Denise Foster was a 55-year-old transgender woman held at Hawaiʻi's Hālawa Correctional Facility on non-violent theft charges. While inside, she worked toward a counseling degree and had a job lined up for after her release. On August 4, she was beaten and strangled to death in her cell. No charges have been filed, but reporting from Civil Beat points to a fellow inmate with two prior strangulation convictions as the person responsible.

Denise never should have been placed in a men's facility to begin with. Housing transgender women alongside men has led to well-documented patterns of violence and abuse in prison systems across the country. Hawaiʻi's own anti-discrimination law already lists gender identity as a protected category, yet the state has no binding rule requiring officials to weigh a person's safety before deciding where to house them.

Hawaiʻi's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) says its mission is to run a "secure correctional environment for comprehensive rehabilitative, holistic, and wraparound re-entry services… with professionalism, integrity, respect, and fairness," according to the department's own stated mission. Denise's death shows how far short of that promise the system has fallen.

We're calling on DCR and Hawaiʻi's state lawmakers to adopt a clear, binding policy that prohibits placing transgender people in facilities where their safety is put at risk — one that puts gender identity and each person's individual circumstances at the center of every housing decision.

No one should be beaten to death because the system refused to ask whether they were safe. Sign the petition to demand gender-affirming, safety-based housing policy in Hawaiʻi's prisons before another life is lost.