Correctional policies for the management of trans people in Australian prisons

Abstract

Background: Despite existing international standards for the prison management of incarcerated trans people, carceral policies across Australian jurisdictions vary in their availability, breadth, and appropriateness. Trans populations in prison represent a vulnerable population, having specific needs surrounding their health, safety, and wellbeing. Prior reviews into Australian carceral policies highlight where contemporary prison practices fall short of meeting those specific needs. Aims/method: A review was conducted on the available carceral policy documents of each Australian correctional service regime, examining their coverage of issues including healthcare access, placement decisions, and classification systems against international standards and prior Australian recommendations. Forty-one relevant policy documents were reviewed against eighteen benchmark recommendations, along with supplementary data. Results: Australian jurisdictions varied widely on the coverage of the reviewed areas. Benchmark attainment ranged from twelve out of eighteen (Victoria and Western Australia) to three out of eighteen (Queensland). The use of administrative segregation was identified as the area in most need of policy reform. No jurisdiction met every benchmark.Conclusions: This review highlights the need for carceral policy reform across Australian jurisdictions in order to meet the unique needs of incarcerated trans people, especially in the areas of administrative segregation and healthcare access. The review also highlights the need for carceral policy reform to bring Australian jurisdictions in line with each other on the management of incarcerated trans people, to reduce disparate outcomes across states and territories.

Keywords:

• Australia
• correctional policies
• imprisonment
• policy review
• prison
• trans

Acknowledgements

The author would like to extend his sincerest thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their expert guidance and advice in the revision of this paper. Additionally, he would like to thank his supervisory team for their support and tutelage. Thank you to Dr. R.V. Gundur and Dr. Melissa vel de Palumbo for providing feedback on earlier versions of this paper and during revisions, and to Professor Damien Riggs for his advice and support during the submission period.

Disclosure statement

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research. This research does not contain any datasets drawn from human or animal participants. No ethical approval was required for this research.

Notes

1 The author recognizes that summarising all gender-diverse identities under the term trans—including Indigenous identities that are not fully synonymous with Westernized understandings of trans people—is far from ideal. In this paper, I “use the term trans to include a very broad and all-encompassing understanding of the diverse trans communities, i.e. communities of people with gender expressions and gender identities that differ from the sex recorded at birth, including nonbinary people” (Bouman et al., 2017, p. 6).

2 The author extends his sincerest gratitude to the anonymous reviewer who supplied copies of the relevant correctional policy documents for South Australia and the Northern Territory, allowing their inclusion in this review.

3 It must be noted that while Garcia and Opie cite this as a direct quote, this phrase does not appear in the Policy 35 document that this author has access to. As such, this statement should be regarded with scepticism.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.