When Hawaii passed the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) in 2012 it hoped to duplicate the results of the 17 other states adopting similar initiatives, accord to a recent report by the Urban Institute. For a while, the state did see improvement, with Hawaii saving $2.5 million by holding fewer prisoners ...
When Congress Passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA), it reduced the 100 to 1 disparity for crack cocaine offenses compared to cocaine offenses to 18 to 1. The intent was to reduce sentences and, as an added benefit, reduce the federal prison population. In 2010, according to an ...
Since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), deportations in the United States have skyrocketed to over 400,000 a year. Although that number has finally started to decline after reaching new records, ICE has struggled to uniformly administer its ...
Two handcuffed Nevada state prisoners held in administrative segregation at the high-security High Desert State Prison were shot by guards on November 12, 2014 after they began fighting, allegedly after those same guards deliberately encouraged them to fight. The shooting resulted in the resignation of the guards involved as well ...
A writ filed by Barbara Gordon-Jones, a prisoner at HM Prison Send in Surrey, southwest of London, resulted in the reversal of a policy instituted by the British government that effectively prevented prisoners from receiving books from friends and family members. Gordon-Jones, who is serving a life sentence, had argued ...
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit prison firm in the United States, and the subject of a recent scathing Mother Jones undercover investigative report that detailed numerous deficiencies at a Louisiana prison operated by the company, effectively found itself “pink-slipped” by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The ...
There is bipartisan consensus on both the state and federal levels that the number of incarcerated non-violent offenders should be reduced, and that process has slowly begun to build momentum. As the U.S. prison population has declined slightly over the past few years, prisoners’ rights advocates have argued that for ...
Federal prisoner Arnold Ray Jones was one of almost 30,000 applicants seeking executive clemency from President Obama, including those who took part in Clemency Project 2014, which was launched to provide much-needed relief to drug offenders serving long mandatory minimum sentences. [See: PLN, Sept. 2016, p.22; May 2016, p.46]. ...
On June 21, 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison ordered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to provide prisoners at the Wallace Pack Unit in Navasota with drinking water free of unsafe levels of arsenic. Prisoners at the facility had filed suit in 2014, seeking relief not only ...
On March 30, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling that had permitted the federal government’s pretrial seizure of a criminal defendant’s untainted assets. Sila Luis, charged with health care fraud, possessed approximately $2 million in assets that were unconnected to her alleged crime, and wanted to ...
