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Articles by Matthew Clarke

Massachusetts Crime Lab Chemist Arrested for Falsifying Results

Annie Dookhan, 34, was arrested on September 28, 2012, and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of falsifying her academic record during her nine-year career as a state crime lab chemist. Each obstruction charge carry up to ten years in prison while the false credentials ...

Bureau of Prisons Physician Charged With Sexually Assaulting Prisoners

On September 20, 2012, Dr. Lewis Jackson, 30, who worked as a physician for the federal Bureau of Prisons, was arraigned and released on bond after being indicted three weeks earlier on three counts of sexually abusing a ward and lying to federal agents. Dr. Jackson worked in the medical ...

Settlement in Suit Challenging Conditions in Illinois Juvenile Prisons

On September 12, 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) helped youth incarcerated in secure Illinois Youth Centers operated by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ) file a class-action federal lawsuit alleging that conditions in the IDJJ violated the youths' Fourteenth Amendment due process rights and their rights under ...

Washington State Prisons Chief Resigns as Video of Affair with Subordinate Emerges

Eldon Vail, Corrections Secretary in Washington State, turned in a letter of resignation on July 1, 2011, after it was made public that he had been having an affair with a subordinate.

Shortly before Vail resigned, several Seattle-area television stations received copies of a video purporting to show Vail and ...

Missouri Jail Head Receives Ten-Year Federal Sentence for Assaulting Prisoners

On July 13, 2011, a Missouri federal judge sentenced a former chief jailer to ten years in prison for violating the civil rights of prisoners and lying to the FBI. The jailer's daughter, a deputy sheriff, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges and was sentenced to probation.

Vernon Wilson, ...

Arkansas Federal Court Holds No First Amendment Right to Lower Prison Phone Rates

On January 21, 2011, an Arkansas federal court held that state prisoners in Arkansas had no First Amendment right to a specific telephone rate.

Arkansas state prisoners Winston Holloway and Joseph Breault filed a civil rights action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in federal court alleging excessive kickbacks resulting ...

Private Prisons Are a Risky Business for Local Governments

Local governments in Texas and across the nation are bearing high costs for building private prisons that are now unwanted due to a sharp decline in incarceration rates. This has led some local governments to adopt radical strategies such as closing, or even selling, the publicly-financed, privately-operated prisons that were ...

Family of Dead Registered Sex Offender Still Receiving Registry Letters

When 17-year-old Justin Fawcett admitted to having consensual sex with a 14-year-old student at the same West Bloomfield, Michigan high school he attended he probably never thought that he would die for his crime, but he did. Hounded by the public shaming of his being listed on the Web site ...

Oklahoma DPS Hires Former DOC Guard Dismissed for Excessive Force

On November 15, 2011, Oklahoma Department of Public Safety (DPS) Commissioner Michael Thompson 'created a high-rank, $60,000-per-year job and hired an old friend, who had been fired for beating prisoners while a guard captain in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) in 1994 Scott Barger, Thompson's new executive assistant, supervised ...

Escapes and Crime at New Jersey's Privately-Run Halfway Houses

New Jersey has embarked on a grand experiment – shifting state prisoners from expensive state prisons into less expensive, privately-run halfway houses. The state prison system bas less than 25,000 beds while the around two dozen halfway houses in the New Jersey system house about 3,500 state prisoners and parolees. ...