by Matt Clarke
On October 15, 2009, the Wyoming Department of Corrections’ Wind River Mushroom Farm in Shoshoni was sold at auction for an undisclosed amount. The agricultural program, which began in 2004 as an $8 million public-private partnership that used state funds and federal loan guarantees, was once called ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 18, 2009, a settlement was reached in a class-action lawsuit over conditions of confinement at the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC). The lawsuit dates back to 1971 and had been on the federal district court’s inactive docket from 1999 until 2004 following a 1993 consent ...
by Matt Clarke
The almost two-year-old, $62-million maximum-security Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation (VCBR) is still having start-up problems. Located in rural Nottoway County on 28 acres and opened in February 2008, VCBR is unable to retain staff and offers little in the way of rehabilitative treatment. The facility, which ...
by Matt Clarke
When the CIA wanted to build secret prisons outside the United States where terrorism suspects could be tortured with impunity, it turned to Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who ran the agency’s main European supply base in Frankfurt, Germany. That was in March 2003, and Foggo already had earned ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 19, 2009, the Texas Supreme Court held that a city zoning ordinance which effectively banned a religious halfway house in the City of Sinton violated the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act (TRFRA), § 110.003(a)-(b), Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code.
Pastor Richard Wayne Barr, a ...
by Matt Clarke
By July 2002, Omar Khadr, a skinny l5-year-old boy born in Toronto, Canada, had become a radical Muslim militant. He received his first training in an Al-Qaeda camp at the tender age of twelve. To Khadr, a kid who loves Die Hard movies, Nintendo computer games and ...
by Matt Clarke
A Texas federal jury awarded $5 million to a former prisoner who was wrongly convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault based in part on falsified evidence generated by the Houston Police Department’s Crime Lab. In rendering its verdict, the jurors found the City of Houston “had an ...
by Matt Clarke
On January 23, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court held that state law amendments enacted in 2001 and 2005, which required that certain prisoners must participate in rehabilitative programs to be awarded good conduct time credits, violated the ex post facto clauses of the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions ...
by Matt Clarke
Two years ago New York enacted the Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, which lets a jury release a civilly-committed sex offender from confinement if the state fails to provide sufficient evidence of a mental abnormality. Sex offenders who are released by a jury are placed under ...
by Matt Clarke
A Pennsylvania federal court has ordered medical personnel to answer deposition questions in a case involving the deaths of two prisoners due to MRSA at the Allegheny County jail. The court also appointed a special master and ordered the parties to pay the master’s fees as a ...
