On April 12, 2012, a Massachusetts federal court entered an order approving a private settlement agreement between the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) and the Boston-based Disability Law Center (DLC) which prohibits lengthy segregation of DOC prisoners with serious mental illness (SMI) and provides for an overhaul in how the ...
When the Wisconsin Legislature first passed the Sexually Violent Persons Law allowing for civil commitment of certain sex offenders who had served all of their prison sentences, the additional expense was expected to be minimal. Today's reality proves that such a prediction was overly optimistic. Currently, there are over 360 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
