It has been an open secret for many years that the District of Columbia jail system is a human-rights disaster. Our nation's capital's correctional system's faults have been compiled in a 73-page report prepared by the Washington Lawyer's Rights Committee for Civil Rights and Urban affairs and published in June ...
The Department of Justice (DOJ) plan seemed straightforward: build two badly-needed correction facilities on the Navajo Nation to replace two obsolescent and overcrowded facilities. Over $70.5 million was allotted for this project, elaborate plans were prepared by professionals, and DOJ and tribal staff selected to supervise the project. Then it ...
The state of California, under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice and singled out by the U.S. Supreme Court for endemic overcrowding in its prison system, still had to be compelled to do the right thing for its incarcerated, low-wage prison workers. California, who offers a day for day ...
In a controversial move, Brazilian prisoners convicted of murder and rape have been allowed to take a drug called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), in a drink known as Ayahuasca, as part of a spiritual rehabilitation program. Generally ingested in a liquid form with tea, the program is sponsored by Acuda, a prisoners’ ...
In February 2012, a federal jury in New Mexico awarded $3.38 million to three female prisoners who were raped by Anthony Townes, a guard at the Camino Nuevo Women’s Correctional Facility, which was operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Townes, who had previously pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the ...
A study released last year, prepared by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), documented what most criminal justice experts have long suspected – that offenders’ pre-arrest incomes are significantly lower than the incomes of people who are not incarcerated. Interestingly, the research did not require a new statistical study; it utilized ...
Those people unfortunate enough to have been incarcerated are all too aware of the harsh realities of life “on the inside.” Thanks to America’s fascination with prison as a solution for all anti-social behavior, as well as draconian sentences and the avarice of the private prison industry, more and more ...
Crime labs nationwide continue to face seemingly intractable problems – particularly in terms of unreliable forensic evidence testing and being influenced by law enforcement and prosecutorial bias. Despite efforts at reform, and efforts to implement technological advances, the field of criminal forensic science seems mired in incompetence and corruption.
In ...
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the U.S. prisoner count in 2014 was 1,561,500, down 1%, or 15,400, from the 2014 figure. Over a third of that modest decrease came about as a result of a decrease of 5,300 prisoners in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in ...
Paula Cooper, convicted for participating in a murder of an elderly grandmother in Indiana in 1984, when she was 15, was sentenced to death before eventually having her sentence commuted in 1989 to 60 years in prison, was finally released in 2013. Unfortunately, freedom did not bring peace to the ...
