By Eder Campuzano
The Oregonian
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Linda Patricia Thompson has spent nearly a third of her life as an inmate.
The 59-year-old transgender woman, who was arrested in July after robbing a US Bank in Cheyenne, Wyoming, told the Washington Post that she considers herself “somewhat of a failure” because she hasn’t been able to make it on the outside.
“Even if they have to pick the lowest form of employment, they’re still out there trying to succeed and whatnot,” Thompson said of other transgender women. “And I choose to have society support me and go to prison, which is kind of a cowardly way of dealing with my problems.”
Thompson made national headlines earlier this year on reports that she robbed the Cheyenne bank. Unlike many other would-be robbers, Thompson committed hers in hopes that she would get caught.
Upon exiting the building with a bunch of cash, Thompson began handing it out to passersby.
She threw some of it into the air.
Then, she sat down in a parking lot and waited for the police to arrive.
“I just robbed the bank. I want to go back to prison,” she told Lt. Nathan Busek when he asked Thompson what was going on.
The former oil rig driller was one month removed from a six-year stay at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, where she served time for a robbery she committed in La Grande, Oregon court records show.
Much of Thompson’s ordeal in the years leading up to her Oregon arrest was chronicled in the 2006 documentary, “Cruel and Unusual.”
In it, she tells the crew about her trouble finding work on oil rigs after coming out.
“But you’re a guy. We can’t go having that around here,” potential employers would tell her.
Before committing the Wyoming robbery, Thompson told The Post that she couldn’t find lodging in homeless shelters, either because they were full or unwelcoming. She was also reportedly assaulted in a Cheyenne park one week before she was arrested.
“I go to prison as a means of survival,” Thompson told the newspaper. “I find prison as a society as a way of life that I accept. I’ve learned over the years to adapt to it.”