Though its forward thinking, beanie-clad baristas façade would suggest otherwise, the State of Washington has a sobering history of abandoning rehabilitative incarceration in favor of some of the most draconian sentencing laws in the country.
First, Washington enacted the Sentencing Reform Act (SRA) of 1984, a law that effectively eliminated ...
The demographics inside French prisons have become a hot-button issue in the aftermath of eleven terrorist attacks that have occurred in France since January 2015. At least six individuals involved in those attacks are believed to have been inducted into radical Islam while they were incarcerated in France or Belgium. ...
Following a decision by Arizona prosecutors not to criminally charge a pair of Phoenix Fire Department (PFD) investigators who allegedly lied under oath and trained a dog to implicate innocent people, victims have pursued justice through civil litigation. During the course of one of those lawsuits, a wrongfully-accused woman found ...
While California’s prison population is down, homicides among state prisoners in 2013 were up sharply over previous years. Deaths from drug overdoses in California prisons were up, too, and the suicide rate among state prisoners was more than 40% above the national average.
That was the analysis of the federal ...
Hundreds of municipalities across the country – including major cities such as Los Angeles and others with large populations of immigrants – are refusing to honor requests from federal officials to hold undocumented immigrants in jail for possible deportation after a judge ruled that doing so was unconstitutional. The policy ...
After resigning from his position, an expert dog trainer and veteran of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for more than 25 years has criticized a new program to reduce prison drug smuggling.
Wayne Conrad, 61, who quit in September 2014 after he was purportedly threatened by an associate ...
The ACLU filed a lawsuit last year on behalf of defendants declared incompetent to stand trial who languish in county jails across California while they await transfers to state mental health facilities.
When the suit was filed jointly by ACLU chapters in both northern and southern California in July 2015, ...
According to legal experts, unpaid jail booking fees that sheriff’s departments across Colorado have collected for years may violate state law if the fees are being taken from people who are repeatedly arrested, such as the mentally ill and the homeless. But that hasn’t stopped at least six counties from ...
A series of hunger strikes over the past two years by detainees at federal immigration detention facilities from Washington state to Pennsylvania have called for an end to the incarceration and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and exposed abuses and deficiencies in privately-operated, for-profit detention centers.
“The fortifications, the walls that ...
A great deal of ink is being spilled on the upcoming presidential election in November, but only a small amount of media coverage has been devoted to the candidates’ positions on criminal justice-related issues. Thus, in the interest of providing PLN readers with information they can use to make informed ...
