Historically, prisons and jails have been loathe to give prisoners access to technology. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) didn’t even allow prisoners regular access to telephone calls until 2009. Access to internet-based services, which the non-incarcerated take for granted, is also forbidden by prison officials who cite vaguely-expressed ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story explores the increasing use of tablets in prisons and jails around the country by the same prison telecom monopolies that have controlled the prison phone “market” for the past 35 years. PLN has been reporting on tablets for a number of years now, ...

As the Hughes fire exploded over more than 10,000 acres of Los Angeles County on January 23, 2025, Sheriff Robert Luna issued evacuation orders to some 31,000 residents in and around the town of Castaic. But no such orders were issued for nearly 4,700 prisoners held there at the county’s ...

Voting rights for Nebraskans with felony convictions were up in the air until October 16, 2024. That’s when the state Supreme Court ruled against Attorney General Mike Hilgers (R), who had declared a new re-enfranchisement law unconstitutional and refused to enforce it. The Court said it was Hilgers’ action which ...

A June 2024 Texas Tribune analysis found that the number of detainees shipped to jails outside the county of their arrest had more than doubled in five years to a total of 4,358, up from 2,078 in June 2019. Meanwhile, the share of counties holding detainees elsewhere climbed from 31% ...

Warden Michele Buckner’s 25-year career with the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) came to an abrupt end on January 7, 2025, when she was reportedly walked off the job at South Central Correctional Center (SCCC) in Licking. Guard Maj. Robert Hopping, another DOC employee with two-plus decades of experience, was ...

The family of Monnie Washburn moved one step closer to holding Arizona prison officials accountable for his preventable heat-related death. On September 10, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s grant of summary judgment in their suit over his fatal 2017 transport ...

Despite a significant drop in reported violent crimes in Tennessee, the number of people incarcerated by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) has risen, according to data released by the United States Department of Justice on October 15, 2024.

That showed that by the end of 2022, the state held ...

After slipping away from Oklahoma’s Caddo County courthouse January 22, 2025, detainee Levi Yeahpau spent a day on the run until he was recaptured. His uncle, Daron Highwalker, said that the detainee “basically [] walked out both front doors, and he just walked out with shackles on and an orange ...

In an amended complaint filed in federal court for the Eastern District of Michigan on December 30, 2024, the mother of a 15-year-old girl accused a state judge of violating the child’s civil rights when he ordered her handcuffed and jailed after she fell asleep in his courtroom.

The incident ...

Parole-eligible Virginia prisoners face one of the nation’s stingiest boards. So state lawmakers made parole decisions more transparent with passage of two new laws, the most recent signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on April 4, 2024. Just six months later, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union ...

Transgender Idaho state prisoner Adree Edmo filed suit in 2017 seeking gender-confirming surgery. She suffered from an extreme case of gender dysphoria—a recognized medical condition—and had repeatedly attempted self-castration. As PLN reported, the litigation was successful, and Edmo received the surgery shortly before her release in July 2020. The federal ...

Justice delayed is justice denied. But for Ronnie Long, 68, who served over four decades in North Carolina prisons for a rape and burglary that he didn’t commit, the long wait to be proven innocent and released from prison came with a satisfyingly large price tag for those who wrongly ...

Peter Newton, 52, the former Sheriff of Addison County, Vermont, pleaded guilty in state court on January 24, 2025, to lewd and lascivious conduct and simple assault. The plea was the result of a deal that Newton cut with prosecutors and represented a significant downgrade from his original charges of ...

The Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) has directed its employees to follow the law, specifically 2017’s TRUST Act, which requires them to notify federal authorities that an immigrant is about to be released from a state prison only when presented with an arrest warrant from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ...

Nestled in central North Carolina’s Alamance County, Benevolence Farm offers a unique reentry program: a holistic approach to supporting formerly incarcerated women. The 13-acre farm serves as their residence, a hub for social advocacy and a small business enterprise. Though currently limited to a half-dozen residents in two shared homes, ...

Former California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) guard Gregory Rodriguez, 56, was convicted on January 14, 2025, of raping nearly two dozen prisoners at California Women’s Prison in Chowchilla between 2014 and 2022.

Though reports of his abuse began to surface in 2014, the CDCR didn’t begin to investigate ...

In a suit filed in federal court for the Northern District of Texas against the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on September 19, 2024, Aafia Siddiqui, 52, a Pakistani national serving an 86-year sentence for a terrorism-related conviction at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, alleged that staff subjected ...

In 2024, land trusts in 10 states generated an estimated $33 million in revenue for their prison systems. The figure was estimated from reports by Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington and Utah. Wyoming and Utah did not provide data, meaning the total amount is likely higher. ...

Among a raft of executive orders issued the day of his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) signed one reversing a decision by his predecessor to remove Cuba from a “blacklist” of nations accused of sponsoring terrorism. Though cheered by hardline opponents of the Cuban government ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

In an opinion decided July 22, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed a district court’s denial of a motion for appointment of counsel by a North Carolina prisoner for his 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint, finding that Kenneth Ray Jenkins’ “low IQ,” ...

by Douglas Ankney

On September 27, 2024, the state of New York agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit that alleged that the state had violated the Eighth Amendment rights of state prisoner Wonder Williams by keeping him isolated in administrative segregation (Ad Seg) for nearly nine years.

The ...

by Matthew Thomas Clarke

On July 2, 2024, the federal court for the District of Arizona approved settlement of a lawsuit brought against the United States by former immigration detainees under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. §§ 1346(b)(1), 2671, et seq., for separating them from their minor children ...

On February 2, 2025, as an exchange of detainees brokered by the United States proceeded between Israel and the Hamas militia, freed Palestinians accused their Israeli captors of abusing them in detention. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu did not respond to the allegations, though it released a report a month ...

On August 7, 2024, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the 2023 Restore the Vote Act (RVA), which returned the right to vote to individuals with felony convictions upon completion of their prison sentences. The law had been challenged a summer earlier by the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), and the group’s ...

Colorado lawmakers have amended the state’s “Clean Slate Act” to include arrests without charges and completed diversions. Effective July 1, 2025, arrest records will automatically be sealed when no charges are filed within one year. The provision is retroactive to January 2022.

Passed as Senate Bill 22-099 in 2022, the ...

by Sam Rutherford

The United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and Tenth Circuits recently held that the government may not immediately appeal a district court’s order extending to new factual scenarios that the exemption to governmental immunity first identified in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal ...

On October 29, 2024, the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal highlighted a former “jailhouse lawyer” who succeeded in becoming a licensed attorney after release. Damon Davis, 47, is now a lawyer with the Hamilton County Public Defender’s Office in Cincinnati. But when released from a 47-month federal prison term for ...

The stock price of Richmond, Virginia-based Indivior PLC was down 20% in the first 12 days of February 2025, after delayed approval from the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) of label changes on its Sublocade medication—a single injection that provides a 28-day extended-release dosage of buprenorphine for those recovering ...

On January 10, 2025, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), non-profit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN), filed suit in federal court for the Northern District of California against Sonoma County and its Sheriff Eddie Engram, as well as Dep. Melissa Parmenter, Division Operations Captain of the County’s ...

by Matt Clarke

"People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed,” lockups where “[i]nmates are maimed, tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not-so-benign neglect.”

So began a scathing 93-page report published by the Civil Rights Division (CRD) of ...

The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn, New York, has made the news repeatedly thanks to some high-profile detainees held there to await trial. But federal prosecutors have also charged nine detainees for a series of assaults on fellow detainees, including two murders.

Additionally, as of ...

Before leaving office on January 20, 2025, outgoing Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) issued a raft of clemency orders—including a sentence commutation for a Native American activist who was considered a political prisoner by Amnesty International and another for a disgraced former Pennsylvania judge convicted of locking up “kids ...

Pointing to “reports of staffing shortages, physical and sexual assaults, murders and a 188% turnover rate among prison guards just last year,” the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on August 20, 2024, that it was launching a civil rights investigation into Tennessee’s troubled Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), ...

On August 23, 2024, the Rhode Island Ethics Commission approved an informal resolution and settlement of ethics violation claims against Wayne Salisbury, Director of the state Department of Corrections (DOC). He was fined a mere $200 for failing “to properly disclose several instances of out-of-state travel during 2023 that were ...

Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) issued an executive order reversing one from his predecessor that barred the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) from contracting with private prisons.

That order from former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) affected only people detained by ...

On January 16, 2025, days before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) returned to office for a second term, outgoing U.S. Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland withdrew the Department of Justice (DOJ) protocol under which condemned federal prisoners are executed with pentobarbital. A DOJ report released with the announcement found “significant ...

A former West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) guard supervisor was found guilty on January 27, 2025, on charges related to the fatal beating of pretrial detainee Quantez Burks, 37, at Southern Regional Jail in March 2022. Former Lt. Chad Lester, 35, was convicted by a jury in ...

On November 5, 2024, the federal court for the Southern District of California approved a settlement under which the United States government agreed to pay $6,411,664.07 in legal fees and costs incurred by Plaintiffs in a class-action challenge to the migrant family separation policy implemented under the first administration of ...

In an executive order issued just after his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) ordered the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), parent agency of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), to remove trans women prisoners from women’s lockups and place them in prisons where they ...

Commissioners of Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County voted on September 19, 2024, to forgive $65,902,534.98 in debt owed by former detainees at the county lockup for unpaid fees they were charged during their incarceration. Such “pay to stay” fees have ballooned over the past few decades, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. ...

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry (DCRR) has faced bitter criticism for the healthcare provided to state prisoners, which a federal judge in 2022 called “plainly, grossly inadequate,” as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p.1.] So it wasn’t surprising when its early response to the COVID-19 pandemic ...

In a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on February 3, 2025, Salvadoran Pres. Nayib Bukele offered to house American prisoners in his country’s lockups “for a very small fee.” A week later, with much less fanfare, El Salvador admitted there was more to the bargain: Foreign Minister ...

On September 27, 2024, the case of exonerated Hawaii prisoner Alvin Jardine drew the state Supreme Court into a battle for a payout—any payout—from the state’s wrongful conviction fund. The state has avoided liability so far with a tendentious reading of the law.

State lawmakers created Ch. 661B of the ...

The Houston Police Department (HPD) fired Off. Deven Ortiz on January 7, 2025, following an investigation into multiple alleged uses of excessive force while he worked as a guard at the Harris County Jail (HCJ). That followed dismissal of charges against three other HCJ guards for assaulting a detainee, after ...

A former high-ranking guard with the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy on February 3, 2025, for her role in a smuggling and bribery scheme at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

As PLN reported, former Cpt. Christine Mary Livingston was accused in April ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 16, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the verdict and jury award of $6.4 million in compensatory damages against three nurses who worked for Corizon Health when it held the contract to provide healthcare at Michigan’s Kent County Correctional ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 18, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed an earlier holding by a three-judge panel of the Court, which found that § 241 of the Mississippi Constitution was unconstitutional. That’s the portion of the state’s Constitution that disenfranchises those convicted of ...

Privately owned prison and jail healthcare provider PrimeCare Medical has managed to keep details secret of payouts to settle lawsuits filed over injuries or deaths of prisoners, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2022, p.1.] One of those agreements in Pennsylvania was revealed in July 2023, when a federal court ...

On December 6, 2025, federal prosecutors dismissed their case against Jeffrey Scott Wells, 54, a former Vice President of private prison medical contractor Centurion Health caught colluding with a former Tennessee Department of Correction (DOC) official to rig bidding for the prison system’s healthcare contract in the firm’s favor.

The ...

Rosie Martinez, then 49, was arrested in January 2015 after police searched her New York City apartment and found heroin that belonged to her boyfriend. While in custody at the 107th Precinct of the City Police Department (NYPD), she suffered a serious injury to her hand. Martinez said officers had ...

A report released in September 2024 by the Washington Corrections Ombuds found that incidence of self-harm was particularly high among state Department of Corrections (DOC) prisoners held in solitary confinement. The report was the second by the Ombuds Office since state lawmakers ended the use of “disciplinary segregation” in the ...

In 2018, former pretrial detainee Quintin Scott joined a lawsuit alleging unconstitutional dental care at the Cook County Jail in Chicago because it failed to employ an oral surgeon. For over a decade since 2007, detainees with serious dental issues had been referred to the surgery clinic at a local ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

In an opinion filed on July 31, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld a district court’s denial of qualified immunity (QI) to two Arkansas jailers who ignored a detainee’s swollen arm and hand from a spider bite for three days. ...

In July 2024, 37-year-old Nathaniel Woods filed lawsuits against the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) and the Pierce County Jail for an assault he suffered there and sexual abuse by a DOC guard while subsequently hospitalized and comatose.

Woods pleaded guilty in July 2022 to taking a motor vehicle without ...

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held on August 1, 2024, that mortality reviews prepared by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) following a prisoner’s in-custody death may properly be withheld or heavily redacted in response to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), ...

Corrections officials usually limit what prisoners are allowed to read. A 2022 report by the nonprofit Marshall Project found that half the United States maintains lists of prohibited publications.

California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has some 3,000 disapproved books and magazines on its list—far fewer than the 20,000 ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

On September 26, 2024, voting rights group Millions for Prisoners (M4P) sued New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver (D), alleging that state policies, practices, and procedures substantially denied access to thousands of released state prisoners eligible to vote.

They were re-enfranchised by the New ...

Much has been reported about the prison staffing crisis in the United States. But by the end of 2024, a curious trend was emerging: In 16 states that year, lawmakers considered 31 correctional oversight bills. In Washington, which already had an independent agency tasked with oversight of state prisons, lawmakers ...

Alabama: Former Crenshaw County Jail Administrator Christian Alexander Porter, 33, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of excessive force, falsifying records and witness tampering on January 28, 2025. According to the Washington Post, the charges stem from an October 2021 incident in which Porter allegedly beat a ...

On February 18, 2025, charges were announced against nine New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) guards in the fatal beating of prisoner Robert L. Brooks, 43. The announcement was followed by a rogue strike staged by guards at three prisons, which were put on lockdown as a ...