by Jacob Barrett
Former prisoner Alex Tretbar won PEN America’s first-place award for poetry in September 2022 for his poem “Variations on an Undisclosed Location.” Tretbar, 33, penned the poem during his five-year incarceration with the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
While incarcerated, Tretbar worked ...
by Jacob Barrett
According to an October 2022 report by the New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the state’s prisons and jails have a drug overdose rate “double the rate for the overall United States population.”
Conditions in New York City’s Rikers Island have deteriorated to the ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 1, 2022, the federal courtfor the Western District of Oklahoma granted dismissal to plaintiffs in a suit against Oklahoma County, after they agreed to a $1.1 million settlement in the death of a detainee killed by guards at the county jail in April 2017. According ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 28, 2022, the Supreme Court of California declined to hear an appeal to a lower court’s decision that shrugged off differences in program credits available to state prisoners held in prisons and those held in local jails. That left standing a decision by the First ...
by Jacob Barrett
According to a report published by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) on December 15, 2022, for-profit telecom companies are using loopholes in the law to price-gouge prisoners and their families on the cost of phone calls and video visits.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has slowly set ...
by Jacob Barrett
On June 27, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Illinois prison officials who delayed a prisoner’s appendicitis treatment until he needed emergency surgery. Incredibly, though acknowledging the treatment he received was subpar, the Court said it did not rise ...
by Jacob Barrett
On August 25, 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of a challenge to the state’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Mexico prisons. Though not entirely agreeing with the lower court’s reasoning, the Court affirmed the result because none of the named prisoner plaintiffs ...
by Jacob Barrett
In 2018, the State of Washington reached a settlement to reform its forensic health system. [See: PLN, Aug. 2017, p.22; May 2019, p.54.] As part of the settlement, the State agreed to follow the district court’s order “to achieve legislative changes to reduce the number of ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 26, 2022, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sitting en banc vacated a district court’s order denying a preliminary injunction to the federal government and private prison giant GEO Group, Inc. that would prevent California from enforcing a ban on all ...
by Jacob Barret
In October 2022, a jury in the federal Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania awarded $400,000 in compensatory damages to former Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) guard Jeffery Kengerski in his federal employment rights case against jail officials.
Kengerski worked as a guard at the jail beginning ...
