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 ...

While prisons cage the majority of American prisoners, jails around the country still hold around 600,000 on any given day and anywhere between five and ten million people cycle through them annually. The vast majority of people who enter and leave American jails are never convicted of a crime. Jails ...

In a case with enormous implications for Oklahoma jail detainees, the state Supreme Court ruled on March 11, 2025, that a jail’s subcontracted medical providers are “employees” for the purposes of the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act (GTCA), O.S.Supp.2014, §152(7)(b)(7), and are therefore immune from liability.

That ruling ended an ...

After the Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC) reached a settlement with state prisoner Anthony Lamar in his retaliation claim against officials at the Varner Unit, the federal court for the Eastern District of Arkansas granted the parties’ joint stipulation to dismiss the suit on March 10, 2025. Driving the DOC ...

On September 6, 2024, the Supreme Court of Kansas held that a prisoner’s due process rights were violated when he was able only to observe his parental rights termination hearing via videoconferencing and was unable to testify or consult with his attorney during the hearing.

Federal prisoner “H.S.” and “R.A.” ...

On April 10, 2025, a jury in tiny Abingdon, Virginia (pop. 8,295) refused to assign liability to a half-dozen state Department of Corrections (DOC) employees accused in the death of mentally ill prisoner Charles Givens, 52, at Marion Correctional Treatment Center.

As PLN reported, five guards and the former warden ...

When government agencies—including corrections departments—enter contracts with private companies, they typically go through a competitive bidding process, beginning with a Request for Proposals (RFP). This ensures that taxpayers have access to information used to award government contracts, providing a level of fiscal responsibility. However, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC), ...

The top New York City Department of Correction (DOC) employees in 2024 overtime averaged over 40 extra hours weekly—enough to fill every week with 14-hour workdays all year, with no days off. For the year, DOC paid $283 million to employees who logged a total of 3.8 million overtime hours. ...

In an opinion filed on August 26, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed an appeal by the Sheriff of Louisiana’s Orleans Parish, who sought to halt construction of a mental health annex for detainees at the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) that was ordered under a ...

On October 17, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that 26 cell checks performed within 13 hours by six Los Angeles County jailers who nevertheless failed to assess the condition of a detainee later found dead were sufficient to create a genuine issue of fact ...

On April 1, 2024, jury in federal court for the Northern District of Illinois awarded $875,000 to state prisoner John E. Taylor, Jr., after finding officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and its contracted medical provider, Wexford Health Sources, had violated his constitutional rights with the deliberate indifference ...

When Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in March 2025 to send several hundred Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the tradeoff for Salvadoran Pres. Nayib Bukele was unclear. But on March 30, 2015, Dropsite News reported a clue: The deal included ...

On January 22, 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) signed an agreement with a firm providing janitorial services at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, which promised to pay $1,029,175 in restitution to workers from whom managers extorted kickbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm, CleanTech, kicked ...

In a case of importance to California prisoners, the state Court of Appeals, Sixth Appellate District, held on June 28, 2024, that Penal Code § 2900.5 requires a trial court to apply presentence credits for periods that a defendant has spent in jail toward any and all sentences handed down “concurrently ...

uring a hearing on April 9, 2025, Florida lawmakers pieced together an elaborate money trail from the former owner of prison and jail medical giant Centurion Health, which pumped $10 million into an ultimately successful effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to tank a 2024 ballot initiative legalizing marijuana ...

Three Arizona prisoners were murdered at the state prison complex in Tucson on April 4, 2025, by fellow prisoner Ricky Wassenaar, 61. He claimed to have a fourth victim, too, who died in November 2024, but state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry (DCRR) officials disputed that.

As PLN reported, ...

Since its September 2021 ruling in Brawner v. Scott Cty., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has held that pretrial detainees challenging their medical care in jail are not fully held to the “deliberate indifference” standard laid out by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) ...

Joining other western European nations, Italy began permitting prisoners to have conjugal visits on April 18, 2025. Officials did not identify the prisoner making inaugural use of the newly constructed “sex room” at his prison in the Umbrian town of Terni.

The move follows a January 2024 ruling by the ...

Longstanding prison education programs at two major public research universities in the South face an uncertain future

by Charlotte West

Just a few months after Georgia State University announced last spring that it would end its college program for incarcerated students, Auburn University’s program was suspended indefinitely after the Alabama ...

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, ...

The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government (NMFOG) has filed an enforcement complaint under the state Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) against the Bernalillo County Board of Commissioners, seeking release of video and other records from the County’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), as well as a declaration whether MDC ...

In a settlement agreement dated May 28, 2024, Colorado’s Jefferson County agreed to pay $500,000 to Frederick Fisk, a former detainee at the county jail who suffered substantial injuries to his face after guards used a jujitsu move to take him to the ground while he was handcuffed.

On the ...

A third New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) guard pleaded guilty on April 23, 2025, to assaulting a Mid-State Correctional Facility prisoner and lying about it to cover it up. Brandon Montanari, 34, admitted in federal court for the Northern District of New York to depriving the ...

In 2017, a prisoner describing himself as a “Christian-Israelite” was denied access to his Arizona prison’s Passover meal after the unit chaplain challenged his religious beliefs.

Michael Ray Fuqua was incarcerated at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Stafford when he requested “to be placed on the list to observe ...

On August 20, 2024, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (DCS) released a report detailing its investigation into three prisoner suicides, finding that DCS did not provide psychological autopsies after two, that one took place weeks after a previous attempt by the ...

A deputy sheriff in Alabama’s Walker County Jail pleaded guilty on April 1, 2025, to a federal charge of depriving the civil rights of a mentally ill detainee with a brutal kick to the groin during his arrest in January 2023. Carl Lofton Carpenter, 55, admitted to “us[ing] his shod ...

A South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) firing squad executed state prisoner Mikal Mahdi on April 11, 2025. It was the state’s second execution conducted by shooting a prisoner to death. In the first, five weeks earlier, a DOC rifle squad gunned down prisoner Brad Sigmon, 67, as PLN reported. ...

On November 13, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld a jury award of more than $8.7 million to the Estate of detainee who died in Utah’s Davis County Jail. In its ruling, the Court agreed that jail Nurse Marvin Anderson and other County officials were ...

An apparent error by attorneys for a former Idaho prisoner limited her recovery to just $62,500 after she was raped by a guard. In a letter to PLN on August 30, 2024, the Idaho Department of Administration confirmed that was the amount paid by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) ...

On November 15, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reinstated a deliberate indifference claim lodged by Missouri prisoner Tremonti Perry, whose alleged medical neglect left him in a coma—and therefore unable to complete the prison grievance process. His complaint had been dismissed for just that reason ...

Global Tel*Link (GTL), doing business as ViaPath Technologies, is one of the nation’s largest providers of carceral communications services, including phones, video calling, and e-messaging. Its subsidiaries include Telmate, LLC and TouchPay Holdings, LLC; the latter provides money transfer services for people to send funds to loved ones in prisons ...

On April 29, 2025, the federal court for the District of Idaho issued a preliminary injunction blocking the state Department of Corrections (DOC) from carrying out any executions until it improves access for members of the media. The ruling came in a suit filed by AP News, East Idaho News ...

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 ...

On October 21, 2024, after a trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, judgment was entered awarding former state prisoner Justin C. Mustafa $1.3 million on his claim that he was repeatedly stabbed by Defendant state prison guard Christopher Byars. 

In December 2018, according to Mustafa’s ...

Prison systems are increasingly rethinking solitary confinement due to extensive research that has found solitary results in serious detrimental effects—particularly on prisoners who are mentally ill, pregnant, or otherwise vulnerable.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was ordered to implement reforms to its solitary confinement policies and practices ...

The federal Department of Justice (DOJ) canceled some $5 million in funding to the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice on April 4, 2025. The decision to end the five multiyear grants to the criminal justice nonprofit was emailed that day and “effective immediately,” Vera reported.

The cuts affected programs ...

The city of Durham, North Carolina agreed on May 20, 2024, to pay $7.75 million to resolve the wrongful conviction claim of exonerated prisoner Darryl Howard. He spent almost 24 years in prison before a federal jury agreed that former Durham cop Darrell Dowdy improperly manipulated evidence used to convict ...

Those in custody of the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) “lose the privilege of speaking to the news media,” a policy that makes it “unique among prison systems nationwide,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

With limited exceptions, the prison system’s media access policy, GA-02.01-8, prohibits “personal ...

In November 2024, a Massachusetts jury awarded $13 million to former state prisoner Michael Sullivan, 64, as compensation for his wrongful conviction for a 1986 armed robbery and murder. Sullivan’s case involved false laboratory test results, as well as a prosecutorial plea bargain that obtained false testimony from the real ...

On September 5, 2024, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) gave the last signoff to a $5.6 million settlement with the wife of a state prisoner who was forced to strip and submit to an invasive body cavity search when she went to visit him.

When Christina Cardenas, ...

Nine condemned Tennessee prisoners filed suit in state court on March 14, 2025, accusing the state Department of Corrections (DOC) of subjecting them to a “risk of torturous death” with a lethal execution protocol utilizing pentobarbital. Kevin Burns, Byron Black, Jon Hall, Kennath Henderson, Anthony Darrell Hines, Henry Hodges, Farris ...

No Georgia prisoner facing a death sentence has ever been able to prove that he is intellectually disabled beyond a reasonable doubt—an impossibly high bar that no other state has set. It was finally lowered with a new bill signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on May 13, ...

On October 18, 2024, the federal court for the District of Maryland granted a motion to modify a years-old consent decree in a decades-old class-action challenge to conditions at Baltimore’s Central Booking and Intake Center (CBIC).

As PLN reported, the original decree was granted in 1993, bringing under the Court’s ...

On March 19, 2025, an agreement was reached paying $50,000 to a Maryland prisoner—who is also a former Baltimore jailer—to settle his claim that he was subjected to excessive force by a guard at Western Correctional Institution (WCI). The agreement settled two suits that prisoner Jeffrey Corporal filed over the ...

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 ...

In a research paper published on October 15, 2024, UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich examined the state of civil rights law regarding excessive use of force by American prison guards and concluded that the current standard is woefully inadequate to protect prisoners from abuse or permit redress once excessive force ...

Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) prisoner Joseph “Joey” Luzier III, a transgender woman, was housed at the Tomoka Correctional Institution, a men’s facility, when on August 25, 2020, she was placed in a cell with Rene Valentin Rivas—a registered sexual predator who was suspected of sexually assaulting two other prisoners. ...

Kansas state prisoner Gary Lee Raburn, 62, was incarcerated at the Lansing Correctional Facility on January 6, 2023, when he was fatally strangled by his cellmate, Ladarious R. Barkers, 25. 

According to the complaint later filed on his behalf, Raburn was “approximately 37 years older than Barkers and physically infirm, ...

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 ...

On December 17, 2024, the Court of Appeals of the State of Washington, Division II, held that a trial court lacked personal jurisdiction over the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and dismissed a motion to enforce a released prisoner’s community custody condition. The Court concluded with an important warning for ...

The newly installed vice-chair of Florida’s Republican Party was previously convicted of providing contraband to a detainee he was accused of having sex with while working as a jail guard, according to reporting by Fresh Take Florida on May 1, 2025.

Jovante Teague, 30, was a guard at the Dixie ...

On March 26, 2024, the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) signed an agreement to pay $3,150,000 to a former state prisoner to settle her claims that she was raped by a guard and then denied entry to a diversion program based on medications she was prescribed because of the trauma ...

On December 18, 2024, notice was filed in the federal court for the Central District of Illinois that a $6 million good-faith settlement had been reached resolving a lawsuit seeking compensation for the April 2022 death of pretrial detainee Brian Downs at the Morgan County Detention Facility (MCDF). The complaint ...

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, ...