Read Reduxx Magazine’s coverage here.

On August 12, Justin “Justine” Randall-Pizarro, a repeat offender who has been arrested 17 times since September 2024, beat a female prisoner while they were both housed in Rikers’ women’s facilities, the Rose M. Singer Center. Randall-Pizarro is a man who was placed with women on the basis of his self-identification.

The female prisoner’s mother reports that he “attacked [her] daughter from behind, punching her in the face, leaving her with a black eye, and stomping on her hands and head.”

She says her daughter was not given proper medical attention after the attack, including a hospital visit for a potential broken hand. “Instead, she was given a citation, reprimanded, and moved to a different dorm — as though she were the one at fault.”

The attacker, Randall-Pizarro, has frequently appeared in the news for hijacking subways, menacing passengers, and assaulting MTA workers. He has been arrested 12 times in 2025 alone.

Under Rikers’ self-identification policies, men can be placed in women’s housing if they declare a female “gender identity.” Other violent men housed with women in the Rose M. Singer Center include Jaia Cruz, a 6’4” man who stabbed a postal worker to death in a deli line; Alex Ray Scott, who is on trial for murder in two different states; Nicol Suarez, who allegedly raped a 14-year-old boy in a bathroom in East Harlem; and Nikki Secondino, who murdered his father.

Since adopting policies that let men in women’s spaces, Rikers has had to move a male inmate, Ramel Blount, for raping a woman in the shower. New York State was also sued in 2023 by a woman raped by a male prisoner who was “instructed to claim that he was transgender so he could stay in the female dorm where he would have access to female inmates.”

“This is an extremely predictable consequence of letting criminally violent men opt in to the women’s center by claiming they feel like a woman inside,” said Elizabeth Fedak, the primary organizer of a local women’s group formed to protect women’s rights, ROAR Women NYC. “Self-ID policies put incarcerated women at increased risk of violence and violate the civil rights of each and every incarcerated woman held in prisons where such men are present.”

ROAR Women NYC is calling on all elected officials in the state to end this cruel and dangerous policy immediately before more vulnerable women are harmed.

For more information on why policies that let men into women’s prisons on the basis of self-ID, check out ROAR’s Myth vs. Fact page on prisons.