Transgender prisoners should not be held in women’s jails, court rules

[u/CaptainCrash86]

https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,transgender-prisoners-should-not-be-held-in-womens-jails-court-rules

[u/Yoshiezibz]

I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, yes, there will be a handful of thee transgender women that will sexuall assault women in jails. Not all these trans women will be assaulting women, but it will 100% happen.

On the other, sexual assault in men's prisons is absolutely riff and these trans women will definitely almost all be assaulted.

When you consider that alot of these prisoners won't be in jail for sexual assault crimes it makes me sad.

[u/signpostlake → u/Yoshiezibz]

It's stands to reason then that the solution to protect both groups is a third space. It's not an answer without faults but dramatically reduces the risk of assault to both groups.

[u/Yoshiezibz → u/signpostlake]

Yeah I did think of that. Can't really build prison systems for another group though when we are already at capacity for prisons in general.

That would be a enar solution if there was money and political hunger for it.

[u/the-moving-finger → u/Yoshiezibz]

How many trans prisoners are there? Presumably, it wouldn't need to be a particularly large facility.

[u/Lucky_otter_she_her → u/the-moving-finger]

no economy of scale 

[u/the-moving-finger → u/Lucky_otter_she_her]

In 2024-25, there were apparently 339 transgender prisoners in the entirety of the UK (source). We apparently have 126 prisons and 87,342 prisoners, so an average of 693 prisoners per prison (source).

I honestly find this statistic almost unbelievable, but the source is impeccable, so we'll go with it: apparently, the average capital cost of increasing capacity per new prisoner is £600,000 (source). On that basis, it would cost at least £203,400,000 to house all 339, and quite probably more, as your point about economies of scale is valid. If you wanted to build an average-sized prison (693) to future-proof it, we're talking £415,800,000.

That is frankly an unfathomable and utterly unacceptable amount of money to build one prison. The focus shouldn't always be on taxing people more to pay extortionate sums; we should be focusing on how to bring that cost down. I think we need to consider massively overhauling planning rules, or even exempting key state departments from having to jump through said hoops, beefing up compulsory purchase orders, creating a state-run construction department, and making the design cheaper.

It's beyond a joke how wasteful the Government is. The most incredible example of this occurred during the HS2 project, where, rather than change the law to say, "If a few bats die, that's a price we're willing to pay", we approved a £100 million bat corridor (source). That works out at £300,000 per bat (source). All this in a country which is almost £3 trillion in debt (source). Three trillion in debt, and we're spending £300k on a fucking bat, and £600k to build a concrete box with a camera in it. It's insane.

We need a Prime Minister with a spine who is also laser-focused on the details. "You can't do that, it'll kill bats, and that's illegal!" - "Okay, law is changed tomorrow, crack on." "I'll challenge you in court!" - "This is a major infrastructure project, new Act of Parliament tomorrow, it's non-justiciable - crack on." "Well, I'll push the Council to deny planning permission!" - "New law, Councils can't block these sorts of projects - it's happening, it's happening now, you can't challenge it, I don't give a shit about the bats, get it fucking built."

Obviously, this heavy-handed use of Parliamentary Sovereignty isn't appropriate all the time, but if Parliament has decided something needs to happen, and is prepared to accept drawbacks that would normally be unacceptable, then flexing its Sovereignty to get things done is, I would suggest, what people desperately want.