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 ...
A report released in February 2014 by Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) found most California county jails were out-of-compliance with a 2012 law limiting the use of restraints on pregnant prisoners.
LSPC helped enact a 2012 law, California Penal Code (CPC) §3407, restricting the use of restraints on ...
According to statistics released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), the number of "major use of force" incidents climb sharply from 6,071 in 2005 to 7,151 in 2013, an increase of 17%.
TDCJ officials claim that the fluctuations in the numbers are random and not tied to any ...
On April 2, 2014, Terrell Harris, a prisoner at the Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans, Louisiana, pleaded guilty to a felony obscenity charge for masturbating in a cell minutes before a jury returned an acquittal on the charge. He received a ten-year prison sentence in a plea bargain that ...
