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The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday released long-awaited reports about sexual violence in prisons and jails, but omitted data on transgender incarcerated people. The two reports came just days after a memo obtained by Prism revealed the department’s plans to dismantle prison rape protections for transgender and intersex people in adult and youth facilities across the country.
In the latest reports on sexual victimization reported by prisoners, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) left out key demographic data that details the identities of those experiencing sexual violence behind bars, including race, sexual orientation, and age. And while the agency says it will release that data in a series of reports sometime in 2026, experts worry that information about trans and intersex people won’t be released.
According to the anonymous questionnaires provided as part of the survey, released by the BJS, prisoners were specifically asked whether they are transgender, which suggests that such data was collected.
Wanda Bertram, the communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told Prism that the omission is glaring, considering how President Donald Trump’s administration has politicized the treatment of trans people behind bars, who face alarmingly high rates of sexual violence from prison staff and fellow prisoners alike.
“It’s part of a shift by BJS under Trump to not collect any more data about demographics that Trump would like to choose to ignore or look away from,” Bertram said. “And it’s basically the government choosing to stick its head in the sand about a pretty key aspect of sexual assault in prisons.”
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment about the data.
The two reports, about prisons and jails, separately, are the fourth of their kind since 2007 as part of the National Inmate Survey (NIS), which draws on anonymous questionnaires provided to incarcerated people. The findings released Tuesday are the first under the NIS since 2013 — and the first since standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) went into effect in August 2012.
And while this data would ordinarily represent a novel chance to study the impacts of concerted efforts to address sexual violence in detention, experts like Cynthia Totten, a deputy executive director at Just Detention International, say the lack of data about trans people in a post-PREA system is a significant hurdle for the group’s work. JDI is a Los Angeles-based advocacy group that works to end sexual violence in detention.
“When you give an incomplete picture, it just makes it impossible to do that next step to do the work of ensuring that correctional practices are as they should be and advance the safety of incarcerated folks,” Totten said.
To that end, the missing data has particularly far-reaching consequences for the people working in and around the criminal legal system, from advocates in nonprofits, counselors at rape crisis centers, and even corrections officials who use the data to inform detention practices. The lack of data also makes it harder to challenge the Trump administration’s transphobic claims that trans people in prison are a threat to those around them, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“If we do not know, and if we cannot show that transgender people are themselves often victims of abuse inside prisons, it’s going to be all the harder to counter,” Bertram said.
Criminal justice experts and advocates are also increasingly worried about robust data collection about LGBTQIA+ people behind bars, especially after the DOJ earlier this year removed questions about gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Survey of Sexual Victimization, and the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails.
Trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of violent crime. And data from the DOJ itself shows that trans incarcerated people face significantly higher rates of sexual violence than others behind bars.
Data released from the NIS in 2014 showed that nearly 40% of transgender incarcerated people reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization involving another inmate or facility staff in the 12 months prior. And data from two previous years of the NIS report detailed similar levels of sexual violence.
A February 2024 report from the Vera Institute of Justice and Black and Pink National also detailed the violence trans prisoners face in state prisons. Out of nearly 300 incarcerated trans people surveyed, nearly one-third said violence from fellow prisoners was the principal reason they felt unsafe. Additionally, more than half reported being sexually assaulted during their prison sentences at the time.
Tuesday’s DOJ reports were released following a memo sent to prison auditors earlier this month that detailed Trump’s plans to roll back standards under PREA aimed at protecting trans and intersex prisoners from sexual violence.
The memo, sent to PREA auditors certified by the DOJ, instructed auditors to ignore provisions requiring that trans people be screened for risk for sexual violence, that their housing preferences are given serious consideration, that they be allowed to shower privately, and that employee training includes how to respectfully treat and communicate with LGBTQIA+ prisoners.
Experts say the result of these rollbacks will likely be increased violence against trans and intersex people, without the limited protections they may have had under PREA. Trump’s plans to change the standards, however, are still up in the air until a formal rulemaking process is complete
“We know there’s still a serious problem of sexual abuse in detention,” Totten said. But now, “we don’t have the information that would help us to know anything about what’s going on, what’s behind those numbers,” Totten said, all while the Trump administration is “about to tear into the standards.”
“What we saw in the memo is that the oversight right around those protections has already been taken away,” Totten said. “We know it’s a very dangerous situation, not only for trans people, but for everybody who’s incarcerated.”
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