LANSING – All 2,044 women held at Michigan’s only women’s prison were called into individual meetings with officials Thursday and asked to state whether they are straight, gay, bisexual or transgender, officials confirmed Friday.

Many prisoners at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility near Ypsilanti were upset by the questioning, according to a former prisoner who received a phone call Thursday from an upset friend who is still incarcerated.

"They were just confused by it," said Tammy Weidenhamer, who was paroled from the prison late in 2017. "They just think it was very invasive and prison officials don't need to know that information."

Corrections Department spokesman Chris Gautz said Thursday's questioning was required to comply with a prison audit related to the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

“The staff there knew this was not going to be perceived well,” Gautz said. They made clear to the women, “You don’t have to answer this question, but we have to ask it,” he said.

Questions about sexual orientation and identity are supposed to be asked when prisoners are admitted, but during the recent audit, officials at the women's prison could not document that they had directly asked the question, Gautz said.

As a result of the audit, women are now being asked about their sexual orientation and identity when they are admitted, just as all male prisoners are asked upon their admission, he said. Prisoners are not required to answer the question and there are no repercussions for those who refuse, he said.

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Asked what relevance sexual orientation or identity has to the Prison Rape Elimination Act, Gautz said it is one factor among many in determining a score each prisoner receives that helps prison officials determine whether they are classified as a potential victim or potential aggressor in a potential prison sexual assault. Those scores, which are also based on factors that include physical size and whether someone has ever been sexually assaulted or has sexually assaulted someone previously, are in turn used to help prison officials determine which prisoners should be housed together, he said.

"If you've got a very small, frail person ... you're not going to put them in with a person who is 300 pounds," he said.

Asked how sexual orientation or identity could in any way be used to determine whether someone is more likely to be a victim or an aggressor in a sexual assault, Gautz said state prison officials are asking themselves the same thing, and it is a good question to ask the federal government.

"It's definitely worth re-evaluating in federal law whether that should be considered a factor," he said.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 is intended to deter the sexual assault of prisoners.

The statute says all inmates should be assessed to determine, among other factors, "whether the inmate is or is perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming."

In federal guidelines intended to help officials interpret the act, the government has said that means each prisoner should be directly asked about their sexual orientation and identity, Gautz said.

Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan's LGBT Project, said sexual identity and orientation has no connection to the likelihood of someone committing a sexual assault, but statistics show prisoners who are gay or transgender can be more likely to be the victims of sexual assault. For that reason, it is legitimate under federal law for prison officials to ask about sexual identity and orientation among a whole range of other questions in assessing the risk for sexual assault, he said.

To single out just the one question, apparently without giving the prisoners adequate information about why the question was being asked, "seems kind of strange," and was understandably upsetting to women at the Michigan prison, he said.

"They were supposed to do this within 30 days of intake," Kaplan said. "Coming back a year, or several years later ... it does kind of stick out like a sore thumb."

Gautz said a similar issue was identified during an audit of a male boot camp near Chelsea in 2017, when all of the about 250 prisoners there had to be individually called in and asked about their sexual orientation and identity.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter.