Editorial: Connecticut wrong to imprison transgender teen

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The ongoing mistreatment of a 16-year-old transgender girl in state custody is raising serious questions about civil rights, human rights and Connecticut’s approach to troubled children.

“Jane Doe” has spent more than a week at the York Correctional Institute — in solitary confinement, she says, 22 to 23 hours a day alone in a cell.

Solitary confinement is an inhumane and counterproductive approach even for adults. To use it in the case of a child who does not belong in an adult prison in the first place is beyond alarming.

The teen in question is under the care of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. It got her transferred to York using an obscure state law allowing courts to transfer a “dangerous minor” in state custody to an adult prison even if they have not been charged as an adult with any crime.

“I can feel myself growing more and more isolated, frustrated, and feeling alone in my current isolation,” Jane wrote to the court in a letter from prison. “I need to be given treatment and services specific to my needs. I need to deal with the trauma I’ve experienced in my life. This prison cannot do that for me.”

That trauma, according to CTMirror.org, has included being “raped dozens of times” by age 15, being “sold for sex, beaten up and addicted to crack cocaine.”

These things happened despite first coming under care of DCF as a young child “because her family members were incarcerated, sexually abusive or addicted to drugs.”

Transgender youth are also at exponentially greater risk of discrimination and bullying, physical and mental abuse, psychological issues and suicide.

DCF says it can’t deal with Jane Doe any longer, citing “an extensive history of violence” that has included stabbing another teen with a fork and 10 assaults on staff while at a children’s psychiatric facility run by the state. She is 16 years old, has had a horrific life, and DCF has failed repeatedly to protect her. Who could be surprised that she would have serious issues?

So why is the state throwing this child away instead of pursuing intensive treatment?

We strongly suspect that the answer lies with underlying bias against her gender identity. And in the process, the state of Connecticut appears to be violating an anti-discrimination law protecting transgender people that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed in 2011.

The state has been inconsistent with Jane Doe. Before being moved to the York women’s adult prison, according to CTNewsJunkie.com, she was housed “in female living sections at child detention centers and DCF facilities, or in isolation at male facilities.”

Legislators have questioned why DCF would not be treating her in a new locked facility for girls in Middletown that the agency specifically got funded to deal with similarly violent or challenging cases.

Its past decisions to house Jane at boys’ facilities, and a loaded statement that placing her at the Middletown facility might endanger “female staff,” signal an underlying bias against Jane’s gender identity.

Connecticut’s Department of Correction has maintained a policy of placing transgender people according to their biological gender. In that environment, someone who identifies as female could be forced to look and behave like a male, leading to potentially “severe psychological consequences.”

But Michael Lawlor, Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice, has acknowledged that the stated reasons for maintaining that stance are thin and likely conflict with the 2011 law. The Department of Correction probably could overcome challenges associated with determining who is “legitimately transgender,” he said, and Connecticut might change its policy.

In the meantime, this child — our child, because she is in the care of the state — needs help, not isolation in a prison cell. If her civil rights and human rights can be violated in this way, it puts everyone’s rights at risk