#prison system

A federal appeals court has vacated a lower court order that had blocked the US Bureau of Prisons from transferring incarcerated trans women into men’s facilities, raising renewed fears about safety in custody. The change is set out in the appeals court decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned preliminary injunctions issued by US District Judge Royce Lamberth in February 2025 and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings. The ruling was decided 2-1.

I cannot FATHOM how anybody could truly believe that IMPRISONMENT would fucking help a person's MENTAL DISORDER!!!!!

All you have to do is spend two fucking seconds thinking about that idea to realize that no, prisons DON'T IMPROVE MENTAL HEALTH, FUCKING HELL! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ASSHOLES?! Even just think about yourself in prison! Would that improve YOUR mental health?? And to add icing to the cake, THE GUY IN THE VIDEO HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPRISONED MULTIPLE TIMES AND IS SUICIDAL LITERALLY BECAUSE HE'S ABOUT TO BE REIMPRISONED AGAIN.

In an article that made me go "wtf, they didn't already do that?!":

'Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed Ohio House Bill 29 on Dec. 19 and it will go into effect on March 20. The bill passed unanimously in the House and the Senate.

"It’s in the best interest of everybody for women to have access to menstrual products,” said Kayelin Tiggs, who has been doing advocacy work with formerly incarcerated women since 2021. She helped author the bill’s language and worked with Ohio state Rep. Latyna M. Humphrey, D–Columbus.

“What we wanted to do is … ensure that women who are incarcerated, had access to feminine hygiene products,” Humphrey said. “What it does is it kind of takes that worry away from women who are incarcerated.”

Tiggs recalls visiting the Montgomery County Jail and being told there was no formal policy in place for period products at the time.

“They had what was called just a best practice, which was taking a handful of products and passing them out,” she said. “There was no formalized way that these facilities would pass out these products, and there was also a pattern of withholding and denying these products.”

Tiggs heard from formerly incarcerated women that feminine hygiene products would sometimes be withheld.

“It was just up to the discretion of the corrections offices that determined most of the time whether or not the women got their products,” she said.

....

'The bill was reintroduced for three consecutive general assemblies before being signed into law. It was first introduced at the end of 2022 during the 134th General Assembly.

“We knew that there was not going to be enough time for the bill to gain any traction,” Tiggs said. “We wanted to make noise about it.”

The bill passed the House, but it stalled in the Senate during the 135th General Assembly. The bipartisan bill was introduced by Humphrey and Republican state Rep. Marilyn John this General Assembly.

I've been getting regular updates myself on the situation as it's developed over the past year but have been so wrapped up in my own (by contrast shallow) dilemmas and general professional overload, and the Suri Dao situation is so separate from all parts of my life (even my interactions with the rat community) and thus easy to compartmentalize away, that I've shoved the horror of the whole thing to one side of my brain. But it makes me so livid when I force myself to think about it fully. Take a human being with a brilliant mind and forceful spirit but a long list of disorders / disabilities / forms of neurodivergence and mental illness -- reasonably likely traits for someone who wound up pulled into a ideological cult (or very ideological cult-like situation) and who may or may not have stabbed an adversary in an attempt to murder them, and drag them through the brutality of high-security prison and solitary confinement as well as an interminable wait for a trial as one wades through our justice system, and what do you expect to become of that person? Solitary would mentally and cognitively screw up most of the least disordered among us who get thrown into it, so no surprise, my old Tumblr friend, who once had a sparkling intellect and emotional awareness (if also a dark and disturbing side that lay dormant and/or invisible), is now in a perpetually catatonic state. And guess what? Even in a cold justice system that doesn't care that a human being who may or may not be a serious criminal gets virtually destroyed as a person, their body and mind are now shattered to the point that they can't testify in your trial whose purpose is to ascertain exactly what really happened on November 15th, 2022.