by Douglas Ankney
Forty-three states, along with the District of Columbia and the federal government, passed “consequential legislation” in 2019 aimed at reducing barriers faced by people with criminal records.
The 152 laws significantly or completely eliminated obstacles to societal reintegration in areas of employment, housing, voting, jury duty and ...
by Douglas Ankney
On July 21, 2020, attorneys for New York state prisoner Imhotep H’Shaka, 46, announced that he had been released into the general population at Attica Correctional Facility after spending nearly a quarter century in solitary.
The announcement followed a March 12, 2020, ruling by the U.S. District ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 10, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Eastern Division, modified and approved a $1.25 million settlement of a lawsuit against Madison County, Tennessee that alleged Sheriff John Mehr violated the Federal Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), 29 U.S.C. § 201 et ...
by Douglas Ankney
On January 28, 2020, the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island found the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) in violation of a 38-year-old consent order limiting stays in solitary confinement to 30 days for a single offense with a unilateral decision to change the limit to 31 ...
by Douglas Ankney
According to a June 30, 2020, report from The New York Times, until recently San Quentin had zero cases of COVID-19. However, officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) transferred infected prisoners to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men (CIM) in ...
by Douglas Ankney
On February 25, 2020, student members of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign (HPDC) filed suit in the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, seeking to force the university to divest its charitable trust investments from entities that directly or indirectly profit from the “prison-industrial complex” (PIC) ...
by Douglas Ankney
Taxpayers of the state of Indiana will pay $425,000 to prisoner Jay Vermillion as the result of an agreement reached on October 21, 2019, between him and employees of the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC). This agreement settled Vermillion’s § 1983 lawsuit alleging the IDOC employees unlawfully ...
by Douglas Ankney
Forty-one-year-old Atlantic County jail detainee Mario Terruso, Jr. died after coughing up blood and begging for water, according to a report in nj.com in September 2019.
Alan Wright, who knew Terruso for about 15 years, was working as a jail runner delivering food trays and cleaning carts ...
by Douglas Ankney
Amherst-Pelham Regional High School (APRHS) English teacher Sara Barber-Just was rubbing sleep from her eyes at 5:30 a.m. while reading the June 28, 2019, online edition of The New York Times. Then her jaw dropped in amazement when she saw the story about her journalism class’ ...
by Douglas Ankney
A county in rural Kansas is jailing people over unpaid medical debt, CBS News reported in February 2020. The county is Coffeyville, Kansas, which has a poverty rate twice the national average.
It’s also the place where attorneys such as Michael Hassenplug have built a successful law ...
