2022 Community Survey of LGBTQ+ People and People Living with HIV’s Experiences with the Criminal Legal System

Protected & Served?

OUR VOICE IS OUR POWER: In 2022, Lambda Legal, in partnership with Black and Pink National, launched the Protected and Served? community survey. With this project, we aimed to learn more about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) people and people living with HIV with the criminal legal system, to assess these communities’ levels of trust in government institutions, and to create a new resource for community members, advocates, policymakers, and researchers for LGBTQ+ and HIV liberation. 

This report describes the findings of Protected and Served?. In addition to asking structured questions that provide a quantitative (numerical) account of the participants’ experiences, the survey also asked for qualitative data (open-ended questions); these answers were analyzed systematically, and the qualitative findings are included throughout the report.1 Protected and Served? focuses on the widespread harm caused to LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV by the criminal legal system, including the adult carceral system, immigration system, juvenile systems, the courts, and schools. The report also examines intersectional disparities within these impacted groups of people.

TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING: In 2012, Lambda Legal first published Protected and Served?, a groundbreaking report that explored government misconduct and harm by police, prisons, school security, and courts against LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV in the United States. The survey found low trust in institutions and high rates of government misconduct against LGBTQ+ people, especially people of color and transgender people, in the criminal legal system. Advocates, government officials, and community members used the original report to support legal arguments; educate the public; train judges, attorneys, and others involved in the legal system; and in many other ways to help identify and uproot discrimination and bias and hold government actors accountable. 

Since that original survey, awareness of the ways that the criminal legal system harms Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQ+ people, people living at those intersections, and others who experience marginalization has grown significantly, thanks in no small part to the 2020 racial uprisings against police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black cisgender man, by a white Minneapolis Police Department officer. LGBTQ+ people and organizations have been at the forefront of protests against police violence and the push to address the systemic violence against marginalized communities inflicted by the criminal legal system in this country.