For most Americans, life without Google or Wikipedia would be quite different, and living without Internet access probably unimaginable. One might ask, “How would I obtain the information I need to live my life?” Yet for most of America’s 2.3 million prisoners there is no Google, no Facebook, no Internet ...
A former high-ranking official at a New Jersey county jail, convicted on federal charges for illegally listening to and recording the private phone conversations of jail union leaders, has lost his appeal and will remain in federal prison.
Kirk Eady, 46, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, was convicted in March ...
A report compiled by a well-respected prisoner group indicates that while the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) is diligent in collecting profits from prisoners' commissary purchases, it has failed to spend those funds on prisoner benefit purchases, as required by state regulation -- to the tune of a $2 million surplus for the fiscal year ending in June 2015.
The stunning revelations are contained in a report authored by Gordon Haas, Chairman of the Norfolk Lifers Group, a prisoner group that has operated in Massachusetts prisons for several decades, advocating for better conditions and the protection of prisoners' rights. Lifers Group is comprised primarily of prisoners serving life sentences at the maximum security MCI Norfolk and has long examined the Massachusetts DOC's abuses of its fiscal responsibilities. In October, 2015, lifer Gordon Haas and his group published a report on the DOC's income and expenses relating to accounts funded primarily by commissions from prisoner commissary purchases via the Keefe Commissary Network (KCN).
Massachusetts regulations 103 DOC 476.10 and 476.11 dictate that the Department of Corrections maintain certain accounts that are intended to provide services or benefits to prisoners. The accounts are funded by monthly assessments of fixed percentages from the ...
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit focused on racial and economic policy, in conjunction with Forward Together and a dozen other community and civil rights organizations recently released a study which surveyed hardships experienced by former prisoners and their families. The study examined the experiences of over ...
In September 2015, Bernard Scott, 44, was arrested for various traffic violations and jailed at the Pine Lawn, Mo. jail in St. Louis County. He was held on a $360 bond.
While in detention he called guards to his cell, where he complained of severe abdominal pain and bleeding. An ...
As bad as it gets in some U.S. prisons, conditions at the notorious Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, South Africa are so abysmal that the government was forced to temporarily close the facility and evacuate prisoners after two contracted a fatal rat-borne disease.
In 2015, around 4,000 prisoners were removed ...
Following 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri ignited by the killing of an unarmed black youth by a white police officer, some local law enforcement practices have been changed. The reforms were spurred, in large part, by a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report that found Ferguson’s police department and court ...
Corrections officials tend to have a single-track mindset: guards oversee prisoners in an attempt to maintain security and order. But what if the looking glass needs to be reversed and the jailers need to be overseen instead? With identity theft perpetrated by prison and jail employees on the rise, that ...
These are flush times for California prison workers. In 2014, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) employees hit a six-year high for overtime pay, receiving $575 million in overtime despite a major decline in the state’s prison population.
Over a third of CDCR guards (more than 8,000) were paid ...
On April 5, 2015, Ramon C. Estrada, 62, incarcerated since 2005, died at the Utah State Prison due to an apparent heart attack related to renal failure. His death was preceded by two days of missed dialysis treatments because a medical technician had failed to show up for work. Estrada ...
