In Solitary Confinement and Despondent with No Release Date: Freddy “Foxy” Fox

Freddy “Foxy” Fox, 44, is an intersex transgender woman who was transferred to Central California Women’s Facility from a men’s prison in June 2021. Although she was looking for sanctuary and kept to herself, she was continually written up for false allegations, she says, and has spent most of her time languishing in solitary confinement.

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I’ve been incarcerated for 24 years. I came into high-level prisons in the late 90’s when it was a death trap, it was a war zone. I stepped into white power prison politics. Forget about being a trans woman, they would kill you if you didn’t do what they said. Nobody was gonna find out that I was a woman. After a few years, in 2004, I went to staff. I was attacked in the SHU (Secure Housing Unit) at the California Correctional Institution, the supermax prison in Tehachapi. This was way before transgender classifications or any of that. They put a note in my file and I was labeled homosexual, and there was a warning that the entire white population in Level IV prisons was my enemy. That’s where it started. The SNY (Sensitive Needs Yards) were created for people such as transgenders and people who had sensitive needs, and I spent 15 years basically being bounced around to every new Level IV SNY yard.

I like to say, SB 132, I’m the poster girl for it. Because I could never feel safe as a woman on those yards. I have a pattern when I look back on it now. I would hit a yard, try to feel comfortable, start to feminize, get on hormones, dress as a woman, grow my hair, find a man that could take care of me and keep me safe or what have you, and then the violence would come. The sexual abuse within the cells, and then the threats on my life. Because for some reason, even on sensitive needs yards, the whites just wanted me dead. I could not be a girl. It impacted my mental health severely because I would decompensate through each one of these cycles. So, I would inadvertently or involuntarily detransition, and go back into some sort of neutral mode to stay safe, and that didn’t make me happy. I couldn’t find peace. I never felt like I could be myself and be a woman in those environments, and if I can’t leave the environment, what am I supposed to do? I wasn’t ever going to get out of that situation because I have so much time – I’m doing 50 years for carjacking and robbery and in-cell situations. So, I’ve been designated EOP (Enhanced Outpatient Treatment level of mental health care). I’ve lost my mind, so to speak, many times. I’ve spent months and years in mental health crisis beds. So for all of it to culminate with this law that I felt was meant for me, I couldn’t believe it.

I had finally made it to Mule Creek (a transgender hub) in early 2020. It took me so long to get to a spot that was geared for transgenders, but I still had zero hope of ever being content. I just felt like I was going to keep my aspirations low, just basically try to survive and avoid danger. That was it. And then I kept hearing about the law. I didn’t get my hopes up at all. But when the law was passed and staff actually approached me, I thought it was the answer to every prayer I’d ever had. I really did. And there’s still potential here. There’s great potential.

I arrived at CCWF at the end of June of 2021, the same day as Sky (Syiaah Skylit).  We spent about a month in reception, so we were segregated. It was July when we got out to the general population, and we hit D Yard together. I went through the same struggles, the same discrimination as some of the others. Sky went to AdSeg in early August 2021. I made it about a month and a half on D yard. And at the time I was the only transgender woman on that entire yard out of 1000 women. Because they had eliminated everyone who had come before me. They were all in AdSeg. I was a little bit naïve. I thought I was doing good because I was programming, right? I was aware of what was happening in my rooms, so whenever there was an issue, I would go to staff, move rooms. I was dealing with the normal stuff. My downside was I was working in the kitchen. I made a friend. I felt like I had a sister, someone I could trust and love, and that was my downfall because the other girls attacked her for being my friend. I was at work and was like, ‘what’s going on?’ And that’s when I had one girl come at me crazy. She wanted to fight me, but I ran away from her. I ran towards staff.

I thought I was going to be vindicated, but staff used that situation to essentially eliminate me. The lieutenant that day, Lt. Roberts, he told me, ‘Well you could have hurt those women, because you’re a man.’ And I’m like, you’re projecting that stuff on me, I didn’t do anything to anyone, I ran away from her. But his attitude was you could have hurt all those women. From that point forward I knew I was in trouble. They tell us to come here and fit in. So I come here, I keep my guard up, I don’t get into any relationships, I don’t do nothing physical, even though all those things were coming at me. But I make a friend at work, and they go at her. When I came back to segregation, I had only known this girl for two weeks. But they immediately turned it into this narrative where I was going to fight everybody over my ‘wife.’ That we’re ‘married.’ They turned it into a thing immediately. It just wasn’t the case.

It was all on camera, but I was put in AdSeg under investigation, and I never got out. You name it, it happened to me. I felt appalled by the fact that I was even segregated to begin with because I hadn’t broken any rules in the general population, so I started filing a lot of paperwork on my own without an attorney, without any advocacy or any help. And that was my downfall, which is kind of counterintuitive. I had no knowledge of what I was doing but I filed a civil suit to the court. I filed a bunch of complaints against staff and I filed 602s — all in the first couple of weeks that I was segregated. And as a result of that, what you would think would happen happened. They retaliated against me. I received 17 write-ups in my first three weeks back here. Anything you could think of. Overfamiliarity. Disrespect. A whole host of write-ups that were just outright exaggerated or false, and there was no way around it. There were days where I would get three write-ups in a day. It became very complicated for me.

I’m not only transgender, I’m intersex. My whole entire life I haven’t had any testosterone. I never developed testicles, so I don’t have complete male genitalia. I’m not driven sexually. People project that onto me but that’s not the way I function and it’s not the way I behave. So in the general population here, I wasn’t having those problems. I was turning people who made advances away. That wasn’t my thing. But that was staff’s go-to thing in this AdSeg. That was immediate. I received three or four write-ups of “behavior which could lead to illegal sexual acts.” Even though I was alone in my cell. I’m alone everywhere I go. But they were twisting conversations on the tier or just doing what they wanted to. Three of them were based on language. I was speaking to someone, they were speaking to me, you know, so obviously there’s two sides to every conversation. But what staff would do, the [cisgender] women would get lewd, or say something crazy, I would be like, ‘Yeah whatever that’s not gonna happen.’ They would exclude that part of the conversation and write me up for something higher than what happened. So, they would allege that I had exposed myself. Then I’d have to go to the cameras to show that I did not expose myself. Then they would drop the write-up to a lesser write-up. But it’s still a sexual misconduct! And it stays on my paperwork. That hasn’t happened since the first month, but that was the go-to thing in 2021 when we first arrived.

They used same script on me that they used Fancy and Sky. They took a situation on the yard where we were the victims of aggression, and they created enemy chronos for us. So, after two or three months when I was supposed to be released from AdSeg, they told me that because I had enemies, I couldn’t be in the general population anywhere in the entire prison. Unlike the cisgender women I couldn’t be put on a different yard than my ‘enemies.’ And then the warden put me up for this DRB process because he wanted to send me back to men’s prison. The DRB hearing process is basically a black hole, it’s unlimited time delays. It’s run by top officials out of Sacramento and was meant for prison shot callers and people who control prisons who they didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t meant for a couple of transgenders who people were discriminating against. We were told at the beginning that we’d have our DRB hearings within a year, but I hit my year months and months ago, and then I was told there is no time constraint. They can take as much time as they want.

In January 2023, the warden here was removed. Warden Michael Pallares. We feel like that warden was the one who made the decision to try to put so many of us up for DRB hearings to send us back to men’s prison. Now they aren’t putting trans women up for DRBs anymore. They’re not keeping people in segregation as long either. But Sky and I are still back here.

To be honest with you, I’ve gone through a lot of psychological issues in segregation. There was a long period of time where I was very despondent, where I had given up basically existing. I’ve been to crisis beds. I got on meds and did the whole meds thing to where I was zombied out. That wasn’t cool.

In late May 2023, Foxy had her DRB hearing:

I went in a room with all the higher-ups at this prison and through the Internet I spoke with people at CDCR headquarters in Sacramento. That’s what I’ve been waiting a year-and-a-half for. My character was assassinated. They read off a bunch of confidential information from other prisoners, which is people’s opinions, they read it like it was fact. They turned me into somebody that was running wild and committing every atrocity you can imagine. When they were done reading off the confidential information, they asked me if I had a statement. And I tried to highlight facts and things that were positive like the glaring issue of me being put in the hole, having run away from someone on camera. And how that situation turned into me being back here with a million write-ups and sitting back here for two years. They weren’t receptive to any of it. Basically, their decision was to keep me in segregation for at least another year. They’re sending me to a long-term segregation unit. It’s not in this prison. They are going to send me to CIW and I’m going to sit down there in their long-term restricted housing.

They wove 95 percent of these confidential write ups that were exaggerated in with a couple of things that are true. I have to take responsibility for being disrespectful and having a lot of issues with staff. I had a write-up for possessing weapons back here in segregation, which is absurd. They found a paperclip and a screw in my cell. Yes, it’s contraband, but it’s trash, it was just garbage in my cell. That’s the kind of thing they were blowing out of proportion back then. Then they kept bringing up sexual misconduct while I was in segregation, alone, which is ridiculous. Trying to negate all of that information in the moment, sitting in front of all those officials at the DRB, was basically impossible. Even if I had committed all these things, you’re supposed to be in AdSeg for finite punishment, a couple of months – which is how it goes for most cisgender woman. I haven’t had a write-up in over a year and a half. I tried to highlight that. None of it mattered I’m just so defeated. It crushes my spirit. I thought it would either black or white, that they’d either demonize me and send me back to men’s prison, which would have been terrible, or they’d release me to the general population. But they found a gray area.

At the end, the lady who ran the whole review said she wanted me to remain in my gender-based housing, and she wanted me to be successful. They’re speaking along these lines, but they’re not giving me the tools to achieve that. How do I achieve success if you keep me segregated? Since segregation isn’t a finite punishment for something specific, they called it administrative, which means they can choose to do it because they feel like it. There’s no release date, but I will be reviewed every six months. 

Foxy was sent soon after to the Psychiatric Services Unit at CIW – long-term restricted housing for people at the Enhanced Outpatient Program level of mental health care. She lost all access to phone calls and emails but in a letter on September 26, 2023, said she was “still being held alone with no release date.”