by Jayson Hawkins
A violent disturbance was reported inside Georgia’s Ware State Prison in early August 2020. A prisoner reporting from inside the prison on an illegal cellphone cited health issues, three meals a day consisting only of cheese and peanut butter sandwiches, and a lack of electricity as reasons ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Former Vermont prison Superintendent Ed Adams has found himself the subject of repeated media scrutiny over the last few years, and his story is illustrative of the problems that surround prison reform, public records availability, and bridging the often jarring disconnect between societal norms and prison reality. ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Mass incarceration has long been recognized as a serious and abiding problem in the American social landscape. Historically, mass incarceration has been attributed to a combination of the war on drugs, politically driven harsh sentencing, and the growth of a prison industrial complex. Recently, however, as arrest ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A recent audit at an Allegheny county jail revealed a series of shortcomings by a food service contractor tasked with providing meals to prisoners. Florida-based contractor Trinity Services Group was paid $3.5 million to provide three meals a day to prisoners at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center ...
by Jayson Hawkins
California became the first state in the nation to roll back laws that allowed for the collection of fees and fines from people released from prison or jails. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Families Over Fees Act into law in late-September 2020. The law ends the collection ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As the extradition trial of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continued in London in September 2020, a series of witnesses were brought forth to describe the conditions Assange would face if extradited to the U.S.
Assange is under a 17-count indictment in the U.S. for violations of the ...
by Jayson Hawkins
An August 2020 wedding in Millinocket, Maine, turned into the state’s largest super spreader event for the coronavirus. Within the next two months, over 170 cases and eight deaths could be traced back to the reception at the Big Moose Inn. The Maine Center for Diseases Control ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A series of assaults by a group of prisoners on convicted sex offenders was carried out with the consent and assistance of 10 officers at an unnamed California correctional facility. After an investigation, the prison’s warden determined that the actions of six of the guards involved were ...
by Jayson Hawkins
An internal investigation conducted by the inspector general’s office of the Department of the Interior found a surprising lack of procedures or policies governing the use of federal prisoners by the National Park Service (NPS).
According to the report: At one unnamed national park—the prisoners, whose criminal ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Communication between attorneys and their clients has long been protected by federal law. Technology, however, has changed the way people in the legal field communicate in the span of a generation — a pace that has left legal protections behind.
“It’s common attorney sense, a bedrock of ...
