States pitch trauma-informed prisons; occupant reports twenty-three-hour lockdown for being transgender

…(cont) Truthout ran a second account this week, describing what the informed part looks like from the inside right now, under the term restrictive housing: someone locked twenty-three hours a day, no human interaction, who says the lockdown answers one fact about them — that they are transgender. It is being applied, on this account, to a status, not a rule broken.

The trauma-informed pitch has a track record to answer to. Last month the Justice Department delivered its assessment of California's two state prisons for women, and the finding was not trauma-informed anything; it was a rape crisis, ongoing, in a system where, the Washington Examiner wrote, the state holds enormous power over the women inside it. Those two prisons did not open this year.

The danger the label promises to address does not stay inside prison walls, or wait for one to be built. In South Africa this month, NPR reported, a spate of killings of nine women in one area left women describing daily life outside any prison as its own kind of confinement. The threat travels; the architecture does not follow it.

A state can put trauma-informed on a blueprint the day it breaks ground. Whether the word describes anything real is a finding made later, by federal investigators or by the people who live inside — and this week, both said it does not.