Belladonna lives in protective custody inside a men’s prison, a housing assignment for people at higher risk of victimization that separates her from the rest of the prison population. She calls the isolation excruciating. “[Protective custody] is so locked down that the world doesn’t know it’s actually a form of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts by email. She said the prison does little to help her deal with the devastating mental health effects of the isolation. When she does get recreation time, she says she spends it in tiny one-person enclosures that she says are known as “dog cages.”

Trans women in New Jersey prisons say they are routinely isolated for all but one or two hours a day, despite recent reforms to reduce solitary confinement in the state. Gia Abigaill Valentina, another trans woman inside NJSP, said she’s usually locked in her cell for almost the entire day and similarly is given little help coping with the near total isolation. “There is no programming for the transgender women here. The only counseling provided is routine mental health services, in which someone from mental health comes around every two weeks,” Valentina said in an email from the prison. “In this lock down unit I am made to stay in my cell for 23 hours a day. I am allowed out for kiosk and shower.”

The isolation that trans women endure inside New Jersey prisons demonstrates the limits of a landmark reform law that state lawmakers passed in 2019 to reduce solitary confinement. The law, the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, hailed as the most progressive solitary reform at the time, put strict limits on “isolated confinement”, which it defined as holding someone in a cell for 20 or more hours each day with “severely restricted activity, movement and social interaction.” The law also prohibited isolation of vulnerable groups, including LGBTQ+ people, but still left corrections officials with broad discretion over when to use isolation, including for protective custody. While the law spells out specific guidelines related to vulnerable populations like pregnant or disabled prisoners or those under 21 and over 65 years old, there are none regarding those who are or perceived to be LGBTQ+.

When prison officials do use isolation, the law says it cannot go longer than 20 consecutive days or 30 days in a 60-day period. But Belladonna says she has been isolated since early February—roughly ten months, as of the date of publishing. 

Isolation of trans women in protective custody is just one of the ways solitary conditions persist in the New Jersey prison system despite the reforms. A recent investigation by HuffPost and the Inside/Out Journalism Project found that more than three years after the 2019 law was passed, the prison system’s main alternative to isolated confinement—so-called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), where incarcerated people are isolated as punishment for breaking prison rules—is largely solitary by another name and seems to defy the reforms. Days after that investigation was published, in early October, New Jersey’s Office of the Corrections Ombudsman, a state prison watchdog, published a report echoing those findings.  

“We found that on any given day, 700+ people are confined to a prison cell for 22-23 hours per day,” Terry Schuster, the New Jersey Corrections Ombudsperson, said in an email. “People spend months or years in these disciplinary tiers, called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), and reached out to our office in large numbers to draw attention to the apparent violations of state law.” The office confirmed to Bolts that it has also received reports from transgender people about the extent of their isolation. 

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) did not respond to questions for this story, including how many transgender people are in isolation conditions inside the state’s prison system. 

Research has consistently shown that solitary confinement has disastrous consequences on mental and physical health. According to psychiatric experts, isolation can both exacerbate existing mental health issues and even cause the onset of mental illness. And according to a recent study, time in isolation can also increase someone’s risk of death in the first year after release from incarceration, namely from suicide, homicide and opioid overdose. 

There is also overwhelming research to indicate that LGBTQ+ people face egregious and disproportionate violence behind bars. More than half of respondents to a 2022 national survey by legal advocacy group Lambda Legal and prison abolitionist organization Black & Pink said they had been sexually harassed by jail or prison staff, while 1 in 6 said they had been sexually assaulted. A stunning 87 percent reported verbal assault. 

Alongside this pervasive abuse, trans people in prison often land in isolation. A recent report in The Nation detailed how trans people disproportionately face isolation in federal lockups, citing data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2017 to 2022 that showed incarcerated trans people are typically two to three times more likely to be put in “restrictive housing” than cisgender people.

Valentina said she landed in isolation at NJSP after being transferred from the state’s only women’s prison, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, earlier this year after Governor Phil Murphy announced his plans to shutter it following years of scandals there. Her path out of isolation isn’t as simple as moving to a women’s prison, particularly in light of a policy NJDOC quietly enacted late last year that gives prison officials greater leeway to override trangender prisoners’ housing preferences. Under the new policy, prisoners have a “rebuttable presumption” that they are housed according to their wishes, but officials now can override that preference based on factors including “reproductive considerations.” 

The new policy was enacted months after another trans woman, Demi Grace-Minor, impregnated two women at Edna Mahan during what NJDOC officials said were consensual sexual relationships. A resulting media firestorm and transphobic criticism preceded the policy change, which now bars many trans women from easily obtaining housing that experts say could make them safer while behind bars.

The new housing policy could also put the New Jersey prison system at odds with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which tasks prison officials with giving serious weight to a trans person’s housing preferences; still, recent reporting shows that trans women are almost always housed in men’s facilities. PREA also requires housing to be decided on a case-by-case basis, which Valentina said isn’t happening for trans women in New Jersey prisons. 

Valentina alleges that under the new policy, prison officials won’t send trans women to women’s units until they get bottom surgery—referring to surgeries that often include an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty—to eliminate any “reproductive considerations.” Valentina, Belladonna, and other trans women have repeatedly said that they face agonizing, oftentimes bureaucratic, delays in actually obtaining these surgeries, leaving them trapped not just in men’s prisons but in continued isolation. Trans women in New Jersey prisons also allege that medical and mental health care are grossly lacking.

“I truly suffer every second of every day with not having my full surgery, although I feel so much better since my first gender affirming surgery,” Belladonna said. 

“I can honestly express with truth and sincerity that I have NEVER in my life encountered or felt such discrimination, hatred and transphobic opposition as I have experienced since coming out here in the NJDOC,” Valentina said. 

Some trans people have been pushed to extremes to alleviate their suffering. Belladonna has thrice mutilated herself, including trying to cut off her penis, and recently tried to remove her testicles, in order to relieve herself of the debilitating dysphoria she faces without gender affirming procedures. 

Belladonna said that even if she were to be offered less restrictive housing, she would still have to turn it down out of concern for her own safety—meaning she will likely stay isolated until she can move to a women’s prison. 

“I signed into protective custody because in a man’s prison PC is the safest place versus the prison’s ‘male population’ for someone as advanced in her transition as me,” she said. 

Like Belladonna, Valentina also detailed efforts to remove her penis herself amid delays in obtaining gender affirming care and a lack of adequate mental health care. 

And when weeks after Grace-Minor was sent back to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility after the pregnancies at Edna Mahan, she similarly tried to remove her testicles. At the time of the incident, Grace-Minor was housed in isolation and said she felt unsafe surrounded by men. Grace-Minor is now incarcerated in Northern State Prison in Newark. 

“It has been pure hell back here in solitary: lack of food, being sexually harassed and housed around men who flash their genitals and refer to me as ‘he-she bitch,’” Grace-Minor wrote on a public blog in September 2022. “I doubt that I will survive all of this.”

Surgeries aside, trans women in New Jersey prisons say they’ve also had to fight for months to get basic necessities like hair ties, proper underwear and even deodorant. Their complaints mirror allegations from a lawsuit filed against NJDOC in 2019. The plaintiff in that lawsuit alleged that corrections officers misgendered her, denied her female commissary items and failed to prevent harassment against her, all of which trans women say still happens in New Jersey prisons. 

That lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of New Jersey on behalf of an anonymous trans woman, ended with a settlement in June 2021 and a change in NJDOC’s housing policy to give trans prisoners a “presumption” that they would be housed in line with their gender identities, a policy it had to maintain for at least a year. Four months after that time period lapsed, NJDOC rolled back the policy to give prison officials greater discretion over housing assignments for trans people.

Amid the constellation of struggles these women face behind bars, they agree that moving to a women’s prison would make them feel safer, but that likely won’t happen until they obtain bottom surgery, which all of them are desperately waiting for. And until then, their isolation and the anguish that comes with it—compounded by their continuing dysphoria absent gender-affirming surgery—will continue.

Belladonna called her situation “agonizing,” writing in a recent email, “It is torture for me because I only have half of my bottom surgery and so I’m stuck in the room all day with this part that doesn’t belong to me.”

The post New Jersey Prisons Isolate Trans Women Even After Reforms to Reduce Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

Ayala on Thursday denounced the new move as antidemocratic. Warren “was elected and entrusted by the people—not once but twice—and it is the job of the elected state attorney to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the community they serve,” she said. “The suggestion that there was malfeasance or a dereliction of duty by the Hillsborough State Attorney Office is a dictatorial response and attack on the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, the organization behind nationwide prosecutors’ joint statements on transgender rights and abortion rights that DeSantis cited in his order, pointed out that many prosecutors, including some conservatives, choose to not charge certain misdemeanors, a practice DeSantis assailed today. “There’s a potential for a legal challenge over the erosion of voter choice,” she told Bolts.

Ayala echoed that point in her statement. “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?”

The post Florida Governor Suspends Tampa Prosecutor in Latest Attack on Abortion and Trans Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Starting when he joined the Texas House in 2013, and continuing session after session since, the Fort Worth Republican has filed bills seeking to end or restrict no-fault divorces in the state. And he has mounted other efforts to preserve his conservative Christian ideal for marriage and family over the years, including being one of the state’s most staunch anti-abortion lawmakers and pushing to end benefits for same-sex spouses of government employees—even after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Texas and across the country in 2015. In recent years, Krause, like much of the Texas GOP, has trained his sights on transgender children, their families, and medical providers who give them gender-affirming care. 

Now he is running to be a culture warrior as the next Tarrant County District Attorney. Krause thinks that prosecutors should be on the frontlines in the latest wave of conservative efforts to police trans families. 

During a recent candidate forum for a Fort Worth GOP group, he bragged about helping kick-start the latest round of attacks. After failing to pass legislation he authored last session banning gender-affirming care for minors, Krause filed a legal request eventually ballooned into state GOP attempts to reclassify abuse outside of the legislative process; Krause’s request eventually snowballed into a misleading legal opinion by Attorney General Ken Paxton that called gender-affirming care for minors “child abuse.” Governor Greg Abbott then cited that opinion in his directive to state child protection workers to investigate families for seeking such care. A Texas Supreme Court ruling last week largely allows those investigations to continue. 

“My approach went after the medical community more than it did the parents,” Krause explained in between asking voters for their support. “I absolutely think that we ought to be prosecuting those medical professionals that engage in this practice.” 

Similar decisions await the county’s next DA on a range of issues from the fate of abortion access in a post-Roe world to conservative efforts to ramp up the involvement of law enforcement in elections. The shifting political and legal landscape on civil rights in Texas has emboldened right-wing attacks to carry severe criminal consequences. The attorney general’s office has sought to bring its investigative powers to bear on how people are voting, and the DA’s office in a county far smaller than Tarrant made national headlines recently for charging a woman with murder over an allegedly self-managed abortion.

Krause faces Phil Sorrells, a Trump-endorsed former judge, in a runoff election on Tuesday to decide the GOP nomination for the Tarrant prosecutor’s seat. Whoever prevails will be well positioned to win the November general election and replace longtime Republican DA Sharen Wilson, who is perhaps best known for sending Crystal Mason to prison for a voting mistake. Mason, who is Black, argues that her prosecution was politically and racially charged, and her conviction has since been called into question by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), the state’s highest criminal court.

Krause and Sorrells, neither of whom responded to repeated requests for comment for this story, have both promised in forums and campaign materials to follow in Wilson’s footsteps if elected. Both have indicated they may even dedicate more resources to policing elections; this has been a priority for conservatives in Texas and elsewhere, raising alarms that increased risks of criminal prosecution may ensnare voters over simple mistakes or intimidate others away from voting. Krause said in a campaign forum that he would dedicate a prosecutor to election crimes full time while Sorrells wants to start an “election integrity task force” inside the DA’s office. 

Sorrells and Krause have also both slammed a recent CCA ruling that limited Paxton’s ability to prosecute election crimes, saying they’d fill in the gap and prosecute more cases. 

Krause has claimed that Wilson, the outgoing DA, effectively asked him to run after announcing that she’d step down last year, before anyone had officially joined the race; Krause had initially launched a campaign to challenge Paxton but bailed from the attorney general race and filed to run in Tarrant County just before Thanksgiving. In the first round of the primary in March, he edged out Mollee Westfall, a longtime judge who had accumulated endorsements, and joined Sorrells in a runoff since neither received 50 percent of the vote. 

Sorrells, who is older and folksier than his runoff opponent, also has unimpeachable far-right credentials and is running with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Political connections likely helped Sorrells, a longtime judge and former prosecutor, get Trump’s support —Sorrells’ campaign consultant is also a political strategist for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a far-right figure who has reportedly helped influence the former president’s endorsements in the state and is notorious for his xenophobic tirades. 

Sorrells sounds most Trump-like when talking about undocumented immigrants, whom he has made central to his campaign. “The people who are crossing the border illegally, they’re coming here to Tarrant County to commit crime,” he said during a recent campaign forum. “My goal is to hold those people in state custody for as long as we possibly can… until we get somebody else in the White House who’s actually gonna enforce our immigration laws.” 

Sorrells’ main critique of his GOP opponent is that he has zero experience in criminal law. But Krause, who worked for a conservative Christian legal advocacy group famous for its homophobia before joining the Texas legislature, is playing up his political career. He tells voters that his experience at the capitol has prepared him to be “a faithful conservative fighter as your next Tarrant County DA.” 

Waiting in the wings is longtime prosecutor Tiffany Burks, who has already secured the Democratic nomination. Tarrant County has been a longtime GOP bastion, and Republicans continue to hold all statewide offices—a rare feat for an urban area. It has, however, started to trend blue, narrowly voting for Joe Biden in 2020, the first win by a Democratic presidential candidate here since Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but Democrats have yet to break through locally, failing to oust the sheriff in 2020. They are now eying midterm elections for DA and other local offices like county judge.

Burks, who was chief of the Tarrant DA’s criminal division before resigning last year, told Bolts in an interview that she chose to leave and run to lead the agency because she disagreed with the direction it was taking. Burks also claimed the office was beset with morale problems.

“For me there was no consistency, I wasn’t quite sure what the criteria was for the decisions that were being made,” Burks said. “The community deserves to have a DA that cares about the concerns of all of its citizens, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or a libertarian—everyone’s needs in the community matter.” 

In addition to facing criticism over her selective prosecution of election laws, Wilson has also drawn the ire of North Texas activists and victims of police brutality who accuse her of failing to hold law enforcement accountable. 

During a recent campaign forum, Sorrells insisted one of his main priorities as DA would be to “back the police,” saying, “They have to know that if they need help on anything, that the DA is ready and willing to help—and I’m that guy, I’m going to help them.” Krause also points to his support from local law enforcement officials; he is running with the endorsement of Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Trump favorite who has become a fixture of the national conservative media in recent years even as deaths have spiked at the local jail on his watch. 

Local jail monitors have called for fewer people to be detained pretrial as one remedy to dangerous and deadly conditions, and the county’s bail policies are emerging as one of the major fault lines in the general election. 
Burks told Bolts that the DA’s office could help address problems at the jail and reduce crowding by requesting lower bond amounts, and in some cases no cash bonds, when dealing with low-level, nonviolent cases. Sorrells, meanwhile, said at a recent campaign event, “I would oppose all the low bails that are being issued right now, because we’ve got to keep those people in jail.” Krause reiterated his support for state laws to restrict some jail releases.

Pamela Young, an organizer with United Fort Worth who has called for Waybourn’s resignation over the string of scandals at his jail, said local activists tried to schedule a forum for people impacted by the criminal legal system to ask questions of all three Democrats running for DA before the March 1 primary. Only one participated, Albert Roberts, who was his party’s nominee against Wilson in 2018, losing by six percentage points. Burks was a no-show for the forum alongside a third candidate. (Burks easily won the primary with 60 percent of the vote.)

“That speaks to where we have to continue moving—putting people forward who have been impacted the most, whose communities have been harmed the most and affected the most by the criminal legal system,” Young told Bolts. “No matter who is in that DA’s office—even if Sharen Wilson ran and won again—no matter who is there, we have to continue the work of fighting to get our people free, bottom line.” 

The news earlier this month that the U.S. Supreme Court may be poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade now also looms large over this DA election. 

Texas has a so-called trigger ban that would immediately criminalize abortion in the state if Roe falls next month. Elizabeth Sepper, a scholar of health law at the University of Texas at Austin, told Bolts that a pre-Roe law on the books in Texas could threaten charges against not just abortion providers but potentially also others who help pregnant people access abortion—like partners, family members or friends. Texas also made it a felony last year to give someone abortion-inducing medication after seven weeks of pregnancy, effectively criminalizing medication abortion. Sepper suspects that some prosecutors in Texas are eager to test the bounds of those laws. 

Sepper also worries about more pregnant people in the state being at risk for prosecution in a post-Roe future, pointing to a case last month where authorities near the Texas-Mexico border jailed and prosecuted a woman for murder, allegedly after self-managing her own abortion, despite state law clearly exempting pregnant people from such charges. The woman was released and the case dismissed only after intense pressure from abortion rights activists and calls from across the country demanding that prosecutors drop the charge.

“If Roe is overturned, I suspect that enterprising prosecutors would comb through the criminal code to try and figure out whether a variety of general criminal laws that aren’t abortion-specific could be used to bring even other abortion related crimes,” Sepper told Bolts. “Right now we’ve seen Texas legislators get pretty creative over anti-abortion laws. The next step, if Roe falls, could be prosecutors who get creative and try going after pregnant people who aren’t subject to these abortion specific criminal laws.”

Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever—Tiffany Burks has no plans to do that.” Democratic prosecutors who serve in the state’s big urban centers, including neighboring Dallas County, issued a joint statement last month that said they would not prosecute cases related to abortion. Neither Sorrells nor Krause have addressed in detail how they would handle cases relating to reproductive rights, and the question did not come up in a series of forums reviewed by Bolts.

But if Krause makes it into the DA’s office at least, he would bring a history as an anti-abortion crusader with him. 
“I think one of the things in this race that could help me or hurt me is that I’ve got a long record from like 10 years in the Texas House on these kinds of issues,” Krause said during a recent campaign forum when asked about the recent investigations into trans families. “You know exactly where I stand.”

The post The Culture Warrior Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.