D.C.’s Department of Corrections has agreed to alter its policies for housing transgender people in the D.C. Jail as part of a settlement with a transgender woman who filed a class action lawsuit against the jail for holding her in a men’s unit.

“No one should face what I had to face at the D.C. Jail,” said Sunday Hinton, the woman who filed the lawsuit, in a press release announcing the settlement. “DOC put my safety and mental health at risk, and I’m glad that other trans people at the Jail will be treated with more dignity.”

According to the settlement, which the parties agreed to on Wednesday, DOC agreed to promptly house people according to their gender identity instead of their sexual anatomy. The agency also agreed to make individualized determinations about whether transgender people should be placed in protective custody, which is similar to solitary confinement. The agency agreed to stop a policy of shackling transgender people during certain movements within the jail. And DOC also said it would start submitting regular reports to the Public Defender Service for D.C., which represented Hinton in the case along with the ACLU of DC.

Hinton says she was forced to live in a men’s unit for more than two weeks of her four-week stay at the D.C. Jail last spring. According to her lawyers, Hinton was being held at the jail pretrial for a charge that has since been dismissed: unarmed burglary with the intent to steal $20. After she filed a lawsuit, she was eventually moved to a women’s unit on the Correctional Treatment Facility side of the D.C. Jail complex.

At the time, a DOC spokesperson refuted the account of Hinton and her lawyers, arguing instead that Hinton had been placed into single-occupancy quarantine for the two weeks after her arrival to the jail as part of the facility’s COVID-19 protocols.

Hinton was moved to the women’s unit just hours before the first hearing in her lawsuit, according to the ACLU of DC. About a month later, in June of last year, DOC also changed its housing policies to stop housing transgender people by their sexual anatomy. Under the previous policy, transgender people were by default housed according to their anatomy until the agency’s Transgender Housing Committee met to evaluate where they should ultimately be placed. But Hinton and her attorneys argued that the new policy was also unjust, because it automatically placed transgender people in protective custody upon their arrival to the jail — and in protective custody, people are held in single-occupancy cells and shackled while moving around the facility.

According to the settlement announced Thursday, DOC has agreed to “promptly” house all transgender residents according to their gender identity. The department also agreed that it would strike its current policy of automatically placing all transgender people in “protective custody” during their intake process — a policy which advocates say is the equivalent of automatically placing transgender people in solitary confinement. Instead, according to the settlement, DOC will make case-by-case determinations about whether transgender people should be placed in protective custody for their safety.

DOC also agreed to stop using shackles to move residents, including transgender residents, who are in protective custody and not in any other category of restrictive housing.

Rachel Cicurel, a staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for D.C., said in the press release announcing the settlement that Hinton’s lawsuit led not only to changes for transgender residents, but also to changes that will affect all people being held in protective custody, “who until now were subjected to the degrading and unjustified practice of full-body shackling.”

DOC also agreed to have its Transgender Housing Committee conduct a formal housing needs assessment for every transgender, intersex, or gender nonconfirming person detained at the jail within about three days of their arrival. One of the central claims of Hinton’s lawsuit was that DOC’s Transgender Housing Committee had not met in more than a year, since January of 2020 — though DOC refuted that account and said that after her 14-day quarantine upon intake, Hinton was scheduled to go before the Transgender Housing Committee to “determine her housing based on safety needs, housing availability, and gender identity.”

DOC also agreed to post its policies for housing transgender people publicly on their website, and to submit monthly reports on how it houses transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people for four months.

The ACLU of DC estimated last year that about 40 to 60 transgender people were detained at the D.C. Jail — and at that point, “the vast majority, if not all of them,” were housed based on their sexual anatomy instead of their gender identity.

Previously: 

Transgender Inmate Sues DC Jail For Putting Her In Men’s Unit