Report From the Frontlines: Men in Women's Prisons
- Amie Itchikawa
- Jan 22
- 8 min read
By Amie Ichikawa
I am a conservative Christian, a 3-time Trump voter, and am also a convicted violent felon. I must warn you that the information I am about to share with you is disturbing, even disgusting.
In 2009, I was arrested for the first and last time in my life for kidnapping and assaulting a young woman over $20. I fought my case for six months in L.A. County jail, during the infamous period of the forced, unconstitutional strip searches that were performed in front of male deputies, outdoors, and way more often than required. On an average court day, I was forced to strip out 6-8 times. One may think that’s just a part of being a criminal, but standing outdoors, completely naked, with male deputies, and 25-50 other women – many of whom were menstruating and forced to remove their tampons publicly is what I consider excessive. It sure doesn’t make the task of convincing incarcerated women that they matter and that they have agency over their bodies any easier since the system has proven otherwise time and time again.
I eventually took a deal for five years in state prison with two strikes. In California, this means if I’m ever convicted of another felony I’ll be at risk of a life sentence, my time will be doubled and I will have sentence enhancements for prison priors. Thank God I don’t have to worry about any of that though.
A few weeks after I was sentenced, I was shackled and loaded onto a county bus with a final destination of Chowchilla – the Central California Women’s Facility, the second largest women’s prison in America. Upon arrival, I was greeted by 115 degrees of the hottest, dustiest air I’d ever inhaled. We were corralled into the receiving & release building, and divided into groups of 10 in 4 cinder block cells. We were ordered to remove all of our clothing and that’s when I experienced my first state-issued strip search. These are even more invasive than the ones I
was subjected to in county jail. If the officers are not satisfied with the cavity search they bring a mirror on a pole and place it underneath you while you cough and squat, in front of 9 strangers Once you pass that level, you’re given a blue polka-dotted muumuu and flip-flops. Then, you’re stripped of your identity and issued a state ID number. You’re no longer a woman, you’re no longer a person. You don’t have a name, you have a number. You are now a dollar amount and you are state property. You have no right to respect, agency, or dignity, unless, of course, you are a man who identifies as a woman.
Fast forward 5 years to 2013, and you can see me getting my parole ducat and weeping because I felt so unworthy. There were, and still are, so many women there who committed lesser crimes than I did that may never experience freedom again. They are the reason why I do what I do. When I walked out of the prison gates, I asked the Lord to please allow me the opportunity to make the time I spent in prison count for something good. I prayed for a chance to be able to reach back in and pull women out and to be able to go back in as a free woman and a beacon of hope. I can now testify that God goes above and beyond and has provided everything I asked for.
I lived fairly normally for the first few years after I was paroled. I maintained contact with several friends inside and did my best to help as many women as I could get reacclimated and transition to freedom from prison. In late 2020, I began formulating the idea of starting an organization dedicated to helping incarcerated women, as the ones previously focused on this cause had shifted toward supporting "transgender" issues. On January 1st, 2021, everything changed. That was the day of Senator Scott Wiener’s “transgender respect, agency, and dignity act” (SB 132). Note section 4 2606.3, which allows ANYONE to access the mother-infant program, was implemented. This law, among many other highly questionable, anti-woman, anti-family, and anti-American pieces of legislation was passed during Gavin Newsom’s COVID-19 lockdowns, and very few Californians were aware. The organizations run by women I was in prison with knew though, and they fully supported those laws. I have lost countless nights of sleep knowing that my peers are writing their paychecks on the backs of our sisters inside the prison and in our sister’s blood.
I soon started receiving calls, emails, and letters not just from my friends inside but from women I’d never met. They started coming in so quickly and at such a high volume that I still have messages I haven’t responded to yet. I started taking up to 20 calls a day from women who were distraught and broken and asking me questions like, “How can they do this to us? Is this legal!?”
They would also say: “These are men! They’re linebackers, these are sex offenders, rapists, and men who hate women but are wearing pigtails with erections! One of them brushed up against me and asked if I liked that! Doesn’t the governor know most of us are rape survivors? Does it even matter?”
I got in touch with two women serving life sentences who were fearing for their lives because their ex-husbands – both of whom were on men’s death row – were headed to Chowchilla. There is no comparable security level in any women’s prison to men’s death row. A women’s maximum security prison is the equivalent of a men’s medium security prison. These two women were initially denied their transfer requests because Chowchilla is the only maximum-security prison for women. As lifers, they are required to be held in a Level 4 women’s facility. They were eventually transferred but the state held out on them so long they left the same week their ex-husbands came. The last thing one of their exes said on the bus after their trial was “Next time I see you, I will kill you.” The other man had beaten all three of his infant children to death.
I had no idea this issue was so politically charged. I had no idea that anyone would disagree with the stance I took to get men and their penises away from women I love and care about. My community turned on me. I left a cohort – where I was unknowingly helping create a curriculum for “transgender”-based domestic violence – and was told I was putting myself in grave danger for being a “transphobic bigot”. One organization said they could no longer be affiliated with me as they were investigating my “nebulous white supremacy”. I was unofficially
banned from the prison I was paroled from because someone called the public information officer and told them I was a threat to transgender inmate safety.
This is the same prison where a 6’4”, Mexican mafia defector is now housed. This man had raped and killed dozens of other men in men's prison and wrote an article for a San Francisco Bayview stating I needed to be identified, purged, and replaced.
I contacted every news outlet, every journalist I could think of, the ACLU, Gloria Allred, and Diane Feinstein, and I got the same response everywhere. They all told me, in essence, “We stand with our “trans” siblings and will prioritize their visibility and “trans rights.” I was so confused. The mass calls continued, but the situations grew darker and the little hope my friends inside the prison were hanging onto was fleeting. Everything I knew would happen started to happen. Women began to fashion weapons. That had never been an issue before. The state cut down all the trees from the yards, because of the security risk the men posed, as they would use them to climb on rooftops and to make weapons. The awnings were removed from buildings. They architecturally turned women’s prisons into men’s prisons to accommodate men who self-identified as women. New port-o-potties came with urinals.
Then the relationships started. Many broken women seek male validation, and the apex predator criminals know that. These relationships put women in the nexus of their crimes. They have taken thousands of steps backward in their healing process. Domestic violence skyrocketed. People are now living in fear of the same kind of traumas that got them into prison in the first place. Women are forced to hear, see, and smell their roommates having sex all day and night and it is not always consensual. It’s like being raped without ever being touched. Imagine being a 45-year-old woman serving a life sentence for killing the man who raped you and you are now forced to live with a rapist one of your roommates fell in love with.
Pregnancy is now a nationwide issue for incarcerated women. It’s a good thing governors like Gavin Newsom ensure access to abortions and plan B pills for female inmates.
I will never forget the day that I found out, via a credible source, that the investigative services unit had searched with the cadaver dogs looking for fetal remains. One of the men, whose trial for two rapes starts in February, beat one of his girlfriends until she miscarried. I learned through a public information request that the findings from that investigation were
unsubstantiated and that the California Department of Corrections takes such allegations very seriously. That same person has fathered two more children since that incident. This has
streamlined permanent income flow for states that now facilitate the conception of children that will go directly into the system.
The nationwide elimination of women’s prisons has impacted women’s already limited access to healthcare. Women waiting to be treated for breast cancer watch in horror as their male neighbors come back from medical appointments with new breast implants. Women with cancer from working prison jobs abating asbestos with their bare hands are forced to watch their abusive male counterparts walk into the units with facelifts, prescriptions for Rogaine, and hip and butt implants, all while parading around rights they never had access to. No inmates in American history have been able to wield control over another sector of the inmate population or staff the way the new trans mafia does. This is costly. Your taxpayer dollars are funding elective, cosmetic surgeries for some of the most mentally unwell criminals in the nation, but that is not the real crime against humanity I want you to focus on. I need you all to fully understand this is a female human rights crisis that will permeate the prison walls and end up happening to you, your wife, and your daughters if we do not ensure basic human rights for the least of us.
Staff will not get involved when women need help out of the fear of lawsuits. Men professionally advocate for themselves in prison. They are master manipulators and have been filing complaint after complaint, assuring there is a paper trail everywhere they go and that they are well-positioned to file lawsuits by exhausting all administrative remedies to establish case law that can be used in big free world cases. They’ve been coached by the biggest, most well-funded transgender law firms in the world with the intent of changing the face of our judicial system.
Another unfortunate reality is that a huge percentage of the male trans-identified prisoner population are violent sex offenders.
Since writing this report, President Trump has been elected, and has signed an executive order to protect women from gender ideology and men claiming womanhood. These changes will not happen overnight, and they will not happen without a fight and holding the new administration accountable for some of the worst brutality happening to American women in women's prisons. It is up to American citizens to mandate that these reprehensible and unthinkable policies are halted.
Amie Ichikawa is Executive Director, Founding MemberWoman II Woman www.womaniiwoman.org
Ambassador, Independent Women’s Forum
Author and Journalist, Jennifer Bilek, has been researching the money and power behind the gender industry for over a decade. Her work can be found in myriad publications, on this blog, on X, Gettr , LinkedIn, Spinster.xyz, at this Substack, and in her new book: Transsexual Transgender Transhuman/Dispatches from the 11th Hour.
Your support for this work has been crucial and so appreciated. If you would like to continue supporting it, you can do so with a one off donation, by purchasing her book, or with a subscription to this blog. Thank you for your engagement.
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