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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop

No, it's the court cases taken to force the prison system to cater to such extremes instead of being allowed to judge on a case-by-case basis of "Okay, Shlomo here really is Jewish but Darrell is just taking the piss".

Remember our dear friend Demi Minor, the 'woman' who got two women pregnant when transferred to a women's prison? In compliance with the law suit taken by the ACLU New Jersey (who are all about that decarceration) to force the New Jersey Department of Corrections to allow self-identified trans people to be jailed in the 'appropriate' prison:

New Jersey has adopted a policy that requires state prisons to house transgender people according to their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth.

The policy change is part of a settlement the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey announced Tuesday, and it puts the state among the handful of others with similar policies.

The ACLU of New Jersey and attorney Robyn Gigl of GluckWalrath LLP sued the N.J. Department of Corrections and its officers in August 2019 on behalf of a trans woman who went by the pseudonym Sonia Doe in court documents.

Prior to Doe's lawsuit, the department's policy was to house people according to their genitalia, according to Tess Borden, an ACLU of New Jersey staff attorney on the case.

...As part of the settlement, which the ACLU of New Jersey filed in the Mercer County Superior Court on Tuesday, the department will adopt an agencywide policy meant to protect people in state custody who are transgender, intersex and nonbinary, according to a press release.

In addition to the policy change, the department will pay Doe $125,000 in damages and will pay her attorney fees.

...New Jersey is now one of a handful of states that have passed laws or implemented policies requiring that inmates be housed according to their gender identity. Borden said the state's policy goes further than most others, though, because it includes provisions that will help the department of corrections implement the policy.

"The purpose section includes the word 'dignity' — that it's the purpose of this policy in the New Jersey Department of Corrections to recognize the dignity of transgender, intersex and nonbinary people in its custody," she said. The policy also requires officers to use a trans inmate's proper pronouns, including gender-neutral pronouns such as they/them, and the gender neutral honorific "Mx." instead of "Mr." or "Mrs."

Funnily enough, Tess and ACLU NJ had nothing to say when contacted about the Demi Minor case. Odd, that.

There's not much a prison governor can do even if they think "this is damn stupid" when informed "yeah well the judge ruled we gotta do this, oh yeah and make sure the wardens use 'Mx' when addressing the violent drug addict rapist murderer, you have to respect their feminine dignity".