SAN DIEGO (LifeSiteNews) — A 16-year veteran of the California Department of Corrections is speaking out about the grim realities of the “immoral, dangerous” transgender incarceration policies that compelled him to walk away from his career.
On Wednesday, Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) released the latest in its “Cruel & Unusual Punishment” series exposing the fallout of housing male convicts with female prisoners simply because they claim the opposite “gender identity.” The new video features the account of Hector Bravo Ferrel, a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who joined the California Department of Corrections in 2006, eventually reaching the rank of correctional lieutenant.
Despite making $157,000 annually and planning to continue serving until retirement with a full pension, Ferrel opted to resign on December 1, 2022, a year after the state began putting into effect SB 132, a law allowing convicts who identify as “transgender,” “non-binary,” and “intersex” to request to be not only housed but searched according to their claimed “gender identity,” rather than their actual sex. For the past year, he has been detailing his experiences inside the system via his YouTube channel, That Prison Guard.
“Some of them are in there for sex crimes. That’s unethical, that’s immoral, that’s dangerous,” he said of male inmates taking advantage of the opportunity to be strip-searched by female guards. “Now you have females looking at the male body parts—and the inmates are demanding it […] Every time an inmate goes to a visit, every time an inmate exits his cell to go to the Ad Seg [administrative segregation] yard, when they go work in a vocational trade, they get strip searched to and from. Every time there is an incident and the inmate is placed in a holding cell, an unclothed body search is conducted per policy.”
Ferrel recalled how Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of SB 132 in 2020 was met with excitement from inmates who realized the state “gave them a perfect storm to be able to exploit their sexual predatory behaviors. They were like kids in the candy store, because they knew they were going from a men’s prison to a females’ prison. And we would watch them take off in the bus.”
In his experience, implementation began with new training on using inmates’ preferred gender pronouns, after which “it just went full throttle. When the State of California Department of Corrections gave [inmates] the full authorization to do as they pleased, you had everybody jump on that program. A lot of non-authentic and a lot of manipulation of the system. Oh, it was obvious.”
Perhaps worst of all, he was largely powerless to do anything about what he saw, contributing to his decision to quit and become a whistleblower. He explained that a guard’s “job is not to stop the individual from going into there… they’re simply there opening and unlocking gates. He’s already been approved through the proper channels to let the wolf go into the chicken’s den.”
READ: At least one California inmate pregnant as ‘transgender’ convicts move into women’s prisons
Ferrel says it was worth leaving his rewarding livelihood behind to take a stand, because “when things became dangerous, when people’s lives were being affected and jeopardized… you put the troop’s safety first and foremost.” More fundamentally, “I have a five-year-old daughter. I don’t want her to grow up in a world that’s currently backwards or upside down.”
Societal indulgence of “transgender identity” has long been known to pose a range of difficulties for the administration of criminal justice, given prisons are segregated by biological sex.
In recent years, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proven to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales last year when a man who “identified” as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two women within days of each other, on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars.
In May 2023, investigative journalist James O’Keefe released an interview with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons psychologist Dr. Linda Noelle, who says that male and female prisoners “both play the victim card” to obtain gender “reassignment” surgeries at taxpayer expense. “And then they go through [the far-left American Civil Liberties Union], and then the ACLU sues the [U.S. Department of Justice]” when demands for subsidized “transition” procedures are initially rejected, Noelle told O’Keefe. “And the DOJ, unfortunately, under Merrick Garland, it rolls over. It doesn’t go through the courts, so they just pay people off.”
Last summer, David “Dana Rivers” Wakefield, a male “identifying” as a female, began serving a life sentence in Central California Women’s Facility after slaughtering two lesbians and their 19-year-old legal son. “My feeling from knowledge of the case is that he killed her because he couldn’t be her, and he shouldn’t be in prison with other women,” activist Kara Dansky said at the time.