A federal court in Southern Illinois today denied the Illinois Department of Corrections’ request to dismiss a class-action lawsuit, Monroe v. Jeffreys, filed by five transgender women detained in Illinois prisons to reform the abysmal medical treatment that they and more than one hundred other transgender prisoners receive from the Department in its facilities throughout the state.
 
In 2019, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Nancy Rosenstengel ordered the Illinois Department of Corrections to overhaul its practices and policies for providing treatment to prisoners with gender dysphoria. Despite the Court’s order, the State has not yet implemented the great bulk of the changes the Court ordered. 
 
In response to the decision, John Knight, Director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the ACLU of Illinois, issued the following statement:
 
“The Illinois Department of Corrections was given a clear path forward by the Court more than a year ago – a path that would provide the basic medical care that transgender people who have gender dysphoria desperately need. After months of dragging their feet and ignoring the clear needs of our clients in their custody, the State instead sought to get out of the lawsuit, arguing that they were still planning and working toward providing the life-saving care that our clients urgently require. That is wholly inadequate for our clients, who continue to endure significant harm from existing Department policies.
 
We are pleased the Court soundly rejected the State’s effort to escape its constitutional duty to promptly reform its health care system and hope to have a chance soon to prove our case at trial.”

Two men currently detained at the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) are asking a federal court to force the Federal Bureau of Prisons to take immediate steps to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the facility. Ricky Price and Kevin Conway are among the more than 500 persons detained at the MCC, a facility designed for only 400 detainees. It is clear that this overcrowding, which has caused double-bunking in small cells and the housing of up to 100 persons in dormitory-like facilities, has facilitated the spread of COVID-19.

The MCC has been a vector for spread of the coronavirus since last spring. In May 2020, 20 to 25% of the population was diagnosed with an infection, despite a lack of testing throughout the facility. The same happened again once winter hit.  Even now, management has stuck with its old, failed practices--officers walk the halls without wearing masks; basic needs such as soap and hand sanitizer are not widely available; and showers and other commonly used objects, like phones, are not cleaned and sanitized regularly. 

“It is hard to define what MCC officials are doing as a strategy for confronting COVID,” said Camille Bennett, director of the Prison Reform Project at the ACLU of Illinois. “They failed in the spring and they have not learned a single lesson. There must be a specific, science-based plan to protect those detained at the MCC.”  

Residents, including the two men bringing the lawsuit, report being terrified and depressed. They have good reason. The BOP COVID-19 page recently reported 307 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the MCC since the start of the pandemic. Reportedly some staff and a few residents were recently offered vaccinations, but most remain unprotected and unsafe. Given the reality that many of the residents at MCC have pre-existing conditions that make them susceptible to serious illness or death if they contract the coronavirus, it is urgent to make changes to the MCC practices.  

“After months of inaction, it is clear that the court must order substantial changes at MCC, or people will die,” added Bennett.

The two plaintiffs are asking the court to order development of a vaccination plan at the MCC which results in all MCC residents and staff being vaccinated as soon as possible, along with vaccine education; adoption of an aggressive testing regimen in the facility, so that staff and all new and existing residents are tested on a regular basis; properly implemented isolation of COVID-positive residents; effective sanitation; universal masking inside the facility, and measures to relieve the depression of residents who have spent months under lockdown.  

A copy of the complaint can be found here.  

The following statement can be attributed to John Knight, LGBTQ & HIV Project Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois:

“Today, we celebrate President Biden’s executive order lifting the ban on transgender service members in the military. The President’s action reverses the cruel and arbitrary ban imposed by the previous administration nearly four years ago. 
 
The facts are clear. The ban did not make our nation safer and it did not increase effectiveness or morale for our troops. Rather, it simply denied the opportunity to serve to new recruits as well as people who had been serving effectively for years and wanted nothing more than to continue doing their job to protect our country. 
 
Time and again over the past four years, in courtrooms across the country, the lack of justification for this ban has been attested to by a range of experts on military preparedness. It was long past time to bring this cruelty to an end.”