The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a grant of summary judgment in a prisoner’s civil rights action alleging the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has a widespread practice and custom of transferring prisoners in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights.
Glenn Smith, who the Eleventh Circuit described as ...
Delbert Tibbs, a peaceful advocate to abolish the death penalty, has lost his battle against cancer and died at the age of 74. His advocacy was borne of personal experience of being wrongfully convicted.
Tibbs was born on June 19, 1939, in Shelby, Mississippi. At the age of 12, he ...
Georgia’s 2012 sentencing reform law is saving taxpayers $20 million annually, said Gov. Nathan Deal during a speech to a University of Georgia alumni group.
The top priority for Deal going into the 2012 legislative session was House Bill 1176. In the end, it made it through the legislative process ...
Pennsylvania courts are frequently imprisoning people who are unable to pay fines. Proposed rule changes aim to end debtor’s prisons, but the real problem may be a lack of oversight for the local courts that oversee such cases.
Ann Lisa Wodarski has been sent to jail six times by Judge ...
A 2013 law passed by Louisiana lawmakers was expected to save $6 million by diverting drug offenders to treatment and shortening the prison sentences of such offenders by having them complete a drug treatment program. The law has not worked as planned, leaving the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC) with ...
“We’re at a fork in the road,” Alabama state Senator Cam Ward, chairman of the Prison Reform Task Force, said in June 2014. “We have two paths to choose from and neither one is easy. Those of us on the task force can solve, it or federal courts can do ...
The New York Supreme Court Appellate Division has affirmed a $15 million judgment awarded to a prisoner who became a paraplegic due to a prison doctor’s malpractice.
Following the judgment by the Court of Claims, the State of New York appealed; PLN previously reported the judgment. [See: PLN, Jan. ...
With the promise of saving taxpayer dollars to house a growing prisoner population during a cyclical crime wave in the early 1990s, Florida decided to experiment with private prisons. From the start, those involved in the push to privatize were tainted with ethical conflicts, and more than two decades later ...
A recently-enacted Michigan law allows an offender convicted of a nonviolent felony or two misdemeanors to ask a judge to expunge their criminal record. The expungement bill had been in the works for several years before it was passed in a lame-duck session in December 2014.
The new statute amends ...
Cost cutting is a staple of most prison and jail systems. However, a mid-2007 decision by California’s Fresno County Jail (FCJ) to restrict psychotropic drugs for prisoners turned out to be a short-sighted exercise that resulted in human suffering and financial costs far exceeding any savings.
FCJ was accredited in ...
