For six years, Honesty Jade Bishop was held in solitary confinement in a Missouri prison after she was sexually assaulted by her cellmate.
The Department of Corrections deemed that Bishop, a transgender woman who was living with HIV, was sexually active and needed to be isolated. And from 2015 to 2021, she was in administrative segregation at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, a prison that houses men.
A federal lawsuit filed on Bishop’s behalf in 2023 after her parole says her prolonged time in solitary confinement caused “depression, hopelessness, severe anxiety and feeling as if she were going insane and reaching a mental breaking point.” It also, the lawsuit says, drove her to “physically self-harm including attempts to take her own life.”
On Wednesday, the department agreed to a settlement, setting new policies and training requirements. But Bishop died before the settlement could be reached, taking her own life in October 2024.
“My sister, Honesty, was a fighter who never gave up,” Latasha Monroe, Bishop’s sister, said in a news release from the MacArthur Justice Center Thursday. “She endured years of cruel treatment because of her HIV status, but she never stopped believing that things could change. This settlement honors her memory and ensures that others won’t have to suffer what Honesty went through. Her courage in speaking out has created lasting changes.”
Monroe continued the lawsuit on behalf of her sister’s estate. There was a monetary award in addition to the policy and training changes, but the amount has not been released.
Lambda Legal and law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon also participated with MacArthur Justice Center in representing Bishop.
Shubra Ohri, senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, said she first met Bishop soon after she was released from isolation and got to know well after her parole.
“She was a bright person who had to cope with a really torturous experience, basically,” Ohri said. “And you know, despite being bright and despite being hopeful and really productive, I could tell she was struggling with things.”
Bishop was in prison after being sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2014, according to a report on the settlement prepared by Midwest Newsroom and The Marshall Project. During a scuffle with police as they tried to arrest her in 2011 for a misdemeanor stealing charge, Bishop bit an officer and was charged with assaulting an officer and recklessly risking an HIV infection.
Bishop began transitioning after arriving at Jefferson City Correctional Center. During her time in isolation, Ohri said, “she was denied, like a lot of things, that would help affirm her identity as a transgender woman, which really had an amplified impact on her mental health.”
At the time of the assault, and until the settlement, the department policy was to place anyone with HIV into isolation if they were deemed sexually active, Ohri said in an interview Thursday with The Independent.
“It was very, very obviously an unconstitutional policy,” she said.
The Midwest Newsroom/Marshall Project report states that, as of January 2025, there were 218 people with HIV incarcerated in Missouri.
Karen Pojmann, spokeswoman for the state department of corrections, did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement.
Going forward, any incarcerated person with a communicable disease will be evaluated individually to determine if they need to be in administrative segregation to prevent the infection from spreading, according to the settlement
“This settlement represents a critical victory in our ongoing fight against HIV criminalization and discrimination,” Jose Abrigo, Lambda Legal HIV Project director, said in the news release. “For too long, correctional systems across the country have subjected people living with HIV to punitive and medically unjustified isolation based on outdated stigma rather than modern science.”
HIV can be controlled with medication to the point that the virus is not transmissible. Part of the settlement mandates new training for corrections officers on HIV transmissibility, as well as the law on disability-based discrimination, Ohri said.
“The hope is that combined, the policy change and the training,” Ohri said, “would really drive home that what happened to Honesty, putting someone in segregation who may have HIV, but was on medication, that there’s no reason for it.”