You can read more on the problems of the bail system here: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Last Saturday evening I woman I’ve come to know – I’ll call her Ginger — called me up in tears. She was at the police station in my suburban home town and she needed $40 (cash only) for bail. Homeless and disabled since her teenage years, she didn’t know anyone who had money or a car to drive to the suburban station. Feeling desperate, she called me, explaining that because of the long Memorial Day weekend she would be held in jail until Tuesday if she couldn’t come up with bail.

At the station a cordial police offer asked to see the cash and then told me to sit and relax on chairs in the station vestibule while waiting for the clerk to come. After about an hour the clerk arrived and, still in the vestibule, I handed over the $40 in a transaction that seemed weirdly informal. (I’ve never bailed anyone out before, but this is not what expected from years of watching Law and Order.) Half an hour later the police officer beckoned me to come inside and said, “There’s a problem.” It turns out that my friend didn’t have any identification on her so there was no way of knowing if Ginger was indeed Ginger. He asked if I could vouch for Ginger. I said yes. He asked how I know Ginger. I said I’m a Suffolk University professor and that for the past six years Ginger has been in a study I’ve been conducting among homeless and criminalized women. He jotted a few words down on a piece of scrap paper and then asked if there are other ways I can verify Ginger’s identity. Puzzled that my university credentials and a six year relationship were not sufficient, I managed to come up with that I was introduced to Ginger by a caseworker at a Boston shelter.

That seemed to do the trick and ten minutes later Ginger emerged from jail. She was shaking. My first thought was that it was a bit chilly out so I gave her my jacket, but she continued trembling so hard that she was unable to walk or talk. For a few minutes I couldn’t figure out why she was so upset. Ginger had been arrested before, she knew the drill, and all in all this suburban police station was relatively pleasant. Then, I looked at the paperwork she had in her hand and realized (part of) what was going on: The form telling her to come to Court on Tuesday morning listed her name as George. Though I knew that what she calls her “government name” is George, I’d forgotten how frightening it is for her to be “George” inside of a jail.

How It All Started

Born into one of the working-class Irish neighborhoods in the 1970s, Ginger knew, in her words, that “I was not a regular boy” since age five or six. Like many children who are different from their peers, George was the target of abuse. In neighborhoods like hers people who broke the gender code were beaten up. Ginger recalls that her mother’s house was repeatedly spray painted with the word “faggot,” rocks were thrown through the window, and her family was threatened with violence and ostracism. When she was thirteen, her stepfather, who also beat her mother, molested her. After a few stints in psychiatric hospitals where she was treated for PTSD, her psychiatrists signed the documentation for her to be classified as meeting Social Security’s criteria for disability (SSI) when she was fifteen. After a few particularly horrific attacks she left home in order to protect her family from further violence. She had heard that New York is the place to be “for girls like me,” and so that is where she headed. Young and petite, Ginger quickly found a job in a drag show, was introduced to crack, and started working the streets.

Like Ginger, many transgender women are forced to leave school in the wake of abuse and find it difficult to obtain employment in a society that often is not comfortable with gender diversity. Close to two thirds of transgender women having a history of incarceration, and transgender women are so frequently perceived to be sex workers by the police that the term ‘walking while trans’ was coined. Open and even chatty about almost all parts of her life, Ginger never talks about her experiences in men’s prisons. However, according to national studies over half of LGBT prisoners report having been sexually assaulted in prison – a rate 15 times higher than the general population. In the hypermasculine cauldrons that are men’s prisons, transgender women are particularly likely to be targets of rape. The night I picked Ginger up at the police station her trembling body gave proof to the terror and pain she had experienced in the past.

As Ginger and I sat in my car with the heater blasting she smoked a few cigarettes, the focus came back into her eyes, her slim body quieted down, and eventually she was able to tell me what happened.

After years of homelessness she had been placed by her caseworker into a room in a long-term shelter for men where she shares the bathrooms, kitchen and living room with approximately twenty men, some of whom have lived there for over a decade. Her caseworker told her that if she stays in the shelter, pays her rent on time and doesn’t make any trouble she’ll likely be eligible for a low-income apartment in two years or so.

On the night before the visit to the police station Ginger had made popcorn in the microwave in the communal kitchen. It burned and set off a fire alarm. On Saturday evening a shelter resident who had been harassing her since she moved in (for example, he often stands outside the bathroom and takes pictures of her coming out of the shower) burst into the living room and started screaming at her for waking him up the previous night. “He said he’s going to smash my head, ‘yours and your nigger boyfriend.’” (Ginger is white, her boyfriend is African American. He does not live at the shelter.) As the tirade went on Ginger did two things: She spit at him and she called the police because of the threats he had made.
Once you are free http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/10/americas-great-tragedy-weve-lost-the-greatest-generation/ buy women viagra from chronic infections, you can easily hope to lead a longer life. It may cause side viagra generic usa effects too, and hence it accompanies a rundown of security measures to be taken with small cup of water around an hour before performing sexual activity. One sachet in a day is sufficient, generic super cialis and its overdose may prove to be immensely damaging to the quality of life a man leads. Initially, the physician prescribed to starts with low dose; in case of its failure the dosage may get enhance. viagra low cost
Listening to Ginger’s account of the evening, I struggled with understanding why she called the police. Quite a few of the homeless and criminalized women I know have been locked up in the wake of turning to the police for help. In this era of mass criminalization, it is not uncommon for women (and men) to have outstanding warrants for a variety of technical reasons. Elizabeth, a rather weepy middle-aged woman whom both Ginger and I know, called the police because a motel she stayed at for a few nights wouldn’t return her room deposit ($50) in a timely manner. When the police came they looked at her ID, saw she owed court fees, and put her in jail for three days over a long weekend.

Aware that both of us know how often this sort of thing occurs – especially to homeless and to transgender people, as well as to sex workers and people of color – I asked her why she called the police. She was truly afraid for herself and for her boyfriend, she said, and she assumed that threatening to smash someone’s head is illegal. However, as it turns out, she explained, when the police came they told her that threatening is not against the law but spitting is.

The police took Ginger to the station in her slippers, t shirt, and draw string pajama bottoms; they cut the string off her pajamas at the jail. That is what she was wearing when I came to pick her up.

The estimated cost to the taxpayers for holding Ginger in jail for three days while waiting for a judge to come to court: $375.

The price of freedom: $40, which seems to be the current going rate for this kind of thing.

It’s time to reform the system.

You can read Part II of my adventures with Ginger here: The Courtroom Was a Circus

More of Ginger’s story appears in my forthcoming book Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility.