More than 1,000 prisoners have been released since California voters approved in 2012 the reform of the state’s harsh three strikes law. Despite not being provided pre-and post-release services afforded other prisoners, the strikers have a lower recidivism rate than other released prisoners.
At the height of ...
Two consultants hired to analyze the cost of prisoner phone calls charged by Louisiana’s Sheriffs have resigned due to conflict of interest.
The Louisiana Public Service Commission (PSC) held two hearings in 2012 on the prison phone issue. Much anger was expressed about the exorbitant costs of call from prisoners ...
California law encourages life-skill organizations to become involved in criminal justice, but a lack of oversight has allowed some non-profits to talk about responsibility while the organization itself shirks it.
A review by the Voice of San Diego (VOSD) of the Corrective Behavior Institute uncovered serious problems with the well-intentioned ...
With a federal court order looming, the psychiatric unit at California’s Salinas Valley State Prison (SVPP) violated its own policies and made risky admissions to reduce its patient waiting lists.
As a three-judge panel was about to decide whether it should continue the decades long oversight of California’s prison mental ...
Hunger strikers and a federal lawsuit have pushed California prison officials to reverse a decades old policy that banned personal photographs of prisoners held in the state’s four special security housing units (SHU). While the reversal currently only applies to prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP), pressure is being ...
Seven guards at a Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJ) facility have been fired or disciplined for assaulting teenage prisoners. Many of the incidents were caught on video.
The TJJ established the Phoenix Program in 2012 to calm and counsel incarcerated youths. Guards, who internal reports say were inexperienced and sloppily ...
A California court is scheduled to follow a victim’s request to sentence her rapist despite the fact that he committed suicide.
Anthony Nicholas Orban was an Orange County detective who was off-duty when he went out “boozing and stalking cute girls” with his prison guard roommate, Jeff Thomas Jelinek, on ...
An arbitrator ordered the state of Washington Department of Corrections (WDOC) to rehire three guards fired on the heels of a guard’s murder. The arbitrator’s ruling found that “widespread… complacency” existed at the Monroe correctional Complex (MCC), which “cautioned” against singling out complacent front-line guards.
In 2011, guard Jayme Biendl ...
With the help from students at the Stanford Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic, Pablo Manuel Diaz, 37, became the first Florida prisoner to be circumcised while incarcerated.
Diaz who is serving a life sentence at Blackwater River Correctional Facility, was born in Cuba to Jewish parents. Fear of political persecution ...
Jail expansion was unpopular in 2007 with voters in Harris County and the City of Houston. Learning from that defeat, local politicians gained approval of an expansion of the jail, but they called it something else on the 2013 ballot.
That ballot proposal was “fundamentally different than what was asked ...
