Prisons Face Dilemma With Transgender Inmates

Jan. 22 -- With fully developed breasts, long hair and feminine features, Kelly McAllister is not the sort of person you'd expect to find sharing a cell with a male prisoner.

But that's exactly where the 5-foot, 7-inch, 135-pound prisoner was housed after being arrested in connection with an alleged public disturbance, a lawyer representing McAllister says. McAllister is a "preoperative transsexual" — anatomically male, but living as a woman and undergoing feminine hormone treatment.

The Sacramento Sheriff's Department classified McAllister as a male, however.

"They classified her as him and put him in protective custody. Then they put her in cell with a straight male inmate," said McAllister's lawyer, Dean Johansson. "There's no wonder why what happened happened."

Johansson claims that McAllister was violently sexually assaulted by the other inmate, and then received little help after the incident, which allegedly occurred last September.

Sgt. Lou Fatur, of the Sacramento Sheriff's Department, said the claim was without merit, but declined to comment further. He said the department's policy was to put transgender and homosexual prisoners in facilities apart from the general jail population.

"They're separated and protected," he said.

No one knows how many "transgender" inmates are in the nation's prisons and jails. The term itself is a catch-all used to refer to many different groups, says Vanessa Edwards Foster, the head of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition.

But it is clear to advocates and prison system experts that transgendered inmates are particularly vulnerable to abuse and assault, in part because they are routinely housed with inmates in the general prison population.

"I would say there probably is a serious problem, especially with preoperative transsexuals," says Christopher Hensley, a sociology professor at Morehead State University and director of the Institute of Correctional Research and Training there. Most prisons have some form of "administrative segregation" for some inmates, but the facilities typically involve reduced privileges and are more expensive to run, Hensley says.