Mark LaFlamme’s coverage of the women inmates at the Maine Correctional Center was long overdue (“Maine women inmates accuse transgender prisoner of harassment,” March 4).

Men, as a group, pose a danger to women in prison — this is recognized internationally in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and by the separation of sexes provision in the Nelson Mandela rules on the minimum standards for treatment of prisoners.

We can protect both female and gender-nonconforming male prisoners from male violence, but we cannot do it in the same spaces. Transgender men can exhibit the same patterns of male violence as other men. Nationwide, there have been a number of rapes, pregnancies and ongoing sexual harassment of incarcerated women who, like Katie Mountain in LaFlamme’s reporting, are themselves penalized when they appeal to prison administrators for help.

The current administration has acted to change the practice in federal prisons, but in states like Maine, women are denied the basic safeguards female inmates have a right to expect. It is the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Dozier Bell
Waldoboro