Biography
Jennifer Amelia Rose — formerly known as Jennifer Gann, and called "Babygirl" by supporters — is a transgender woman, jailhouse lawyer, writer, and prison abolitionist who has been incarcerated in California since 1990. Of white and Cherokee heritage, she has become a widely supported voice against the abuse of LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming people behind bars.
Originally sentenced to seven years for armed robbery, Rose became a militant jailhouse lawyer and organizer, taking part in prison protests and direct action through the early 1990s. After being beaten by guards at Folsom Prison, she fought back; the resulting charges — including weapons possession and assault on a district attorney and an associate warden — brought multiple sentences of 25 years to life under California's "Three Strikes" law in 1995–1996, turning a fixed term into what amounts to a life sentence.
She survived more than a decade in solitary confinement, including the Security Housing Units at Pelican Bay State Prison (1994–2004) and Tehachapi (2010–2011) — conditions widely condemned as torture.
Rose came out as a bisexual trans woman in 2006. She has organized alongside anarchist, feminist, and queer prison abolitionists and the Maoist MIM (Prisons), served for five years in the leadership of Black & Pink, and is a prolific writer, blogger, poet, and artist whose work documents the realities faced by trans prisoners.
In 2018 she won a California Supreme Court ruling granting reconsideration of her sentence, and she has continued to pursue relief, including resentencing under Proposition 36, the Three Strikes Reform Act. She remains imprisoned at Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, California.
In the first-person statement reproduced in the 2021 prisoner list, Rose identifies participation in the 1991 Folsom Prison hunger strike as her early involvement in political-prisoner struggles. She describes subsequent beatings and torture by guards and more than ten years in solitary confinement at Folsom and Pelican Bay. These are attributed accounts of prison resistance and conditions, not new calendar endpoints or an additional custody total. The statement’s age is not converted into a birth year.
