At 5am on 14 January, Jessica James Hicklin passed by her cell window without a glance. Outside was the same prison courtyard she had seen every morning for the past 26 years.
Over 260 miles away, Hicklin’s sister and niece were busy packing their van. Running on fumes, they were on the second of two sleepless nights fueled by excitement and anticipation. One state away, Hicklin’s aunts prepared for their own drive.
Everyone’s destination that morning: a family reunion more than a quarter of a century in the making.
Around 8am, Hicklin was finally able to pull on the lace-adorned black leather boots she had been desperate to wear since she was told of her upcoming release. Steeling herself, she checked her makeup in the mirror one last time – lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara and eyebrow pencil – and walked into the lobby a free woman.
Upon seeing her, her family leapt to their feet. All five family members exhaled audibly, having held their breath for more than two decades. Hicklin’s older sister, Heather Henke, prayed aloud to God as Hicklin approached her with open arms. Henke melted into her baby sister’s embrace, her body racked with sobs.
“I told you this would happen one day,” said Hicklin. She was laughing, her eyes shining as she held her sister tight.
That morning, Hicklin had finally been set free from Potosi correctional center (PCC), a men’s maximum security prison in Missouri. An anonymous teenager when she entered, Hicklin was leaving a 42-year-old “superstar” – a title given her by deputy warden Jody Glore, who noted her ability to change the Missouri department of corrections from the inside out.
After 26 years behind bars, Hicklin was leaving prison as the first transgender inmate in Missouri to have successfully sued for the right to access hormones. She was also leaving behind a legacy called UnLocked Labs, an organization which aids prisoners to continue their education.
But notwithstanding all the good she has done, she was still re-entering society as a convicted murderer.
On 24 September 1995, Hicklin, who was 16 and then presented as male and went by her deadname James, shot her friend Sean Smith three times following a botched drug deal. At the time, Hicklin was suffering from severe paranoia due to a methamphetamine addiction.
Two years later, Hicklin was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, alongside a concurrent sentence of 100 years for armed criminal action. (She is released due to a supreme court ruling and a federal appeals court decision.)
She is leaving prison not only as an adult, but as a woman who has a completely different viewpoint of the world and her role in it. Hicklin’s many transitions while incarcerated have been driven by her desire to bring about change because, she says, she made society a “really bad place” when she took Smith’s life.
On the other side of the prison walls, which provided her with a level of security and routine, she knows she will have to grapple with the public’s attempts to define her – just as she begins to define herself.
•••
Minutes after her release, as Hicklin buckled her seatbelt, her aunt Catherine Cooper commented on the number of people rooting for her.
“You didn’t have that many nice people when you went in,” she said.
“No, that’s how I ended up in,” Hicklin responded. Cooper laughed.
Five years into her sentence, Hicklin realized she didn’t need to die in prison the same person she went in as. Instead, she chose to accept that the only way to move past having taken someone’s life was to better the lives of those around her, and herself. Then, 20 years into her sentence, Hicklin made the decision to accept the fact that she is a woman.
On her 36th birthday, she filed for a name change and made an appointment with the prison therapist. There are approximately 4,890 transgender prisoners living in state prisons across the US, but an NBC News investigation was able to confirm only 15 cases in which these prisoners were housed according to their lived gender.
Hicklin first knew she was a woman at the age of eight. She now admits to stealing her older sister’s clothes (Henke claims she knew all along). She remembers diagnosing herself with schizophrenia around 11 years old after investigating the mental health section of the public library.
Photograph: Jess T Dugan/The Guardian
“With nobody to turn to, I was like, ‘This must be it, I must be schizophrenic because there’s this woman inside of me trying to get out,’” Hicklin said last July.
It wasn’t until she was in prison that she learned the term transgender. A fellow inmate got Hicklin a subscription to POZ magazine, an LGBTQ+ publication. While skimming through the pages, Hicklin saw an image of a trans woman wearing a business suit and thought: “There I am. That’s me.”
Hicklin grew up in a small town called Mineral Point, Kansas. She describes her childhood as abusive – a “dog-eat-dog” world. Court records show that her stepmother sexually, verbally and psychologically abused her and her siblings, including throwing Hicklin outside naked in the freezing cold and burning her with a lighter. Their father knew about the abuse but did nothing, and their mother was an alcoholic who moved around a lot.
Hicklin started drinking and doing drugs like pills and cocaine around the age of nine to self-medicate, eventually graduating to methamphetamine. Still, she had above-average grades, good relationships with teachers until high school, and her high level of intelligence was clear.
Two days before Hicklin shot Smith, she had initiated a drug deal with him in the hopes of securing money to help get her mother out of gambling debt. Hicklin arranged for a buyer to purchase the drugs from a connection Smith had, but the buyer backed out at the last minute. After being told the deal fell through, Smith showed Hicklin a gun while making comments that Hicklin took as threatening. They went to a field to do drugs together, but Smith got angry and stormed off. He soon came back and Hicklin – who later said she feared for her life at that moment – took out her gun and fatally shot him.
Hicklin was arrested days later. At the time, what she felt was pure resignation. Her body essentially shut down, and she fell asleep for three days once at the juvenile center. It wouldn’t be until five years later that she would finally start to come to terms with taking Smith’s life.
•••
Hicklin entered prison a broken teenager who felt she deserved nothing. She spent the first few years in prison defending herself from other prisoners, and was raped multiple times. Following the attacks, Hicklin crafted a homemade knife and convinced her cellmate to report her so she could be placed in administrative segregation.
It was during her nine months in isolation that she got the breathing space she needed. She also made a friend who would change the course of her life: Sister Elaine, a nun who volunteered at the prison once a month.
“The combination of conversations with her, meditation and maturity all came together at the same time. And I realized not only was I sentenced to die here, I hurt a lot of people in the process,” Hicklin recalled.
Hicklin’s relationship with Sister Elaine helped her come to terms with what she had done. Believing she had atoned herself, Sister Elaine spoke on Hicklin’s behalf at the parole hearing. Today, Hicklin recognizes that killing her friend was a result of her own decisions, including drug use. In her parole application, Hicklin wrote: “Had I not been strung out myself, I would’ve realized he was not the threat I perceived him to be.”
(The Guardian reached out to the Smith family to give them the opportunity to speak about the loss of their son or comment on Hicklin’s parole. The family declined to respond, but did submit letters opposing Hicklin’s release to the parole board.)
Sister Elaine was the first supportive relationship Hicklin would develop during her incarceration – but certainly not the last. Her first five years behind bars were grueling, but soon Hicklin found many other helping hands along the way.
“It’s kind of like you start pulling on a thread of goodness and there’s no end to it – it unravels … there are really, really good people in the world. And I just seem to have this fortune of finding more and more of them,” Hicklin said last July, days after she heard she was being officially paroled.
Her sister, Henke, came to visit throughout her sentence, bringing along one of her four young children when she could. She would sometimes try to sneak Hicklin cigarettes. Henke remembers a time when she would budget for calls that cost 25 cents a minute, saving for longer phone calls.
Hicklin’s mother went from being an “irresponsible alcoholic”, as Henke put it, to a nurturing and caring mother who would do anything for her child. “She spent endless hours looking at the case law and contacting attorneys,” said Henke. “There were a lot of transitions that happened while Jess was in prison. It wasn’t just a male to female transition that happened, our whole family transitioned and grew.”
This constant support bolstered Hicklin’s transition into being a hopeful adult – an attribute she treasures above all. Hope is what sent Hicklin into the psychologist’s office when it was no longer a choice to live as a man – it was a life-or-death decision.
“I like to tell people what it’s like to be in prison,” said Hicklin during an interview before her release. “These concrete walls are what you make of them. You know, there’s a community in prison, you can live in it, you can do things that profoundly affect the world in it. You can in some ways get away from it by listening to music and things like that.
“This prison,” she continued, referring to her body by placing her hand on her chest, “doesn’t work that way. There’s never a time that you can step away from the prison of your body when it’s the wrong one.”
On 23 March , 2015, Hicklin told prison qualified mental health specialist Catherine Klein that she had always felt that her male anatomy was “wrong”. Klein referred her to the prison psychiatrist, Dr Meredith Throop, who diagnosed her with gender dysphoria, a condition that is “identifiable, diagnosable and treatable” according to most prominent medical bodies in the US.
Hicklin’s toughest obstacle during her medical transition ended up being the prison facility itself.
Hicklin was referred for hormones by Throop but the prison prohibited the referral from becoming a prescription, quoting a “freeze-frame” policy that prevented access to hormone therapy for inmates not receiving treatment before their incarceration.
Hicklin sued the Missouri department of corrections (MDOC) and its private healthcare provider, Corizon Health, for treatment. In an unprecedented ruling in Missouri, the court granted her medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria, including body hair removal, access to gender-affirming canteen items (including but not limited to, female underwear, a curling iron and some makeup), and hormone therapy.
The same court then struck down the freeze-frame policy.
Before leaving prison, Hicklin also sued for access to gender-affirming surgery. The court denied the request. (Research shows that one in four transgender Americans undergo gender-affirming surgery.)
Hicklin knows that people might question whether prisoners deserve access to gender-confirming care, especially when prisons cost taxpayers money. Her response is that all humans have a right to healthcare, regardless of crimes committed.
“[Not having access to hormones] kills trans people. The data is very clear: untreated trans people who do not have access to healthcare have a much higher suicide rate. It’s killing people to refuse to give them access to care.
“And if your basis for denying treatment is saying, well, you killed someone? How the hell are we different then?” she asked.
•••
Months before her parole date, Hicklin got in touch with Black & Pink, a prison abolitionist organization, asking for help purchasing her first all-female wardrobe. They sent her a clothing catalog and Hicklin got to pick items to wear once released, including multiple pairs of vertiginous sparkly high heels.
Hicklin still sees herself as the businesswoman she spotted in POZ magazine years ago – and through her new role as chief technological officer of UnLocked Labs, Hicklin has been adopting that look and can-do attitude while leading business meetings across the US to discuss funding and program growth.
The day of her release, she was able to move into a sizable one-bedroom apartment in St Louis, which came furnished with a brown faux-leather sofa and a twin bed. The tiny kitchen has all the appliances she’ll need to cook for herself, and a bathroom comes with a tub. Her drawers are now filled with a variety of colorful skirts, dresses and tops – a far cry from the bleak prison uniform she had to wear day in and day out. She’s most excited about wearing her new bikini, a green and white number which she plans to don while swimming at the YMCA down the road.
The transitory apartment was secured through the Center for Women in Transition, an organization that provides services for women returning from jail or prison. The center requires Hicklin attend substance abuse and life skills programming and obey a curfew. Tenants also get other forms of support, including a therapist and certified peer support specialist.
Maggie Burke, CWIT’s client service manager, believes that “safe and stable housing [can be] healing all by itself”. Her view, shared by many other experts, is that re-entry programs are vital to the success of the criminal justice system.
But for Hicklin, the support was already there. As her family unpacked a filled-to-the-brim car, Burke’s two rescue dogs provided a four-legged welcome party.
“Rarely do we have this many people show up for someone coming home. This was probably the first time,” Burke said.
Within minutes of arrival, Hicklin’s apartment was transformed. There is now a clock on her living room wall that once hung in her mother’s house, and a blanket her mom used during her final years (she passed away years ago without being able to hold her daughter one last time). The book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype resides on a side table in the living room, and hand-me-down pots and pans stock the kitchen. Hicklin’s family brought toilet paper for her private bathroom, where she would no longer need to wear shower shoes.
Though Hicklin was surrounded by testosterone for 26 years, her first three days out of prison were spent entirely with women: her two aunts, sister and niece. The day after her release, Hicklin went to Walmart with her niece and sister to buy new makeup, including a pink lip color, glittery purple nail polish, an eyebrow pencil and brush and an at-home ear piercing kit, which Henke, a trauma nurse, successfully used to pierce Hicklin’s ears at the kitchen table a few hours later during girls’ night.
The new makeup was applied by Hicklin’s 17-year-old niece, Faith, who also braided Hicklin’s nearly waist-length hair. That afternoon, Faith made Hicklin cry by telling her that she’s a “beautiful woman”. While recounting the story later, Faith told Hicklin: “It’s always been like I see you as my uncle, and the more I’ve spent time with [you] you’re definitely my aunt. We’re just saying that you’re truly my aunt now.”
Hicklin responded: “I appreciate that more than you probably know.”
Within 24 hours of her release, Hicklin had received about six phone calls from inmates at Potosi, including trans women she fondly calls “her daughters” – though she is still figuring out the difference between a ringtone and text message alert. Hicklin plans to help them with anything she can while they serve out their sentences. She has a million plans now that she’s been released, most of which revolve around trying to make the world a better place.
Hicklin’s story, at its core, is about the human condition.
“She’s the real deal,” said Donna Brockmiller, Hicklin’s aunt by marriage. “She is a person who has come through adversity, made mistakes in her life, paid the price, came out of it and she is going to do wondrous things in her world for society. I mean, she is like the poster child for rehabilitation.”
Hicklin finally has a brand-new view, one of a calm neighborhood filled with cats and backyard swimming pools. As she looked out her bedroom window, it hit her: she was out of prison. For the first time that day, tears fell down Hicklin’s face while she hugged her sister, both repeating a mantra that described their lives thus far: “We survived, we survived.”
“I spent 26 years in prison and 16 years of hell before I went to prison,” Hicklin said. “Most people say that’s a pretty shitty life, but because I have the opportunity to live even one day in my truth … that’s a pretty good life.”
On 14 January, Jessica Hicklin woke up a prisoner. By 8.45am, she was driving away a free woman. After getting in the car, Hicklin’s aunt turned to her and asked about the plan for the day.
“Oh jeez. Breakfast and chaos I think is the, uh, the order there,” Hicklin responded. But in truth, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
•••
Since reporting this story, Hicklin has moved into her own apartment. She is working full time as CTO of UnLocked Labs, and recently traveled to DC and New York.
Jessica Hicklin is the focus of one episode of a documentary series entitled Girl Problems, co-produced by the article’s authors (Sabrina Jaglom, Rebecca Gibian and Katrina Eroen)
