interests at the expense of our most vulnerable residents,
has forced countless trans people into unsafe living situations... San
Francisco must shift its priorities away from protecting corporations and
toward providing affordable housing for all who need it and particularly
creating affordable housing services, safe housing programs and more safe
spaces for trans people.

Clearly, there's no way to stop all harm before it starts, but Bay Area
groups that include some of the people who formed Taja's Coalition are
seeking accountability for harm in unique ways. STOP – the StoryTelling &
Organizing Project <http://www.stopviolenceeveryday.org/> – outlines dozens
of cases where individuals and their communities (of all sexualities)
created alternative accountability practices for harm, forgoing the
traditional justice system. Likewise, QUARREL, a loose group of Bay
Areaites with an "anti-colonial, queer, feminist" bent described how they
dealt with a serial sex abuser in the Bay Area in their zine
<https://quarrelthezine.wordpress.com/>. About 50 people showed up to the
club where the abuser in question was deejaying and presented him with a
statement saying he'd be isolated from some of the places and social
circles he had frequented:

Over the next few months, we will be speaking with communities on campuses,
in radical spaces, in collectives, and queer safe spaces, to let people
know that you are not to participate in solidarity with women's causes
until we can reevaluate your pattern of abuse… If you refuse to abide by
these guidelines or emotionally torment survivors of your abuse, we are
prepared to take more serious, public action.

These are by no means the only examples of people using grassroots
approaches to accountability; countless more never made it into writing.
And the groups mentioned in this piece are working to make sure they're
just the tip of the iceberg.

***

On the afternoon of February 10, spurred by the die-in and protest outside,
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors held a memorial for de Jesus inside
City Hall, making a commitment to use people from the Coalition as advisers
on how to make San Francisco a better place for trans people. "It's
unprecedented," Castro says, happily (Supporters are currently raising money
<https://life.indiegogo.com/fundraisers/1123986> to cover the costs of a
community memorial for de Jesus).But it's too early to see whether the
Board will make good on its promise, so the actions aren't going to cease
just yet, according to Castro. "We're not stopping. We're planning to do
another protest, and this time block traffic. There will be more."

Over the phone, en route to a funeral for de Jesus, Castro shares one of
her favorite times she had with her sister:

I remember [Taja and I] sitting in my car outside of this rehabilitation
center for elders, and we were about to visit an old-timer from Alcoholics
Anonymous and just bring him some hope and love. We were sitting in the car
and Madonna was playing and we were just singing – we both adore Madonna,
and Prince, so that's what I remember of her, having so much and her
laughing, and giggling and singing.

It's a memory Castro is hoping will displace the imagined image she has of
Taja in the final moments of her life. Working for positive change with her
trans sisters is helping. "I'm filled with hope and love – these incredible
people, our allies and our community came together and made it happen in 72
hours. It was surreal."
 Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission
<editor at truthout.org>.
 Toshio Meronek <http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/47891>

Toshio Meronek is an independent journalist focusing on politics,
disability and LGBT/queer issues. He has reported for Al Jazeera, In These
Times and The Nation. Previously, he served as editor for The Abolitionist
(the newspaper of the anti-prison-industrial complex group Critical
Resistance) and Where's Lulu (a blog covering disability and pop culture).
  ------------------------------

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-- 
*Diana*
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