I guess every era is convinced they live in the best/worst of times, but when I read stories like this one in the LA Times (h/t Digby) I feel that our claim on America's nadir is more than narcissism:

In May 2007, Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old transgender immigrant from Mexico, was sent to a detention center in San Pedro after being arrested on a traffic charge.

Arellano, who was born a male and had come to the United States illegally as a child, had AIDS at the time of her arrest but exhibited no symptoms of the disease because of the medication she took daily. But once detained, her health began to deteriorate.She lost weight and became sick. She repeatedly pleaded with staff members at the detention center to see a doctor to get the antibiotics she needed to stay alive, according to immigrant detainees with whom Arellano shared a dormitory-style cell. But her requests were routinely ignored.

The task of caring for Arellano fell to her fellow detainees. They dampened their own towels and used them to cool her fever; they turned cardboard boxes into makeshift trash cans to collect her vomit. As her condition worsened, the detainees, outraged that Arellano was not being treated, staged a strike: They refused to get in line for the nightly head count until she was taken to the detention center's infirmary.

Officials relented, and Arellano was sent to the infirmary, then to a hospital nearby. But after two days there -- and after having spent two months at the federally operated facility -- she died of an AIDS-related infection. Her family has taken steps to file a wrongful-death claim against the federal government.

The treatment Arellano received in San Pedro, unfortunately, is typical of what passes for healthcare at about 400 immigrant detention centers across the U.S. More than 70 immigrant detainees have died in custody since 2004, at least 13 of them in California, more than in any other state, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The reason may shock you. Unlike federal and state prisons, immigrant detention centers, many of which are run by private contractors, are not legally mandated to abide by any healthcare standards when it comes to treating sick immigrants. Civil and immigrant rights groups have filed suit in New York to force federal officials to issue such rules, but the Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction in the matter, has yet to produce them. In the absence of legally binding standards, detained immigrants, such as Arellano, have no legal way to complain about the lax healthcare they receive at the facilities where they are held. They cannot appeal the denial of care or sue in federal court to obtain it. [full LA Times story]

Digby goes on to say that "those who would make the inevitable observation that these immigrants shouldn't be granted health care that Americans don't have, one thing to keep in mind is that they also aren't free to go anywhere to get treatment --- like an emergency room or an alternative medicine doctor or some quack operating out of his basement. This person was in jail for the crime of being brought here illegally as a child and could do absolutely nothing to help herself."

Take note that the other detainees worked together to do what they could to take care of their fellow inmate. The story doesn't indicate whether Victoria Arellano was in a male or female facility, but male prisoners and immigrants are high often on the list of demos assumed to be, uh, congenitally homophobic. My own stereotyping makes it easier for me to imagine a group of female detainees banding together to protest the (non)care Arellano was getting, but it's also possible to imagine fellow inmates of any sex just wanting her out of population for fear of illness. Either way, the fact that her plight roused the inmates to strike is a bright, bitter note in an otherwise throughly depressing story.

In California, transgendered people apparently end up jailed according to their birth gender fairly regularly:

Rosa casts her dark eyes downward and then looks up from under wispy bangs to say matter-of-factly, "I've been raped six times.

"At one time I was raped by five individuals," she continues in slightly tentative English.

Rosa wasn't born female, but she says she was very young when she realized "I was special." Today, she doesn't just "pass" as a woman — it's hard to imagine how anyone would see this person with the bewitching eyes and feather-soft voice as anything else.

Except that for the past eight years, Rosa has lived in men's prisons.

The way the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) sees it, Rosa has a penis, and that makes her a man. Never mind that she hasn't seen herself as male for decades, or that she's been taking feminizing hormones since her 16th birthday. Rosa, who is serving 15-to-life for stabbing a man she says was trying to kill her, was never able to afford sex-reassignment surgery. The one time she came close to saving enough money, she spent it helping her sister set up a fruit stand in Mexico. So the prison system put her in with the men.

Rosa, 37, isn't just out of place: In the hierarchical and hypermasculine world of a men's prison, she's the ultimate target. She's been insulted, degraded, and smacked around countless times. If another inmate is feeling feisty, he's likely to take it out on her. And if it's sex someone is craving, there are more than a few reasons he'd look to Rosa to satisfy his desires.[full story]

That Bay Guardian story includes the telling fact that male-to-female transgender people are more likely to end up in jail than anyone else.

Transgender women are more likely to end up in prison than virtually anyone else. The oft-quoted statistic about African American men — that one in four has a history of incarceration — is dwarfed by the available stats on people who are male-to-female, or MTF. A San Francisco Department of Public Health survey conducted in 1997 found that almost two thirds of MTF respondents had been incarcerated. More than 30 percent had spent some time behind bars during the preceding 12 months.

Most people agree that the high incarceration rate is due mainly to the difficulty trans people have finding and keeping work. To survive, they often turn to sex work, drug dealing, or other illegal forms of moneymaking — and, in the process, greatly increase their risk of arrest. [full story]

Illegal, colored, funny genitals, locked in the privatized prison-industrial gulag - I'm almost amazed Victoria Arellano lived as long as she did.

The US is becoming fearful, constrained society where large segments of the population are upfront about their desire to deprive various groups of rights, privileges, protections and freedoms they themselves enjoy and often take for granted. When those segments of our society aren't making direct, full-throated claims that, say, gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry, that so-called enemy combatants can be tortured, that illegals have no right to medical care while in detention, or that inadequate black men should not be allowed to getting over on real Americans, they are engaged in a passive acquiescence to the politics that make these deprivations and assaults on basic fairness possible.

I've been having an ongoing debate with a good friend about California's recent gay marriage decision, and they get riled when their position (man+woman=marriage) is painted as bigotry. "Look," they keep telling, "it's not like I'm calling for people to be stoned in the streets." That's where we're at these days. As long as you're not calling for murder it's okay.