All transgender prisoners will go into an assessment in a prison service facility that matches the sex of their birth, according to Scotland’s Justice Secretary.
In Scotland under the initial plans, newly convicted prisoners were categorised under the gender they identified as rather than their sex at birth.
Adam Graham
Graham/Bryson, who will be sentenced this month after being found guilty of raping two women, was initially sent to a segregation unit at an all-female prison at Cornton Vale prison in Stirling.The convicted rapist did not make the decision to transition until 29 and is currently taking hormones and seeking surgery to complete gender reassignment.
The series of interim measures announced by the SPS said that it should now “consider the weight of an individual’s previous offending history as part of the case conference process.” It also proposed “an urgent exploration of the process of immediate admission into a prison.”
In an interview with BBC Scotland, Brown explained that the change in policy means that transgender individuals will now automatically go to a male prison regardless of whether or not they have previous convictions of violence against women. They then will then be assessed before a decision is taken on where to place them longer-term.
“That will very often be a process which is undertaken in a segregated environment before an assessment is made as to where the person goes,” he said.
“And if it turns out the person has that history [of violence against women or girls] then of course they will not be going to, if they are a trans woman, to the female estate,” Brown added.
‘No Faith’
Dr. Kate Coleman, who runs the organisation Keep Prisons Single Sex, which was set up in 2020 to campaign for the right of female prisons to single-sex provision, told The Epoch Times that she was “unimpressed.”Coleman expressed concern as under the wider rules with convicts initially allocated to the male estate, this doesn’t mean they can’t then be transferred to the female estate.
“The initial allocation of male prisoners who identify as transgender on the basis of ‘birth gender’ is wholly consistent with subsequent transfer to the female estate,” she said.
“In respect of those who have been convicted of violent offences against women, I frankly have no faith in a case-by-case assessment that requires ministerial sign off. Keith Brown and the SPS have shown themselves to be wholly unsuited to this task. Nothing less than an independent public enquiry is required,” she added.
Susan Smith, co-director of For Women Scotland, told The Epoch Times that there are multiple cases of dangerous men in Scotland who have entered and who seek to finish their sentences in the women’s estate.
A male-born Katie Dolatowski, a convicted paedophile who sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, was sent to Scotland’s only women’s prison Cornton Vale Prison last year. Paris Green, who was born Peter Laing, jailed for murder was moved from Cornton Vale in 2013 after he allegedly had sex with fellow inmates.
Recently there were calls to block “Tiffany Scott” born Andrew Burns, known as one of Scotland’s most dangerous prisoners, to the female estate.
“It’s naive to the point of idiocy that people who have carried out extremely violent acts and sexual acts against other men would be happy to leave other women alone. It’s just mind-blowingly stupid to think that,” she said.
“This whole policy has been predicated on the mythical 20-year transitioned transsexual who led a blameless existence and accidentally commits fraud, that is what this policy is based on and that person doesn’t exist in the prison estate at the moment,” added Smith.
The Scottish government told The Epoch Times that it did not wish to comment.
