The Women of San Quentin

At its worst, the U.S. criminal justice system does more than execute individuals: It murders their very souls. That's the premise of Norwegian photojournalist Kristin Schreier Lyseggen’s searing new book, The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons.

Lyseggen crisscrossed the country to photograph, interview, and collect memorabilia from trans women who had been housed in men's prisons, highlighting the resilient spirit of one of the nation's most vulnerable populations inside the criminal justice system. She visited subjects in what she calls the “war zone” of low-income neighborhoods in East Oakland, Calif., and “the run-down and chaotic” Tenderloin district in San Francisco. She met with legendary trans justice and prison reform advocates like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Angela Davis.

The images in The Women of San Quentin and the stories behind them bear unflinching witness to the lives of those who contend with a prison system that even President Obama acknowledges is long overdue for change. "Our criminal justice system isn't as smart as it should be," the president told an annual gathering of NAACP leaders in July. 

“Grace [Lawrence] shows me scars from one of three attacks in San Francisco,” writes Lyseggen in the book. Grace (pictured) immigrated to California from Liberia, where she survived repeated transphobic attacks. But even in San Francisco, her struggles continued. She was arrested several times for infractions like petty theft of food and sex work — which criminal justice reform and trans advocates often label "survival crimes," committed in an effort to ameliorate abject poverty.  Those arrests ultimately landed her in San Quentin, where she was placed in solitary confinement, allegedly for her own protection.

Her body records a horrific legacy of the violent hate that she has faced on two continents, with scars that have turned to keloids and welts.

For all her suffering, Grace (pictured) exudes a calm and wisdom that represent her endless resilience, as she sits facing the camera at her home in San Francisco's Tenderloin district in 2013.

“The bravest thing I ever did was wear a dress,” writes Donna Langan in a 2007 poem that she sent to Lyseggen from federal prison. Donna has been incarcerated in federal facilities across the South, from Butner, N.C., to Lee County, Va.

In letters and emails to Lyseggen, Donna Langan talked about finding joy in little things while incarcerated in federal prison: things like growing her hair as long as she can, demonstrated in this 2004 photograph printed in Lyseggen’s book — an image taken at a high-security federal prison for men in Lee, Va. where Langan remains incarcerated.

Donna Langan is the child of a U.S. foreign aid official who died when Langan was 9 years old. She spent her earliest years in Saigon, and sent Lyseggen this 1959 keepsake photo of herself as a child, pictured here in her first year life with her nanny. After her father died, Langan grew up under far less-advantaged conditions in Wheaton, Ill., where her life spiraled out of control. She fled arrest for robbery in 1974, but was later found and convicted, serving five years. She dropped out of school in 10th grade, and then converted to Mormonism, but quickly abandoned the faith to become a minister in a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated church. Then she helped rob a pizza shop. Throughout all the chaos, Langan struggled to find her true self — and began attending a Kansas City transgender support group in the 1990s, before entering federal prison. Her story was featured in a 2005 episode of The Investigators TV show.

Shiloh Quine (pictured) began medically transitioning with hormones while interned at the Mule Creek prison in California. She fought through the courts to transition while incarcerated at a men’s facility — and won in August. This April, a federal judge in California ruled that another transgender prisoner, Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, must be granted access to gender-affirming surgery that her prison doctors deemed medically necessary. But Norsworthy was granted parole before the surgery.

Lyseggen visited Shiloh Quine often at the Mule Creek men’s prison where she is incarcerated, despite being a transgender woman. Here Lyseggen (at right) joins Quine in a photograph on Lyseggen’s third visit.

“The prison did not put her in a cell by herself, because this would be asking for special privileges, and to have privileges was dangerous, even life-threatening,” writes Lyseggen about Janetta Johnson’s experiences while interned in a men’s facility. “Every time she got a new cellmate, [Johnson] told me, ‘The man would say, ‘I ain’t want no room with a faggot, I don’t like faggots, I kill that motherfucker.’ But as soon as the door closed, he wanted to touch her, he wanted favors. If she didn’t do what these men asked, she would end up in [solitary confinement]. ‘I was able to negotiate just giving people a hand job or a blow job just to make peace,' [Johnson said.] 'I have had some guys pin me down to penetrate me, and I would beg: Please no, please no, I suck it, but don’t rape me!'”

After being released from prison, Janetta Johnson became an outspoken advocate for transgender equality in her work with the TGI Justice Project. She is shown here protesting at San Francisco City Hall to draw attention to violence against transgender women of color in 2013.

“My dad lives in a Florida state prison,” Janetta Johnson told Lyseggen, recollecting the painful way in which violence, drug addiction, and prison life has played a role in her family. “His name is ELjah. He received three consecutive 99-year sentences, for which I think he will be discharged after doing over 20 years this year. Our relationship is a little spotty. I don’t really have any special moments with him that stick out, other than him taking us to bars and dope holes so he could score dope.” Johnson is pictured her during a WPATH presentation planning dinner in Berkeley, Calif., in 2013.

Janetta Johnson embraces Miss Major Griffin-Gracy at a 2013 TGI Justice Project fundraiser in Oakland. Pioneering civil rights leader Angela Davis, who was featured at the fundraiser, is shown at right.

Tanesh Nutall’s story is one of resilience and redemption. Currently, she works for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Next Door Homeless Shelter. But, as she told Lyseggen, her life was once filled with crimes to ameliorate poverty like “boosting” (stealing from a store and reselling the items), check kitting (writing false checks), and sex work.

“In 2006, Tanesh signed up for yet another drug treatment program, her 63rd,” writes Lyseggen. “And there she met Pierre, a tall, muscular guy with kind eyes. They started talking and would sit together during sessions. ‘Pierre is a heterosexual man, and I know he knew what I was. But he fell in love with me, my spirit,' she says.” Here’s Nutall with her husband, Pierre, and their grandchildren at their Nob Hill home in San Francisco in 2014.

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