In May 2016, private prison firm The GEO Group, which operates the maximum-security Louis Kutama Sinthumule Correctional Centre in Louis Trichard, South Africa, lost a lawsuit that alleged the company’s guards beat a prisoner while he was restrained in handcuffs and shackles. Prisoner Takalani Neluheni claimed that in February 2011 ...
In an October 7, 2015 corrected ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by two New York state prisoners alleging they had been sexually abused by a guard who fondled their penises.
James Crawford and Thaddeus Corley, both ...
On March 11, 2016, Orleans Parish jail officials in Louisiana agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from the 2011 suicide of a mentally ill detainee. The suit, filed against Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman and numerous other jail personnel, alleged that prisoner William Goetzee, a career ...
The June 6, 2015 escape of two New York state prisoners from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora revealed troublesome issues that will not soon go away. While many news outlets focused on the spectacular nature of the break-out and emphasized the potential threat to public safety, others noted that ...
Despite the fact that the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president in U.S. history, in 2015 the number of deportations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reached a low not seen in many years. Some believe the drop was the result of more targeted ICE ...
The federal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently investigated and issued a final report concerning a 2015 prison transport bus accident that claimed the lives of eight prisoners and two guards. The report faulted both the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) officer driving the vehicle as well as the ...
The Vera Institute for Justice, a non-profit research organization, has completed an ambitious aggregation and analysis of the county-by-county increase in incarceration from 1970 to 2014. Starting with figures provided by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and using statistical tools to fill in gaps in data ...
A new study released in December of 2015 by the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), for the period of 2011 to 2012, shows that although the percentage of veterans in the state and federal prison population has declined slightly, fully half have been diagnosed with some form ...
The National Immigrant Justice Center and the Detention Watch Network recently released a joint report sharply critical of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency and its oversight methods, terming them "fundamentally unchanged and unreformed. The ICE detention system, the report said, "remains non-transparent and ineffective at identifying pervasive and ...
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inspectors are entrusted with ensuring that facilities used to house vulnerable detainees are following strict guidelines for their operation. However, an October 2015 report by two independent prisoner-rights groups, "Lives in Peril – How Ineffective Inspections Make ICE Complicit in Immigration Detention Abuse," shows that ...
