At the end of December, Rikers Island said it would close a housing unit that offered protection for gay and transgender inmates from the common sexual and physical abuses of the general-population inmates. Gay and transgender prisoners will have to apply for “protective custody” which is actually 23 hours of lock-down in their cells. Does this sound like protection or punishment? The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a gay/transgender legal activist organization, has spoken up in these prisoners defense along with more than a dozen gay and civil rights groups. One reason is that in the New York case Schipski v. Flood, it was decided that locking up prisoners for 22 hours violates their constitutional rights. The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy blog posted a summary of the events on January 24 because of this constitutional violation.

The New York Times covered the story as well as the AP, but most other major news organizations, such as The LA Times, picked the AP’s coverage and failed to do any further reporting. While I’m impressed that several major dailies even covered the story, I won’t pat them on the back too quickly. Besides the laziness of piggybacking the same content, the stories were each written several weeks prior to the decision being final, and there wasn’t coverage of the protests following the announcement or of the results of the decision in Rikers as prisoners have slowly been filtered out of the unit. The AP failed to mention that the 23-hour lockup solution wasn’t constitutional. Once again, minority groups must look to the alternative press for fuller representation. The Gay City News does a decent job of surpassing the bare minimum two points of view that the major papers offer. This article actually lets us know that Mayor Bloomberg and the corrections department have been forced to listen to the civil rights groups who’ve spoken up. I guess we’ll all have to do our own digging to see what happens.