With the highest incarceration rate per capita in South America, Uruguay had to resort to building new prisons. One of them proposes to create a new space, only reserved for transgender people. This “innovation” was announced this Friday, July 28 by the Uruguayan authorities.
“As part of a new prison project in Montevideo, there will be a specific sector for the transgender population,” Juan Miguel Petit, the deputy in charge of prison system issues, told AFP. “This is good news for a very vulnerable population that requires enormous attention,” he added.
Mr. Petit thinks the new prison could be ready in less than two years. In Uruguay, a country of around 3.5 million people, four out of every thousand people are behind bars and the number of prisoners exceeds the available capacity in the 26 prisons.
Uruguay currently has 14,965 detainees, 13,855 men and 1,110 women. There are a total of 28 transgender women and nine transgender men in these prisons, according to Mr. Petit’s services. The women’s prison whose construction “will soon begin in Punta de Rieles”, about 15 km from the center of the capital Montevideo, “has a particularity that has never been taken into account, the transgender population”, has its side said the director of the National Institute of Rehabilitation (INR), Luis Mendoza.
“If the transgender person enters the (prison) system, they have the right to decide whether they want to go to a male or female prison,” he said during a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, according to a transcript published later. Mendoza said transgender women are currently placed in women’s institutions, but living together involves “a whole process” of adjusting.
In her view, if the Uruguayan state recognizes transgender women and grants them appropriate identity documents, the prison system must give them “a place in places reserved for women, if necessary”. “The laws are very advanced in Uruguay, but the mentality and infrastructure are not up to snuff,” he lamented.
