by Ed Lyon
The former District Attorney of Suffolk County, New York, Thomas Spota, and his former top assistant, Christopher McPartland, appeared before a sentencing judge in a federal courtroom on August 10, 2021. But instead of seeking the harshest sentences allowed by law as they had often done for ...
“I don’t know how you can live with yourself.”
by Ed Lyon
In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, County Executive Armond Budish (D) is now the last man standing in a decade-long county government and jail malfeasance and mismanagement scandal, after his appointed jail director, Ken Mills, was sentenced to a nine-month ...
by Ed Lyon
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, health and penology experts have urged state and federal governments to depopulate their prison systems. State governors remain under increasing pressure to use their executive clemency powers to achieve this purpose. Some are, some are not. Some can, some cannot. ...
by Ed Lyon
Professor Michael Conklin recently released a law review article arguing the merits of allowing juries to consider imprisonment costs when they are deliberating sentences lengths, with the objective of lessoning mass incarceration. Conklin’s report is founded on and supported by dozens of statistical compilations, databases and statutes ...
by Ed Lyon
Of the many mysteries surrounding Jeffery Epstein, including exactly where the billionaire got his fabulous wealth before committing suicide in a Manhattan cell in August 2020—while awaiting trial on charges of sex-trafficking in underage girls—the question of who is responsible was officially decided when federal prosecutors accepted ...
by Ed Lyon
For many years PLN has reported on prison systems across the nation like those in Arkansas and Texas that pay prisoners nothing for the work they are required to perform. Others, like Louisiana, pay only pennies per hour, which is legal because the Constitution’s 13th Amendment that ...
by Ed Lyon
The COVID-19 pandemic is now a well-known, world-wide fact of life. Less well known is a lingering set of aftereffects that afflict some people infected with the disease, which the medical establishment has labeled “Long COVID.”
Some of Long COVID’s common symptoms include tiredness or fatigue, cognitive ...
by Ed Lyon
Regardless of what people without first-hand knowledge of prisons or detention centers believe, prisoners are generally not the blood-thirsty, brutal animals depicted in the media. In fact, especially in the face of SWAT-styled rapid response teams used within institutions, prisoners are mostly hopeless, helpless, often powerless individuals. ...
by Ed Lyon
Prison populations exploded in every state across the country during the 1980s and ‘90s. It was during that massive expansion that the modern private prison industry was born as a “way to ease the burden on taxpayers by reducing public spending on government-run facilities,” as touted by ...
by Ed Lyon
In the antebellum South, the Missouri Compromise allowed for every slave to count as four-fifths of a person for census and representative purposes.
In our current, much more enlightened nation, every prisoner counts as an entire person for census and representative purposes. One thing that has yet ...
