On September 12, 2005, New York Governor George Pataki issued an executive order instructing state officials to confine sex offenders after their sentences were over. Pataki has introduced civil commitment laws in the state legislature since 1998. Typically, they have passed the Republican-controlled state Senate, but died in the Assembly, ...
In an opinion dated November 10, 2014, the Court of Appeals of Indiana overturned a trial court's holding that a lower standard of medical care applied to prisoners and reversed that court's granting of summary judgment.
Dr. Alan Neal Wilson performed male-to-female gender reassignment surgery on Christa Allen in 2002. ...
Texas Group Finds Correlation between Incarceration Rate and Academic Achievement
by Matt Clarke
Stand for Children – Dallas used data from the Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Correction to determine which ten Dallas zip codes had the largest number of prisoners in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), and ...
Fifth Circuit: Texas May Not Enforce Rule Prohibiting Religious Beards
By Matt Clarke
On April 2, 2013, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice could not continue to enforce a rule prohibiting prisoners from growing beards for religious reasons, in a case involving ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 25, 2012, the Supreme Court of Tennessee held that prisoners with consecutive sentences are not entitled to separate parole eligibility dates for each sentence. The Court also clarified that a prisoner may only challenge the calculation of a release eligibility date by the Tennessee Department ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 7, 2009, Oklahoma State Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee was accused of asking the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) to conduct a study analyzing the cost of closing certain state prisons and using private, for-profit facilities to house prisoners formerly held in those DOC ...
by Matt Clarke
On the night of October 18, 2007, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, founders and owners of the Phoenix New Times, an independent weekly publication in Phoenix, Arizona, were arrested and charged with the misdemeanor offense of revealing grand jury information. The alleged crime occurred when the New ...
By Matthew T. Clarke
States, strapped by tight budgets and pressed by swelling prison populations, are faced with the Hobson's choice of releasing prisoners early to ease overcrowding or building prisons they can ill afford to construct and staff. Private prison corporations seem to offer a third choice: They claim ...
Iowa Sued Over Proselytizing Fundamentalist
Christian Prison Program
by Matthew T. Clarke
On February 13, 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AUSCS) filed two lawsuits in federal court, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, against officials of the Iowa Department of Corrections (DOC), Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM) and ...
In February 2006, a report on the status of 517 prisoners being held in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba compiled by Seaton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux, seven of his law students and attorney Joshua Denbeaux, was made public. The report, entitled The Guantanamo Detainees: The Governments Story, ...
