The Northwestern Prison Education Program held a virtual panel Tuesday night to discuss how the intersecting identities of incarcerated LGBTQ+ individuals might affect their experiences within the criminal justice system.
NPEP is a degree-granting program that provides liberal arts education in two Illinois prisons. The program also offers five individuals directly impacted by incarceration the opportunity to work with NPEP as a Justice Fellow, program coordinator Josias Escobedo said. Throughout the year, each fellow works to create a panel on a topic surrounding criminal justice.
Justice Fellow Veronica Valencia Gonzalez hosted Tuesday’s panel, which explored key challenges and systemic issues faced by LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as solutions and advocacy strategies aimed at creating a more equitable system.
Gregory Phillips II, an associate professor at NU who researches health disparities in marginalized minority populations, began by pointing out that the carceral system utilizes the traditional gender binary. Transgender and nonbinary individuals are often housed based on their sex assigned at birth, which can place them at greater risks, he said.
In addition to the issues LGBTQ+ individuals face within prisons, LGBTQ+ disparities exist at all levels of the criminal justice system, said Kris Rosentel, who researches gender and sexual inequalities in health and the criminal legal system. LGBTQ+ individuals are not only more likely to be stopped by the police than people who are cisgender –– they are also more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, Rosentel said.
The LGBTQ+ community has historically held a complicated relationship with law enforcement, Rosentel said. In the era of gay liberation, when people engaged in riots often combating the police, they said, LGBTQ+ organizations utilized alternative public safety infrastructure like street patrols to keep people safe.
“Something we’ve seen, especially in neighborhoods like Boystown, Greenwich Village or the Castro — predominantly white, more affluent LGBTQ+ spaces — is this increasing reliance and partnership with the police,” Rosentel said. “It’s framed as a way to keep people safe, to protect people from hate crimes, but the consequence is that LGBTQ+ folks of color, especially young folks seeking services and accessing programs are often the targets of these policing projects.”
At the other end of the system, wealthier, white and cisgender individuals tend to have a lot more infrastructure and support when they are released, Phillips said.
Phillips pointed out that the same factors that put some LGBTQ+ individuals at a greater risk for being incarcerated in the first place — such as being kicked out of their families — still exist when they are released. Without a support system in place, there is no way for people to exit the cycle, he said.
There are many reasons people from minority groups might not want to be in the police department or work in the criminal justice system, but with little representation, it’s hard for these issues to be understood and for changes to occur, Phillips said.
The end of the panel focused on initiatives that can assist LGBTQ+ individuals during and after incarceration. While many of the panelists had difficulty thinking of examples of programs that had already been implemented, NU Professor of Black Studies Marquis Bey said they try not to let that discourage them.
Gonzalez said they want to believe that education can inspire policy changes and that teaching judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys about these issues might have a positive impact.
Criminal justice policy analyst Bryant Jackson-Green said that education within prisons can also help incarcerated LGBTQ+ individuals. Classrooms can provide people with spaces to engage in self-expression and have engaging conversations that would be difficult or impossible to have otherwise, he said.
“I taught a queer theory class inside of a prison, which I never thought would be possible, and yet it happened,” Bey said. “Just the ways that the readings, the conversation, the discussion (and) the introduction of terms and histories, made things possible for them, I don’t think can be understated.”
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