K e v i n M e di n a Br i a n Ngu y e n I was dehuman [ized] by the lack of empathy prison officials have towards victims of sexual assault, potential victims, inmate['s] safety in general.Inmates are looked at and treated as subhuman across the board. If an incident can be covered, it will be. If it can be ignored, it will be.-As cited in No Escape, Male Rape in US Prisons (2011).Why is there a prison rape epidemic?In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the criminal justice system has essentially become the United States' new racial caste system. Through the systematic persecution and prosecution of mainly black bodies, beginning with the Reagan administration's supposed "War on Drugs," the prison population exploded starting in the 1980s, (over) filling prisons with nonwhites. This system of criminalizing racial minorities results from a distinct inequality of criminalization: despite proportional rates of drug use across ethnicities, African Americans see higher incarceration rates of any other ethnicity and experience harsher punishments for similar violations. 1 Beyond the war on drugs, other historically disenfranchised communities, including individuals of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latina/o descent, immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT individuals are victimized as the result of overt and more subtle collusion of systematic practices of racism, classism, transphobia,

Research shows that the LGBTQ population is disproportionately affected by hate crimes and those against transgender individuals are especially violent. Given the considerable underreporting of these crimes, better insight into the victimization experiences and reasons for underreporting is necessary to improve the safety of the transgender community and secure necessary services for these victims. The current study takes a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach by creating and utilizing an Advisory Board made up of service providers in the transgender community in Los Angeles, to assist in the development of a survey instrument and focus group questions and provide venues for the focus groups. The study examines results from a short survey and five focus groups with transgender individuals on their experiences of hate crimes and reporting activities. Results indicate nearly all participants experienced some type of hate incident or crime based on their gender identity and/or expression. Almost half of the respondents did not report these crimes to the police because they did not think police would do anything, were afraid of being arrested, or were afraid of being victimized by the police. Narrative accounts describe mostly, though not entirely, negative encounters with the police and how participants take preventative measures to reduce their potential for hate-based victimization. Based on our findings several recommendations have been made to help improve relations between transgender communities and law enforcement with the goal of creating a safer environment for transgender individuals and increasing the reporting of hate crimes.