- LGBTQ people are three times likelier to be incarcerated and more than twice as likely to be arrested compared to straight people.
- Prison rates are even higher among LGBTQ people of color.
- “Being poor, a person of color and LGBTQ puts you at the intersection of being arrested and incarcerated,” one LGBTQ advocate said.
By the time she’d approached the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois for help last year, the client, a Black transgender woman, had more than 100 arrests on her record.
Growing up in Chicago in the 1980s, she’d been harassed at home and at school and was eventually kicked out of the house at age 14. The adults she turned to for shelter and support were engaged in the drug and sex trades, and by her 20s she was drug dependent and working the streets.