As reported in my last article it appears that the gambit Michael Hari has employed to get incarcerated in a women’s prison has worked.
Hari, the leader of an Illinois anti-government militia group who plotted the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque was sentenced Monday to 53 years in federal prison.
The judge presiding over Hari’s case has gone on record saying that he is “fully prepared” to recommend he be sent to a women’s prison for the 53 years of his sentence but that the federal Bureau of Prisons would have to evaluate Hari and that they’re not obliged to follow any judge’s recommendations and that the final determination on where Hari eventually ends up is entirely up to the them.
In 2019 a federal judge has mandated major reforms of the treatment of transgender inmates in all Illinois prisons, including an end to “mechanically assigning housing based on genitalia,” physical size or appearance, according to court documents.
The court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Rosenstengel comes in response to a 2018 class-action lawsuit filed against Illinois Department of Corrections officials on behalf of five incarcerated transgender women claiming inappropriate treatment of gender dysphoria, an intense distress due to a mismatch of biological sex and gender identity.
Recently the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons released revisions to its Transgender Offender Manual. Notably, the rewritten manual gets rid of language asking that an inmate's gender identity, not the sex they were assigned at birth, be considered when recommending a housing facility for them.
The initial manual, dated Jan. 18, 2017, states: "The TEC [Transgender Executive Council] will recommend housing by gender identity when appropriate." In the revised version, which was approved by the Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Mark S. Inch, that sentence has been struck. The language in the revised version instead insists that facility assignments for transgender inmates be assessed on "a case-by-case basis."
The guidelines now say that the Transgender Executive Council "will use biological sex as the initial determination" for facility assignment for transgender inmates, and a transgender inmate would be assigned to a facility based on their identified gender only "in rare cases." To make a determination about placement, the Council can consider the inmate's health and safety, the inmate's history of behavior and the security of the institution and its inmates.
According to the revisions, an inmate may also be assigned to a facility based on their self-identified gender if "there has been significant progress towards transition as demonstrated by medical and mental health history." Prison wardens are permitted to recommend transferring an inmate based on their identified gender as well.
“Case by case”.
”In rare cases”.
Given that the determination for gender dysphoria is now predicated on an affirmation model instead of getting to the root cause as to what evidence a transgendered person bases their gender dysphoria on I’d have to say that there’s every reason in the world to believe that Michael Hari will be sent to a women’s prison to serve out his 53 year sentence.
I hate being right.