By Chuck Sharman
On September 2, 2022, the federal court for the Northern District of Georgia accepted an amended complaint from a former detainee in the Clayton County Jail who spent 13 hours in labor there because jailers allegedly thought her infant would be stillborn. Only when Tiana Hill finally ...
by Chuck Sharman
On June 27, 2022, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the nonprofit that publishes PLN, filed suit in federal court for the Northern District of Indiana under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, accusing St. Joseph County Sheriff William J. Redman of violating the firm’s First Amendment and ...
by Jory Smith and Chuck Sharman
On February 22, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a writ of certiorari to hear an appeal by an impoverished New York sex offender who was forced to remain in prison two years after his release because state restrictions made finding housing ...
On May 10, 2022, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed a state parole board decision and granted release to Sundiata Acoli, whose involvement with a radical group that advocated overthrow of the U.S. government was repeatedly cited to keep him incarcerated for nearly a half century. In doing so, the ...
By Chuck Sharman
On April 26, 2022, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva walked back comments made at a press conference hours earlier, when he suggested a journalist was under investigation for covering a leaked video showing one of his deputies kneeling on a restrained detainee’s head.
“All parties to ...
By Chuck Sharman
A former jailer was fired and the sheriff is now being sued after two women detained at the Grainger County Jail complained they were forced to stage “sex shows” at the Tennessee lockup on more than 30 occasions over a two-month period beginning in February 2021.
According ...
By Chuck Sharman
Four men held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by private prison firm CoreCivic at its Otay-Mesa Detention Center in San Diego filed complaints after a staff member allegedly ogled them on March 22, 2022. That was less than two weeks after another group of 12 ...
By Chuck Sharman
Roughly one-third of the U.S. supply of Paxlovid, an antiviral pill to fight COVID-19, were still sitting unused on April 26, 2022, according to the New York Times. But few if any of those 630,000 doses were destined for prisons, despite seeming “tailor-made” for use there, ...
by Chuck Sharman
A report released on January 31, 2022, by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) shows the financial burden that falls disproportionately on poor families as a result of interaction with the private companies in the criminal justice system.
CFPB was created in the wake of the ...
by Chuck Sharman
In a filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on January 5, 2022, Florida-based GEO Group—the nation’s largest private prison operator—laid bare its strategy to keep federal dollars flowing into the company’s coffers, despite a Presidential Executive Order that bars the U.S. Department of Justice ...
