People are escaping from the Austin County Jail in Texas. Not the prisoners, but the jailers. Low salaries and a lack of overtime compensation have driven jail staff away and led Austin County Sheriff Jack Brandes to close a new annex to the jail with 50 of the jail's beds, ...
Inefficiencies in the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and the state’s Parole Board have resulted in hundreds of prisoners being kept in prison long beyond their parole release dates. The cost of incarcerating each prisoner during this so-called “in-house parole” is $99.31 per day, and with only 50% of New ...
An interesting collaboration between medical and law professionals, under the leadership of University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel R. Gross, led to the application of medical statistical analysis to exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners, in order to estimate the number of innocent defendants who receive the death penalty. The report, ...
The word “first” was applied to Craig M. Watkins multiple times after his election to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in 2006. He was the county’s first black D.A., the first D.A. who had been a public defender before being elected prosecutor and the first D.A. to establish a ...
In the 1990s, high crime rates in public housing – especially the infamous “projects” – led many cities to adopt a one-strike policy that banned anyone with a felony conviction from public housing. Now, with declining crime rates and the demolition of many massive housing projects, some cities are re-evaluating ...
In 2012, the Hamilton County Jail in southwest Ohio was the first jail in the state to purchase a SecurPass full-body digital scanner, using a $243,000 federal grant. Thereafter, prisoners at the facility were subjected to scans in addition to strip searches during intake. Jail officials reported the device revealed ...
With construction costs of $840 million and a capacity to provide care to almost 3,000 patients, California’s new medical prison near Stockton is the largest and most expensive in the nation. Unfortunately, that expense has not resulted in a smooth-running operation; instead, waste and mismanagement have occurred as prisoners’ basic ...
Programs that allow pregnant prisoners to keep their babies and raise them in prison appear to have benefits for both the babies and their mothers.
According to a recent report, two-thirds of the over 200,000 women incarcerated nationwide have children under the age of 18. About 2,000 prisoners give birth ...
Before he pleaded guilty to taking bribes and illegally spending around $150,000 of his campaign money, resulting in a 46-month federal prison sentence in 2013, former Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana Sheriff Jiff Hingle may have started his parish on a road to financial ruin. The instrument of that potential ruin is ...
In early 2015, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Universal Music Corp. and several other record labels and music producers filed a federal lawsuit against companies that provide mixtapes to prisoners in at least 40 states. The suit claimed that mixtapes contained in “care packages” purchased from the companies by prisoners or ...
