NEW BOSTON, Texas >> The inmate, dressed in prison whites with a shaved head and incongruously tender eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, entered the visiting room with her wrists joined as if she were handcuffed. At 31, she had spent her whole adult life behind bars, and it looked like a posture of habit.

She introduced herself: "My given name at birth was Joshua Zollicoffer, but my preferred name is Passion Star."

A transgender woman whose gender identity has been challenged by Texas authorities, Star herself is challenging Texas’ refusal to accept new national standards intended to eliminate rape in prison, which disproportionately affects gay and transgender prisoners. Last spring, Gov. Rick Perry declared in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that Texas had its own "safe prisons program" and did not need the "unnecessarily cumbersome and costly" intrusion of another federal mandate.

Star, who says she is a victim of repeated sexual harassment, coercion, abuse and assault in Texas’ maximum-security prisons for men, disagrees.

"Look, I got 36 stitches and have scars on my face that prove the prisons are not safe and the current system does not work," she said. "Somebody needs to be intrusive into this state’s business. Because if somebody was intruding, probably these things would not happen."

After decades of societal indifference to prison rape, Congress, in a rare show of support for inmates’ rights, unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, and Perry’s predecessor as governor, President George W. Bush, signed it into law.

"The emerging consensus was that ‘Don’t drop the soap’ jokes were no longer funny, and that rape is not a penalty we assign in sentencing," said Jael Humphrey, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, a national group that represents Star in a federal lawsuit alleging that Texas officials failed to protect her from sexual victimization despite her persistent, well-documented pleas for help.

But over 12 years, even as reported sexual victimization in prisons remained high, the urgency behind that consensus dissipated. It took almost a decade for the Justice Department to issue the final standards on how to prevent, detect and respond to sexual abuse in custody. And it took a couple of years more before governors were required to report to Washington, which revealed that only New Jersey and New Hampshire were ready to certify full compliance.

With May 15 marking the second annual reporting deadline, advocates for inmates and half of the members of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a bipartisan group charged with drafting the standards, say the plodding pace of change has disheartened them despite pockets of progress.

"I am encouraged by what several states have done, discouraged by most and dismayed by states like Texas," said Judge Reggie B. Walton of U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, who was appointed chairman of the now-disbanded commission by Bush.

Some commissioners fault the Justice Department for failing to promote the standards vigorously. Others blame the correctional industry and unions for resisting practices long known to curb "state-sanctioned abuse," as one put it. All lament that Congress has sought to weaken the modest penalties for noncompliance, and that five governors joined Perry last year in snubbing the standards.

"There’s a whole kind of backlash, which is very depressing," said Jamie Fellner, a former commissioner who is senior counsel for the U.S. program of Human Rights Watch. "It’s 12 years since the law passed. I mean, really. We’re still dealing with all these officials saying, ‘Trust us. We’ll take care of it.’?"

Last year, 42 governors signed a form providing "assurance" to the Justice Department that they were advancing toward compliance. But they were allowed to make that assurance without having conducted any outside audits; the commissioners protested this in a letter to Holder in November, expressing concern about "efforts to delay or weaken" adherence to the standards.

In fact, the ambitious goal to audit every prison, jail, detention center, lockup and halfway house in this country over a three-year period is far behind schedule.

Some 8,000 institutions are supposed to be audited for sexual safety by August 2016; only 335 audits had been completed by March, according to a Justice Department document obtained from the office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas; the department declined to provide numbers.

The Justice Department said it "remains steadfast in its commitment to the implementation of the National PREA Standards" – PREA is the acronym for the Prison Rape Elimination Act – and hopes for "full participation" from all states this year.

But states face only a small penalty, the loss of 5 percent of prison-related federal grants, if they opt out of the process entirely. "There are a lot of carrots in PREA, and not enough sticks," said Brenda V. Smith, an American University law professor and another former commissioner.

Texas forfeited $810,796 – the equivalent of a minuscule fraction of its multibillion-dollar corrections budget – after Perry declined to sign an assurance letter. According to a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, this loss "will not have any effect on TDCJ operations."

The other renegade states, as advocates called them, were Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana and Utah.

Texas’ opting out was considered especially significant, however, because it has the largest prison population in the country and by far the most reports of sexual assault and abuse. Texas had 3 1/2 times as many allegations as California in 2011, when California still had more inmates than Texas, according to the federal data.

Texas authorities attribute this to "extensive efforts to encourage and facilitate reporting." Declining to discuss Star’s case, they said their "goal is to be as compliant as possible with PREA standards without jeopardizing the safety and security of our institutions."

Twenty-seven of their 109 prisons have passed outside audits, they said, including the one where Star is now locked up for a teenage offense that the authorities considered kidnapping.

On a summer day when she was 18, she accompanied her boyfriend, who was 23, to a Chevrolet dealership to test-drive a car. Her boyfriend took the wheel of a maroon Impala, a salesman got in the front passenger seat and Star sat in the rear.

When the salesman indicated it was time to return to the lot, the boyfriend said no, in Star’s recounting.

"I’m like, ‘Wow. What do you mean?’" she said. "And he’s like, ‘Be quiet.’ It was one of those things where keeping it real goes wrong. Where I could have been like, ‘Well, you need to stop,’ or gotten out, and I didn’t. We make bad decisions when we’re young."

After 40 miles, they deposited the salesman on a rural road. He eventually flagged down a police car, and an alert was issued for the stolen Chevy. The couple kept driving north, even picking up a hitchhiker at one point, until, with the authorities in pursuit, their flight ended in a ditch.

Charged with aggravated kidnapping, a first-degree felony that carries a penalty of five to 99 years, Star accepted the same plea deal of 20 years as her boyfriend.

Last November, Star was transferred to her seventh prison, William P. Clements, another prison with a very high rate of sexual victimization. She immediately found herself back among gang members she knew, and encountered escalating threats of assault and rape.

In March, her lawyers filed an emergency motion asking that the court order Texas to place her in safekeeping or explain how it would otherwise keep her safe.

"I’m afraid Passion is going to get murdered – like this weekend," Humphrey said then.

For that weekend, her lawyers agreed to let the authorities place Star back in solitary confinement while they negotiated a resolution. At that point, Texas appeared to be arguing that Star’s only alternative was to remain in isolation.

On March 20, The New York Times asked Texas for permission to interview Star.

On March 30, more than a decade after she says she first requested it, Texas put Passion Star in safekeeping. Her lawsuit, which seeks damages from the officials who allegedly failed to protect her, is continuing.

At the time of the interview, she had been in safekeeping only a couple of days, but already found the new atmosphere a relief. "Everybody’s calmer," she said. "The tension level is extremely low. There are no gang influences that basically are threatening our lives. So it’s a change – a change for the better."

As a reporter left the prison that day, an officer at the security entrance said, "So, did you see him-her?"

Fumbling for an answer, the reporter said yes and that Star had been "very nice."

"For a kidnapper," the officer replied.