Driven by “rage” and “revulsion” of registered sex offenders, the 2009 Nebraska Legislature enacted LB 97, which allowed law enforcement to monitor and restrict Internet usage by those offenders. In an exhaustive order following a trial, U.S. District Judge Richard D. Kopf held that sections of the legislation “gut the ...
The confines of prison render abuse by guards a virtually impossible crime to prosecute. The few cases that come to light and successfully prosecuted occur only with video evidence or the testimony of another guard. Florida Department of Corrections [FDOC] guard John Pisciotta took the courageous path to report another ...
A contributor, perhaps the most serious one, to violence in Mississippi prisons is the accessory before the fact by guards.
Prisoners being able to access cells and cellblocks not their own due to locks being easily overcoming via design problems or guards “popping” them is a “constant” problem. Sometimes, the ...
In the midst of a pornographic email scandal, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery retired. That move came just a week after his colleagues issued an order suspending him from all judicial work and instructing the Judicial Conduct Board to begin an ethics violation investigation.
McCaffery was renowned for ...
A class action challenging the indefinite jailing of persons in a Mississippi’s Scott County Detention Center without indictment or representation by counsel was filed on September 23, 2014. The lead plaintiffs are indigents who have been held up to sixteen months without being indicted or appointed counsel. They seek injunctive ...
The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) cancelled the contract for a residential youth program run by Youth Services International (YSI). DJJ defaulted on the contract for the Santa Rosa Substance Abuse Treatment Center because the facility’s staff “failed to correct deficiencies and sustain those corrective actions in areas involving ...
The death of a woman on a private transport van raised a much needed spotlight on the private prisoner transport industry. The 54-year-old woman was found slumped over in the back of the Prisoner Transportation Services of America (PTS) van after a grueling two-day transport from Kentucky to South Florida. ...
In response to a female secretary who was raped by a prisoner at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution – Rockview in 2013, the State Attorney General’s office filed a pleading that blamed the woman for her rape.
As PLN previously reported, prisoner Omar Best went into a secretarial office at Rockview ...
The estate of a pretrial detainee who was “neglected to death” sued Florida’s Broward County Jail (BCJ) and its medical contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services (Armor). In other BCJ news, a guard was acquitted of assaulting a pretrial detainee.
Upon entering BCJ in February 2012, Raleigh Priester, 52, carried 240 ...
Severe financial obligations imposed upon offenders who get entangled with the criminal justice system "perpetually punish many ex-offenders and consign them to a life of permanent debt and poverty," concludes a report published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The report "explores the causes and effects of perpetual ...
