The efficiency and functionality of every enterprise rests largely upon the staff put in place to carry out its operations. But at the heart of the most dysfunctional prisons PLN has reported on over the last 35 years is one common denominator: Understaffing. Nationwide, there are an estimated 31,000 vacant ...

With its sixth and seventh detainee deaths of the year coming just minutes apart on June 20, 2025, New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex eclipsed its death toll for all of 2024. Benjamin Kelly, 37, and James Maldonado, 56, were the latest of at least 40 people who have ...

After it was signed into law in 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 147 § 15601 et seq., remained unused for a decade while standards were developed and implemented to curtail rape and sexual assaults at prisons and jails nationwide. At that time, the Human Rights ...

The State of Washington has consistently failed to provide timely competency evaluations and restoration services to defendants facing criminal charges. Despite years of litigation, injunctions, consent decrees, and contempt fines ranging into the hundreds of millions, problems persist unabated. With mentally ill detainees languishing in jails untreated and unable to ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 22, 2024, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky sentenced Jesse Kipf to 81 months in federal prison for hacking into the Hawai’i Death Registry the year before. It was a strange crime; in his guilty plea, Kipf, 39, admitted to using the ...