Seventh Circuit Clarifies Standard for Recruiting Counsel in Pro Se Cases
by David Reutter
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has held that an Illinois federal district court, like many federal courts in Northern Illinois, used an improper standard when refusing to exercise its discretion to recruit counsel ...
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court’s imposition of four special conditions of supervised release, due to the court’s failure to explain its reasons for imposing them.
Rashan R. Doyle was convicted in New York of attempted sexual abuse in the first degree; as a result ...
A series of investigative news reports by Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Joy Lukachick, published from February to December 2013, revealed numerous problems in Georgia’s prison system – particularly at Hays State Prison (HSP), located around 40 miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee – and resulted in lawsuits, security improvements and ...
by David M. Reutter and Alex Friedmann
Defendants who are placed on probation and ordered to pay a growing array of fines and fees levied by local governments facing budget deficits, combined with additional fees charged by private companies hired to provide probation services, are increasingly being squeezed into burdensome ...
by David M. Reutter
Research into the use of topical antibiotics in correctional facilities found that prisoners frequently use antibiotics for reasons inconsistent with their recommended purpose.
A two-year study of 822 New York state prisoners was presented at the 39th Annual Educational Conference and International Meeting of the Association ...
As the United States was becoming an independent nation with its own values and form of government, it discarded an archaic English system that drove the poor into greater poverty. When the U.S. ended the practice of debtors’ prisons in 1833, it ensured that people would not be jailed merely ...
by David M. Reutter
Last year, the GEO Group – the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison company – announced that it was pulling out of its contracts to operate three Mississippi prisons. That development came shortly after a federal court announced sweeping changes at the GEO-run Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility ...
by David M. Reutter
Several Texas towns are bemoaning their bad business decision to enter into the for-profit incarceration industry as the bottom began dropping out of that market 5 or 6 years ago. Over a two-decade boom in prison building, rural communities in Texas and other states were able ...
by David M. Reutter
Prisons and jails in Massachusetts have a problem: Almost every correctional facility in the state is operating above its capacity. Budget cuts have compounded the overcrowding problem because there is no money for new construction or expansion, and longer prison and jail terms due to tougher ...
by David M. Reutter
The fact that prisoners have a constitutional right to adequate medical care under the Eighth Amendment has long been established. Since the U.S. Supreme Court made that pronouncement in Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976), most lawsuits challenging deliberate indifference by guards and medical staff ...
