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 ...

In an essay for Filter Magazine published on February 10, 2025, openly gay Tennessee prisoner Tony Vick made a surprising admission: He consistently identifies himself as “straight” in annual classification hearings conducted under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 147, § 15601 et seq. The reason, he added, ...

Former Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) Warden Randall Hepp took a deal before his sentencing on April 28, 2025, accepting a $500 fine in exchange for his no-contest plea to a misdemeanor charge of violating state and county institution laws. The deal allowed the now-retired prison official to avoid any ...

A complaint filed in federal court for the District of Colorado on March 26, 2025, accused guards at the Huerfano County Jail of needlessly assaulting a detainee suffering a mental health crisis and then ignoring him for another week as he slowly died from his injuries. Ironically, the detainee, Michael ...

Since 2023, the Idaho Department of Correction has spent $200,000 in purchasing lethal injection chemicals. Because of prisoner appeals and other delays, however, those drugs have now expired, amounting to a complete waste of taxpayer money. Although Idaho passed a bill this year to replace lethal injections with a firing ...

Alabama: Kadarius Shermaine Todd, 28, a new guard still on probationary status at the Madison County Jail, was fired on April 4, 2025, after allegedly attempting to smuggle contraband into the lockup. He was apprehended upon arrival to meet a contact with a package containing Suboxone, cigarettes, a cell phone, ...

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 ...