TPI Prison Abolition Advocacy Work and Resources

The primary purpose of this page is to provide a landing page for our prison advocacy work and publications, and to provide brief commentary to supplement our blog entries on prison issues.

Much of our work related to carceral systems currently involves collecting data about violence to help illustrate the inhumanity of retributive justice. We use in part tools that have been made available through the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) because these are some of the only tools that actually address violence agaisnt trans and gender diverse persons.

On January 22, 2026, TPI published a report called Subverting Compliance: The 2025 TDCJ Agency PREA Audit Assessment and Continuing Agency Deficiencies. The report is the second in our “Prison Abuse Series,” and it covers problems with PREA compliance in much greater detail than our earlier 2018 report in this series.

Significant findings in this report, in addition to a wealth of data not provided elsewhere, include:

• With the help of state legislator John Smithee, TDCJ has in effect implemented Texas' “homosexual conduct” code in its facilities, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in 2003 under Lawrence v. Texas.
• TDCJ is clearly identifying consensual sexual activities between incarcerated persons as sexual abuse in violation of PREA § 115.78(g), which specifically and clearly prohibits such definitions.
• TDCJ staff admitted in a 2023 court deposition that the agency was noncompliant with PREA requirements that housing assignments for transgender persons to facilities designated for male or female persons must not be based on genital configuration. The testimony of Eric Guerrero, who was not only in charge of classification but also training, indicated a complete lack of knowledge of this PREA requirement, which indicated also a failure of PREA training requirements.
• TDCJ opposed PREA screening and protective custody standards, and has manipulated policy to illicitely avoid compliance.
• Discriminatory screening processes have resulted in over 75 percent of transgender and intersex persons being assigned to the facilities with the highest incidents of sexual abuse.
• Screening data more broadly are ignored by TDCJ and the auditors, with sexual abuse incidents trending higher for persons who are not sufficiently separated as required under PREA. This includes clear problem areas such as physically larger persons having access to smaller more vulnerable persons, not to mention failures to appropriately separate LGBTQ persons from trans/queer-phobic persons. The agency has also stopped disclosing the number of cameras installed in housing areas, where most sexual assaults occur, probably because it can clearly be seen the percentage is falling and has been for years, which also indicates noncompliance with PREA § 115.18(b).

TPI has been publishing comments on PREA audits since 2023. Most of these are letter reports that document our assessment of the audit, reasons the audit report is considered deficient, and information that needs to be considered to provide a legitimate audit. TPI began commenting on audit reports concerning facilities for which we had the most data and information, but we have gradually increased the number of facilities we cover due to the extremely poor quality of most of the audits. In general, the audits are cursory, do not investigate the necessary compliance issues required by PREA, and are completed more with the goal of finding the facility or agency compliant rather than fulfilling actual audit responsibilities.

In July 2018, TPI released a report concerning TDCJ failures to comply with PREA requirements called “I Don't Believe You, So You Might as Well Get Used to It”—The Myth of PREA Zero Tolerance in Texas Prisons. The report was our first attempt to garner greater public attention to the false claims made by TDCJ and the state government about compliance with the PREA standards.

The quote in the title comes from an actual statement by TDCJ staff to a trans person reporting sexual abuse. The report grew out of a suggestion from the Texas Association Against Sexual Abuse that TPI request to speak to the Texas Legislature during discussions of the 2018 interim charges, which included the state's compliance with PREA. TPI made the request and began preparing documentation to provide to the legislators. We were refused the opportunity to speak in person, so we published our finding that were to be presented as this report.