Why are men still being held in women’s prisons?
Women’s safety is being disregarded for the sake of an ideology that very few support.
Imagine a criminal justice system modelled entirely around the perspective of the accused. We would have no need of trials, as the defendant would simply have to answer one question: ‘Do you perceive yourself to be guilty or innocent?’ Prisons could be abolished, since only a handful of criminals would choose to be so accommodated. The very concept of the law would be redundant, as crime would be redefined as non-crime by the perpetrators.
As absurd as this sounds, this is precisely what we are doing by allowing prisoners to decide for themselves whether they are male or female and housing them accordingly. There are clear incentives for violent and predatory men to prefer the female estate, not least that they are unlikely to be attacked by inmates who are physically weaker. But the biggest incentive must surely be opportunism. Many of these offenders have a history of lying about their identity to gain access to vulnerable women, so it seems unfeasible that they would stop when the state itself is facilitating their lies.
Consider the case of Nathan Venable (aka ‘Natasha’), a man who is held in the women’s facility at the Maine Correctional Center having committed multiple sexual assaults on children. In a male prison, he would be a major target for violent retribution; in the female estate, he enjoys greater protection. Worse still, as feminist Jennifer Gingrich has pointed out, his female inmates ‘are apparently terrified of him’. Their rights apparently matter less than those of a convicted paedophile.
According to a report this week in the Sun Journal, another male inmate at the same prison, Andrew Balcer (aka ‘Andrea’), has been accused of forcing himself on women. At over six feet tall and weighing over three hundred pounds, he has allegedly ‘terrorized’ other inmates with his sexual behaviour. The report claims that ‘at least six women – and perhaps as many as 11 – have filed complaints against Balcer since she [sic] arrived, but they said it has gotten them nowhere’.
It is unethical enough that a news report is falsely identifying the accused as female, but it is even more troubling that Balcer was housed in the wrong prison facility in the first place. Jennifer Gingrich’s account of a direct conversation with an inmate at the Maine Correctional Center makes for harrowing reading:
‘The situation is much worse than we thought. There isn’t just one male murderer in there – there are a bunch of physically intact rapists & murderers of women. Women are paying each other with pop tarts & Mountain Dew to accompany them to the bathroom & showers because they’re so afraid of being trapped in an area with no cameras with these men. The men rub their crotches against them when they pass them and make jokes about getting them pregnant and killing them. “It’s not fair. Why doesn’t anyone care about us?” she asked me. I didn’t have an answer.’
The official policies of prisons in the UK is scarcely better, in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 that women’s facilities cease to be single-sex if they admit men who identify as female…
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