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 ...

Coleman v. Newsom, a class-action case challenging inadequate mental health care for California state prisoners, has been ongoing for the past 35 years. Over the course of that litigation, a bench trial was held where a federal district court “found overwhelming evidence of significant and chronic understaffing among ...

On June 30, the Federal Communications Commission announced a two-year postponement of a rule to lower the price of phone and video calls in prisons and jails. As PLN reported, the FCC voted in 2024 to approve the regulation, which was set to go into effect nationwide later this year ...

Gratien Milandou-Wamba, 32, fled to the United States on a tourist visa in 2023 from the Republic of the Congo; he applied for asylum several months later, claiming that he had been tortured in his home country because of his brother’s political activity. Milandou-Wamba then obtained a work permit and ...

On June 25, Amy Murray, a 46-year-old former prison nurse in Miller County, received a 12-year sentence after she entered an Alford plea—a guilty plea in which the defendant maintains innocence—around charges related to poisoning her husband, Joshua, and setting fire to their home. 

Seven years ago, in December 2018, ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit approved the appointment of a receiver to oversee operations of the Raymond Detention Center (RDC) in Hinds County, Mississippi. The district court’s action was a contempt sanction imposed for the County’s repeated failures to comply with a consent decree.

RDC has ...

Since the passage almost 30 years ago of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, prisoners have been required prior to filing suit against their captors to exhaust all available administrative remedies, usually through the prison grievance system. A body of case law has since arisen defining the ...