MOJ said to be prioritising trans inmates ahead of women’s safety

TRANS prisoners’ needs “cannot come at a cost to the safety” of female inmates, a group of prison governors, barristers and academics have warned.

The comments come after a judicial review at the High Court over the Ministry of Justice’s (MOJ) policy of placing trans women in women’s prisons.

The policy is being challenged by an inmate, who cannot be identified and is known only as FDJ, who claims she was sexually assaulted by a trans woman, referred to as J, behind bars in 2017.

The alleged attacker had convictions for “serious sexual offences against women” and was being housed in the general population of a women’s prison.

As this week’s hearing came to a close, a group of barristers, Oxbridge academics, prison officers – including Ian Acheson, former prison governor at HMP Erlestoke who also held a senior role at HMP Wandsworth – criticised the Government over concerns “that the rights of women in prison to singlesex spaces are not being upheld”.

In a letter published in today’s Daily Telegraph, spearheaded by Kate Coleman, director of the Keep Prisons Single Sex campaign group, they say: “All vulnerable prisoners have the right to be safe, but the needs of one group cannot come at a cost to the safety and wellbeing of women in prison.”

“We consider women’s prisons to be definitive examples of facilities used by women that should be single-sex,” they added. “The vulnerability of female prisoners is well established and evidence demonstrates that female offenders require female-only settings.”

The intervention came as lawyers for the Government told the High Court that they did not know, and were unlikely ever to know, how many transgender inmates there were in prisons across the country.

Under current laws, transgender men and women are not obliged to tell the authorities that they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC), a document verifying that they have changed their legal gender.

The number of GRCS are therefore “actively not recorded” in the justice system, the High Court heard, meaning prison officers are left unaware that some inmates are transgender.

An MOJ spokesman said that it does not house all male-born prisoners who have since changed gender to female in women’s prisons, and that the policies do allow for some transgender women with GRCS to remain in the men’s estate, and this has happened since the introduction of such policies.

It also claimed that the prison and police investigated the allegations made by FDJ and no corroborative evidence was found to bring a charge.

Lord Justice Holroyde and Mr Justice Swift will reserve judgment until a later date.