2 NJ Women's inmates impregnated by male criminal

Written by Stephanie, WoLF Volunteer

Two women inmates at New Jersey’s only all-women prison have become pregnant by the same trans-identified male who was housed there last year following a settlement agreement between the ACLU and the scandal-ridden Edna Mahan Correctional Facility.

Twenty-seven men are now incarcerated there alongside 800 females, and under the agreement, surgery isn’t required. If national statistics are anything to go by, it’s likely the majority of those 27 men still have their penises, too. So the risk is real that such pregnancies could become the norm, not an aberration, at the Clinton, N.J. facility and others like it.

Let’s be clear: Men should not be incarcerated with women - full stop. Pregnancies are an inevitable and predictable consequence of housing males with females since a woman cannot get another woman pregnant while a man can. To deny this fact or twist reality does grave disservice to not just women – who WoLF advocates on behalf of – but to their children and society overall.

Yet news story after news story on the pregnancy of not one but two inmates refers to the 27-year-old father Demitrius Minor as “transgender” or a “woman”. Again, a woman cannot fertilize another woman’s eggs. This is an impossibility. While it’s not a surprise the ACLU is still defending its lawsuit settlement with the Edna Mahan facility, it’s distressing to see the Fourth Estate reveal its bias – almost in lockstep - towards trans-identified men. In doing so, it perpetuates confusion at the detriment of women everywhere.

Women are not human shields for criminals looking for refuge from men’s correctional facilities. It is cruel and unusual punishment to place these criminals – some of whom are repeat sex offenders – with female inmates. Demitrius Minor, for instance, is serving a 30-year sentence for killing his foster father at the age of 16.

One should question the wisdom of this happening at any prison, but particularly at the Edna Mahan facility, whose record of violence and corruption is so notorious that Governor Phil Murphy threatened to permanently shut it down.

Recent comments underscore the proximity and at times unfettered and unmonitored access these men have with women.

“There’s congregate showers, recreation, and we can’t watch all 800 inmates every single second of the day,” William Sullivan, president of the union that represents most of New Jersey’s correctional officers, was quoted as saying.

A source familiar with Edna Mahan told DailyMail.com “cell doors are left open during recreation time, so inmates can theoretically use those periods to sneak into each other’s cells or slip into a bathroom for quickie sex.”

While Latonia Bellamy, one of the women impregnated by Minor, has been quoted as saying their relationship was consensual, she said the facility breeds “a pervasive culture of rape.”

Bellamy, who is 31 and serving a sentence for murdering a couple leaving their engagement party in Jersey City in April 2010, also reportedly said that if correctional staff had done their jobs, “the conceiving of a baby would have never taken place here at Edna Mahan.” She is due to give birth in the autumn.

Next to nothing has been published about the second mother.

We do know that all three of them have been placed in solitary confinement, which raises even more concerns about the mothers’ health and what kinds of risks were posed by the prison population at-large. It also underscores how unprecedented these policies are and the long-term repercussions on women and their children. Women and their children are neither human shields nor guinea pigs in what looks like an ongoing, perpetual social experiment at their expense.