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Transgender Wins Court Victory for Treatment in Prison

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BALTIMORE (AP) - Advocates say a transgender inmate who says she was called "it" and "some kind of animal" by guards who watched her shower has won a legal victory that forces the Maryland prison system to better train for how to treat transgender people.

An administrative law judge ruled in August that Patuxent Institution violated the Prison Rape Elimination Act over the treatment of Neon Brown, who goes by Sandy, and because the jail did not have a policy for strip-searching transgender inmates.

Gerard Shields, a spokesman for the state corrections department, said all jails now have policies for handling transgender inmates, and that a directive has been issued that dictates how to strip-search vulnerable inmates.

Don Rush is the News Director at Delmarva Public Media. An award-winning journalist, Don reports major local issues of the day, from sea level rise, to urban development, to the changing demographics of Delmarva.