When you talk to transgender people who came of age before the internet, you’ll hear a common refrain: “I thought I was the only one.” The experience of growing up transgender is most often a very lonely one, every childhood memory and familial relationship shaded by the pain of lacking the vocabulary to even ask for help, much less seek it out. Transgender people often grow up with the sullen certainty that no one will ever understand us, a sense of social isolation that, combined with widespread poverty, homelessness, and harassment, can often prove deadly.

All of this makes safe places for transgender people to gather among ourselves of utmost importance to our own survival. Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs where a gunman recently killed five people and injured dozens more, was one of these vital safe-havens. Survivors of the shooting have described it as a rare gathering place for the queer community of the famously conservative small city, and the lives of those lost reveal the immensity of what was taken from them.

Kelly Loving was described by her sister as a very giving person, “always trying to help the next person out … she was just a caring person.” A friend of Kelly, also a transgender woman, said, “When I first started to transition, I wasn’t confident at all. She reminded me that you are not doing the wrong thing by being trans, that it was okay to embrace it because you are a beautiful person. Without her giving me the confidence, I don’t know where I would be today.”

Daniel Aston, a 28-year-old transgender man and bartender at Club Q, was similarly described as a keystone of hope for the entire community. “He had friends that would come by the carload just to come and see him bar tend or just to hang out and support,” said a coworker at the club. As Daniel wrote on social media before his death, every time “I have even the slightest thought of leaving Club Q, someone comes up and tells me ‘you’re the reason I love this bar.’”

Daniel and Kelly were far from alone — countless transgender people across the country serve as models of hope, strength, and joy for the people around them. It’s a particular note of tragedy that this shooting happened in the first minutes of Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of transgender people lost to violence — each one of them with the potential to be the kind of pillar for others Daniel and Kelly were.

Across the country, this sense of community and support for transgender people is in peril. Even when not taking the form of violence or the threat of it, politicians are working overtime to further isolate and alienate transgender people from their communities and their families. Whether it’s banning books by or about us, censoring teachers and doctors from sharing the truth of who we are, or even threatening parents who support their own transgender youth, the end goal of these restrictions is denying transgender people the words to describe our experience, the means to express it safely, and the community and support we all deserve.

Violence isn’t often described as a form of censorship, but what are LGBTQ people attacked for if not the way we express ourselves? What is the impact of a shooting at Club Q on transgender people across the country if not instilling a sense of fear in our own ability to live our truth? Kelly, Daniel, and transgender people across the country are bridges across this enforced silence, helping one another navigate a world that was never built for us. While nothing can replace that immense loss, one thing we can do in response is help transgender people know none of us are alone and, in truth, we never were.

As paralegals with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, we spend a lot of our time speaking to and corresponding with people in our nation’s prisons, jails, and detention centers, and their loved ones. Frequently, the top concern is food. As many Americans prepare for Thanksgiving feasts with loved ones, we can’t help but think of the people we correspond with who are deprived of fresh, nutritious meals year-round.

The food in prisons and jails across the United States is too often unpalatable (the infamous “nutraloaf,” for example) and innutritious. Diets in detention also often do not meet people’s health and religious needs. For example, in 2019, guards force fed a Hindu man in ICE detention who went on hunger strike to protest the failure to provide vegan meals to him and other Hindus in detention.

Sixty-two percent of formerly incarcerated respondents to a 2020 survey reported that they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables while incarcerated. The typical prison diet, which is high in salt, sugar, and refined carbohydrates, contributes to the elevated rates of diabetes and heart disease among the incarcerated population. People who are incarcerated in the U.S. are also six times more likely to contract a foodborne illness than the general population.

It benefits us all to ensure that people return to their communities after incarceration in better physical and mental condition than when they went in. Meals that foster diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, or other costly illnesses associated with poor nutrition result in expensive medical care for formerly incarcerated people, and a lost opportunity for them to return home in good health upon their release. Rebuilding a life after incarceration is difficult, and diminished health adds yet another barrier to reentry.

Here, we share just a few examples of what we’ve learned from our incarcerated clients about the food available in prisons, jails, and detention centers.

We recently visited Lewis prison in Buckeye, Arizona to speak with our clients primarily about their health care as a part of a class action lawsuit against the state prison system. In speaking with many insulin-dependent people, we learned the food they are provided is not only deficient in nutrients but also actively harmful to the management of their diabetes. One man told us that he relies entirely on commissary foods and tries to make his own meals because the prison doesn’t offer any fresh fruit or vegetables — only refined carbohydrates, like cookies, saltine crackers, and bread.

While prison commissaries carry a broader range of foods than are available in the cafeteria for people to purchase, many incarcerated people don’t have family or friends who can fund their commissary accounts. Prison jobs — when they pay — pay an average of 13 to 52 cents per hour. This leaves little money for food, especially now with soaring inflation. And there is no special medical diet available for people with diabetes in Arizona’s state prisons.

In 2020, the ACLU filed a case on behalf of people detained in Orange County’s jails in response to unsafe conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the litigation primarily focused on issues such as testing and vaccine accessibility, many of our clients expressed that their top priority was the resumption of hot meals at the jail.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the jail stopped serving hot meals for “reasons of health and safety” according to the sheriff’s department. For more than two years, the jail served sack lunches, usually rotting bologna sandwiches, for each meal of the day. Even if the sandwiches were safe to consume, a diet of processed lunch meat can lead to serious health problems such as high blood pressure and an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. It is not only inhumane but an issue of public health. In line with our clients’ priorities, the ACLU successfully advocated for the resumption of hot meals to be included in the settlement agreement.

After visiting our clients at the Baltimore jail in August and again in September 2022, it was clear that the quality and quantity of food provided is inadequate. We spent a lot of time in the infirmary, talking with the sickest people at the jail about the numerous failures and delays in their medical care. It was also in the infirmary where we received the most complaints about the food and not receiving enough of it — patients at the infirmary are inexplicably not allowed to order foods from the commissary at all. We spoke with a young man recovering from a broken jaw who had only been given two cups of broth for every meal. It took weeks for him to get Ensure, a nutritional shake, after he repeatedly told staff he was hungry.

In the general population, we spoke with a woman who was 17 weeks pregnant and experiencing hunger pains. She requested some snacks or extra portions. Many other incarcerated women told us they were also not getting enough food. One woman said jail staff told her they were getting small portions because they weren’t burning calories and getting activity outside of their cells.

The National Prison Project’s litigation against prisons, jails, and detention centers advocates for adequate health care and humane conditions, which includes nutrition. Aside from their constitutional right to the basic necessity of palatable and nutritious food, incarcerated people should be treated with dignity — and that includes a nutritious and healthful diet. The issue of food in prison is a moral, legal, and collective one. Sharing food and breaking bread is a fundamental part of our shared humanity — it’s why so many of our most important rituals happen around the dinner table. That humanity doesn’t go away because someone is incarcerated.

Below are more examples of the sparse, nutritionally scarce meals being served in prisons around the country:

Texas prison food, October 2022.

Keri Blakinger

@keribla

19 Oct, 2022

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UPDATE on Alabama prisons: this was the entirety of what grown men were served yesterday at one of the prisons where they’re still on strike.

This was breakfast. And dinner. And there was no lunch.

Keri Blakinger

@keribla

12 Oct, 2022

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And some of the food images that have been circulating and were included in a motion in the ongoing lawsuit.

Keri Blakinger

@keribla

6 Oct, 2022

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Every fan of old crime novels or cop movies is familiar with the classic police “stakeout”: round-the-clock surveillance by police hiding in a car or camped out in an apartment across the street, watching a suspect’s home. In both fact and fiction, stakeouts don’t last long — even with rotating shifts, police get tired; the costs pile up, and after a while, people start to notice that they’re being watched.

In 2022, though, technology allows police to avoid these practical limitations, conducting surveillance for months on end using small, hidden digital cameras that can be panned and zoomed from afar and that transmit video back to police to be stored indefinitely and reviewed at law enforcement’s leisure. Law enforcement agencies around the country maintain they can engage in this practice for as long as they’d like without even a modicum of concrete suspicion, and never have to obtain warrants before using a hidden surveillance camera to watch a person’s home. These technological “stakeouts” of homes can go on for months on end. They make a record of every time someone leaves their house or has a guest over, and monitor every activity in their yard, driveway, or doorstep.

This is a profound threat to privacy, and is exactly what happened to our client, Daphne Moore, and her family in Massachusetts.

So last week, the ACLU and ACLU of Massachusetts, along with the law firms of Elkins, Auer, Rudof & Schiff and Thompson & Thompson PC, filed a petition on behalf of Ms. Moore urging the U.S. Supreme Court to make clear that under the Fourth Amendment, police should be required to get a search warrant before engaging in such invasive surveillance.

Ms. Moore’s case clearly demonstrates the frightening extent of the government’s argument for unfettered discretion over the use of pole cameras. In 2017, while investigating Ms. Moore’s adult daughter, federal agents attached a small, hidden digital video camera high on a utility pole across the street from her home in Springfield, Massachusetts. On their own initiative, without getting a search warrant from a judge, agents operated the camera 24 hours a day for an uninterrupted eight-month period. The camera transmitted live video to police and could be remotely operated to zoom in and pan up, down, left, and right. Police also recorded the digital footage, creating a searchable record of Ms. Moore’s, and her family’s, patterns of life: when they left home and returned, who visited them and when, what they carried to and from the car on each trip, and more.

After eight months of continuous surveillance with the pole-mounted camera, agents arrested Ms. Moore’s daughter on drug charges. Nearly a year after that, they brought charges against our client — a lawyer, respected judicial clerk, devoted church member, and a grandmother raising her grandkids — as well. But after the government disclosed its pole-camera surveillance to the defense before trial, a federal district court judge ruled that operating the camera over a long period without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and ordered the pole camera footage to be excluded as evidence at any trial. The government immediately appealed, and the full en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit took up the case to clarify whether a warrant is required for long-term pole-camera surveillance of a home.

A full year after the oral argument, the court split evenly on the issue. Three judges wrote an opinion explaining why long-term pole-camera surveillance of a home violates people’s reasonable expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. The other three judges disagreed, writing that because passersby could see our client’s driveway, yard, and front door, there could be no reasonable expectation of privacy against police using digital recording technology to make a complete record of everything that happened on her property over the course of eight months.

This divide mirrors a split among federal appeals courts and state supreme courts across the country. Three federal courts of appeals have concluded that police can use pole cameras to surveil homes without any constitutional limit. In contrast, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the supreme courts of Colorado and South Dakota, have held that long-term pole-camera surveillance of a home is a Fourth Amendment search, for which a warrant is required. Massachusetts’ highest court has reached the same outcome under its state constitution. (The ACLU’s amicus briefs in the Colorado and Massachusetts cases are here and here).

Central to this case is the question of how to apply recent Supreme Court decisions on privacy in the digital age to this particular technology. In Carpenter v. United States, a 2018 case that the ACLU argued, the Supreme Court held that police need a warrant before requesting significant periods of a person’s historical cell phone location data from their cell phone company. In that case, the government argued that people lose Fourth Amendment protection in that data because they expose their location to their phone company by carrying a cell phone, and to other members of the public who might see us as we go about our days. The court rejected the government’s argument, explaining that data documenting a person’s location over time reveals extraordinarily private information, and a warrant is required to avoid police exploiting cell phone technology to amass a complete and near-perfect record of everywhere they’ve been.

Last week’s filing provides an opportunity for the Supreme Court to make clear that the rationale of the Carpenter decision applies to prolonged surveillance, via remote video cameras, of a person’s home. The small, cheap digital camera technology available today poses a similar threat to the location tracking the Supreme Court addressed in Carpenter, allowing police to covertly amass a complete record of our activities at the thresholds of our homes. Despite the magnitude of the privacy invasions in these cases, courts continue to struggle to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter and other recent Fourth Amendment cases to pole-camera surveillance.

Only the Supreme Court can impose the strong, nationwide protections that Americans need and deserve. Moore v. United States provides the opportunity to do so — and clarify that police cannot deploy new and cheap technology to conduct constant stakeouts of Americans’ homes wherever and for however long they please.