by David M. Reutter
Florida taxpayers spend around
$2.3 billion annually on the state’s Department of Corrections – twice what they spend on Florida’s 28 public colleges combined. At least five other states also led by Republican governors and GOP legislative majorities – Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska and Utah – ...
by David Reutter
Criminal justice reform advocates are pushing back against a new trend to “always believe the victim” in sexual assault cases, which has given rise to “victim-centered and offender-focused” investigations.
The victim-centric trend has led to a 20-point manifesto called the “You Have Options” law enforcement program, which ...
by David Reutter
Increasingly, criminal justice reformers are pushing for “ban-the-box” policies, ordinances and statutes, which are intended to eliminate from job applications the box that asks, “Have you been convicted of a felony?” [See: PLN, March 2017, p.26; Oct. 2014, p.46]. Many jurisdictions have adopted such policies, but ...
by David Reutter
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) must provide prisoners with the option of receiving kosher meals, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held in affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment and a permanent injunction.
As previously reported in PLN, the U.S. Department of Justice sued ...
by David Reutter
The use of prisoner labor and poor prison conditions are behind calls for action in Texas and Alabama, and have led to concerns over the use of prison labor nationwide.
Most people believe slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but that amendment ...
by David Reutter
The Eleventh Circuit held last year that a district court erred in finding the dismissals of a prisoner’s prior civil rights actions due to “lack of jurisdiction” and for “want of prosecution” counted as strikes under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The Court of Appeals further ...
by David Reutter
Two federal district courts, one in Florida and the other in Rhode Island, have held prison gerrymandering unconstitutional, though one of the orders was overturned on appeal. The rulings are the first of their kind.
“This is a big win for democracy,” said Adam Lioz of the ...
by David Reutter
In a preliminary consent order, Sentinel Offender Services, a private probation company, agreed to stop its practice of drug testing probationers without court approval. The order was entered in a class-action case challenging Sentinel’s practices in a Georgia county that uses the company to manage its probation ...
by David Reutter
In 2005, at the urging of then-Governor Mitch Daniels, the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) awarded a contract to privatize medical care for prisoners. The winning bidder, Prison Health Services, merged in 2011 with Correctional Medical Services to form Corizon Health, which later won renewal of a ...
by David Reutter
Virginia has more than 3,500 prisoners eligible for parole, representing over 9% of its prison population of 38,000 – a significant number considering that the state abolished parole over 20 years ago. Still, even for those long-serving prisoners who are still eligible, the odds of being granted ...
