These motherfuckers are trying to dodge your question. Try getting back to them and specifying for trans prisoners *presently* in prison. The idea that this information would be too much work to get hold of is completely outweighed by our right to know how many trans people are presently in conditions of... like, unimaginable danger, administered by the DoC.

Also, Sophie, if you wanted to get in touch with me, I'd love to talk. pookiekinz@gmail.com

Shawn Moodie from the New Zealand Human Rights Commission has given some advice on Twitter about what can be done about this refusal: https://twitter.com/NZHumanRights/status...

"We suggest asking Corrections to review the decision & if still unsuccessful contacting the Ombudsman"

The ombudsmen will side with Corrections. People need to understand that not every single thing is recorded in nice, neat little spreadsheets.

It is in the public interest for the administrators of the public prison system to collate this information into "nice, neat little spreadsheets", rather than keeping bad records that obscure bad stats.

I have complained to the ombudsman and they are processing it. Just in case they do side with the DoC on this, I have also clarified my request and broken it down into four simpler questions based on the information the DoC gave about the limitations of their current records and their reluctance to do any work to them.

Yawn, they aren't hiding anything. Trust me, they would love to have a easily accessable electronic record management system that would enable them to keep track of every little niche demographic in data warehouses that actually work as they should.

Sadly, unless you are personally willing to fork out for it, they have more important things to spend their limited (which are getting more limited by the year) budgets on.

Thank you for your encouraging and pro-transparency annotations, Thomas.

Looking over the response, this is definitely not a dodge. You can generally tell by the attempts to give you related information or clarify the situation when the response has taken your request seriously, and DoC have actually provided you with a lot of information regarding the intent of your request. It does sound like management have policies in place for transgender prisoners, (although perhaps not for intersex prisoners?) but that they haven't updated their information systems to generate specific reports on transgender prisoners.

Getting an update on information systems is an extensive project, and while it's often necessary, if they've explained why they don't have the information in a collatable format, they've done their job in responding to the request. In an ideal world every department would keep their data in easy amendable warehouses and could design a quick query for any type of information... but often they use proprietary software that can't easily report on certain data, don't have the resources to update their database, or keep paper records on certain matters.