by Ed Lyon
In January 2022, when Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) announced the closing of the state prison complex in Florence, he pointed to the facility’s age—it was built in 1904—and said spending an estimated $150 million on needed repairs “just doesn’t make sense.”
What does make sense? Apparently ...
by Ed Lyon
Two high-profile prisoners made nonfungible token (NFT) sales of some prison memorabilia in December 2021, adding to both the notoriety and bottom line of Michael Cohen, one-time personal lawyer to former President Donald J. Trump (R), and Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web’s “Silk Road” site. ...
By Ed Lyon
The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have been difficult for everyone, especially prisoners. Like a form of universal long-term solitary confinement, the endless hours of boredom were broken only by an occasional shower, or a dry bologna sandwich with an occasional handful of raisins or prunes in ...
by Ed Lyon
By the time he was released from Maine State Prison (MSP) on March 7, 2022, Zachary Swain estimated he had spent half of his seven-year prison term in solitary confinement, isolated over 23 hours per day.
Swain, 25, was a high school senior when he stabbed someone ...
by Ed Lyon
In February 2022, watchdog groups called for a U.S. ban on imports of fishing nets from Thailand, after a December 2021 report by Thomson Reuters Foundation that found some of that country’s 280,000 prisoners are being forced to make the nets by hand under threat of punishment ...
by Ed Lyon
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic persisted and more variants appeared in late 2021, courts were steadily easing restrictions to mitigate its spread in prisons. A case in point: Massachusetts, where initially strong rulings by the state Supreme Court eroded over time.
As early as January 2020, before ...
by Kevin Bliss and Ed Lyon
In September 2021, a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit research and advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) gave a failing grade to 42 U.S. states for their efforts to mitigate the spread of the disease in their prisons and ...
by Ed Lyon
Two suits playing out in federal court in New York in mid-2022 will determine whether the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is held to account for a policy that denied pain-relieving medication to state prisoners for years.
Back in March 2016, as the opioid ...
by Ed Lyon
Prison guards in Arizona, Utah and West Virginia have recently been reported indulging white supremacist and anti-prisoner views on the job.
Most recently, members of the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) Special Tactics and Operations team proudly sported patches bearing a skull and crossbones, eerily reminiscent of ...
by Ed Lyon
Here’s a story with a familiar ring to it: A massive prison bureaucracy, which regularly clears its staff when prisoners are brutally abused, is forced by leaked video to finally hold someone to account—so it goes after the whistleblower.
This is the basic outline of what happened ...
