Trans prisoners make up a fraction of the people incarcerated in state-run correctional facilities, but accounted for more than a third of Maryland’s civil lawsuit settlement payouts by the corrections department last year, according to a recent budget analysis.

The analysis cited three settlements in 2024 that involved transgender prisoners and pretrial detainees, amounting to about $835,000 — roughly 38% of the total amount the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services paid out in settlements that year.

There are about 115 prisoners and detainees in Maryland prisons and state-run Baltimore jails who identify as transgender, according to the corrections secretary, out of a total population of about 17,000 incarcerated people between the prisons and jails. Trans prisoners are known to face high rates of sexual and physical assault, often spending time in solitary confinement as a result of those threats.

Federal guidelines and interpretations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act provide protections for trans prisoners, but Sam Williamson, an attorney with the Public Justice Center, said that “many of those protections have not been observed by the department.”

“This is why we’ve seen such extensive settlements paid out by the department in the last year alone,” Williamson, who helps to lead the Trans Rights Advocacy Coalition, said during a Senate budget hearing on Thursday.

The advocacy group said it has met with corrections officials 10 times since testifying in last year’s budget hearings.

At those hearings, the coalition was reacting to a November 2023 report by the corrections department that detailed its policies for the trans prisoner population. Some of those policies came under immediate scrutiny for not complying with federal protections.

Over the last year, Williamson said the group has provided feedback on just one policy so far — the medical evaluations manual — but it is waiting to provide feedback on 28 additional policies that the department identified as affecting trans people.

While the department expressed gratitude for the advocacy group’s input in recent budget hearings, advocates remain frustrated that the agency has moved slowly to enact changes.

The corrections department has also failed to produce a study that would provide more data on its trans prisoner population and detail the amount of money the state has spent on settlements related to their alleged mistreatment since the fiscal year 2021.

The Department of Legislative Services, which produced the analysis for the corrections department’s budget hearings, is recommending restricting $100,000 in general funds pending that overdue report.

The state paid out the bulk of its three settlements in October last year when it approved $750,000 for Amber Canter, a transgender woman who accused three correctional officers of assaulting her and putting her in a chokehold while she was incarcerated at the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center.

The Canter settlement, the analysis said, “notably established individuals with gender dysphoria as a protected class under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), giving transgender inmates grounds to sue if they are mistreated or improperly accommodated.”

Will federal protections for trans prisoners erode under Trump?

As Maryland grapples with housing trans prisoners, the legal landscape around their civil rights protections has faced new uncertainty in recent weeks.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal authorities to house prisoners on the basis of their biological sex, which contradicts what has been accepted as the federal guideline of housing trans prisoners on a case-by-case basis.

Beyond the immediate impact the executive order had at federal facilities, the changeover in administration at the U.S. Department of Justice also has implications for the ADA and the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a 2003 law that has become a driving force in prison and jail policies.

The legislative analysis for the corrections department budget pointed out that the Trump administration has hinted it might move to amend the Prison Rape Elimination Act and provide “interpretive guidance” regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure its policies are being carried out at the federal level.

Such an amendment “may weaken protection standards for Maryland prisons and place transgender inmates at an increased risk for violence,” the analysis concluded.

During Thursday’s budget hearing, Williamson, the attorney and trans rights advocate, said that while the future of federal protections “may be uncertain, these are still the laws today.”

“There have not been any proposed regulations that would weaken PREA’s requirements,” Williamson said.

At a Wednesday budget hearing for the corrections department in the House, Heather Warnken, executive director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, responded to questions about the uncertainty of federal requirements from state lawmakers in the face of Trump’s executive order.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act “and its implementing regulations are still the law of the land,” Warnken said. “Those [executive orders] have not changed that. That will be fought tooth and nail.”

Warnken, who has served on a DOJ Prison Rape Elimination Act working group, added that, to the extent those protections are eroded, “it is more important than ever that we stand on Maryland’s values and anti-discrimination law to not allow the absolutely horrific humans rights violations that are taking place right now as a result of that [executive order] for trans and non binary individuals in the federal [prison] system.”

Earlier in the Wednesday budget hearing, Corrections Secretary Carolyn Scruggs spoke to the department’s work with its trans prisoners, saying that case managers were meeting with each of the 115 transgender individuals to determine how safe they felt and where they preferred to be housed.

“We’ve done some implicit bias training, and we started at the executive level with my team, moved it down to the wardens, and it’s now being implemented with our annual in-service training,” Scruggs said. “So we are working diligently to ensure that we meet the needs of that population.”