Widespread disdain for people held in prisons and jails, public apathy for humane conditions in detention facilities, tough-on-crime political rhetoric and the privatization of correctional services by for-profit companies have taken a collective toll on the quality of our nation’s criminal justice system. Outwardly, organizations like the American Correctional Association ...

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-1 decision, left no doubt that it did not believe prosecutors’ assertions that race was not a factor during jury selection in a death penalty case. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in a May 23, 2016 decision, found that prosecutors had ...

Over the years PLN has reported extensively on the ACA and NCCHC, and the “accreditation” scams they run using taxpayer money to promote mass incarceration and the prison industry. They are not alone; many other groups like the American Jail Association and National Sheriffs’ Association represent the interests of those ...

The Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee (CBC PAC) says that it works to increase the number of African-Americans in the U.S. Congress, support non-black candidates who champion black interests, and promote African American participation in the political process.

However, Color of Change (CoC), the nation’s largest online civil rights ...

by Alyssa Stryker, Solitary Watch

“When we were sentenced to death,” wrote Carlos M. Argueta from death row in California, “we weren’t sentenced to be mistreated, humiliated, discriminated against, psychologically tortured and kept in solitary dungeons until the day of our executions. Never once did the judge say that was to be ...

Prisoners’ rights advocates know that education is a key element of reducing recidivism, and the federal Bureau of Prisons and most state departments of corrections agree. However, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has had to continue its decade-long oversight of the infamous Rikers Island ...

Lloyd G. Samuels, a former captain employed by the Virginia Department of Corrections and a naturalized U.S. citizen from Jamaica, was sentenced on March 11, 2016 to 10 years in prison with six years suspended for raping a fellow prison employee in a staff barracks. Samuels’ unidentified victim has remained ...

Shaidon Blake, a Maryland prisoner, claimed that he was punched in the face and had his head slammed into a wall by guard James Madigan while handcuffed during a move to a segregation cell – an assault that he reported to the prison system’s Internal Investigative Unit (IIU). The IIU ...

The tip of pretrial detainee Cherie Harding’s little finger was accidentally severed in her cell’s door frame when a guard at a San Francisco jail opened the door to commence a pat-down search. Harding claimed that even though her finger was bleeding profusely, she was shackled for transport to the ...

Michigan state prisoner Kevin King was awarded $1,250 in punitive damages and $1 in compensatory damages after a federal jury found that a guard had intentionally interfered with a visit with his wife. The court determined that the guard, Tiffany Williams, had violated the civil rights of both King and ...

According to its website, G4S is the world’s “leading global integrated security company.” Besides providing security services, it also operates private prisons and immigration detention centers, provides electronic tagging (monitoring) for offenders on community supervision and has a prisoner transport service – mostly in the United Kingdom. G4S also manages ...

Ann Marie Patrick wants an investigation into the death of her son at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. Michael Stanley Galliher, 49, was found dead six days after he was transferred to the prison from a state mental hospital. A coroner’s report released on March 8, 2016 following a ...

Visit the website for Haystack Mountain, a Colorado-based goat cheese manufacturer, and you will find information about fancy chèvre and other tasty products. The “Our People” section includes profiles on cheesemaker Jackie Chang and other staffers at the 25-year-old company. The site also mentions their incarcerated workers – Colorado prisoners ...

On March 14, 2016, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill to eliminate a question on state government job applications that asks about an applicant’s criminal history. The measure, commonly called “Ban the Box,” was signed into law by Governor Bill Haslam on April 14.

The move to help applicants seeking ...

Several Ohio state prison guards have been disciplined following at least 19 allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate relationships with female prisoners between 2012 and 2013. Most of the allegations arose shortly after the Dayton Correctional Institution (DCI) switched from a male-only to an all-female prison in 2012, but ongoing ...

Prison Legal News has learned through a public records request that 18 prisoners died at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman in just over a six-month period. The most recent reported death was that of Terry Echols, who passed away in May 2016 due to complications related to morbid obesity, ...

In an ironic twist, a Florida drug court judge was removed from the bench after enrolling in a substance abuse treatment program herself.

In December 2013, Broward County Judge Gisele Pollack, 57, took a two-week leave to participate in a substance abuse program after admitting to consuming alcohol before work. ...

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held on June 6, 2016 that a federal prisoner, Walter J. Himmelreich, could file a § 1983 federal civil rights complaint after the dismissal of his Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) claim, under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1346(b), 2674. An FTCA suit allows ...

Valley fever is widespread in the Southwest, yet Hawaii prison officials haven’t paid much attention to it, despite the recent deaths of at least two prisoners who had the disease.

by Rui Kaneya, Civil Beat

In the spring of 2014, Melvin Wright was among a crew of prisoners who manned ...

A surge in female prisoners incarcerated on low-level drug charges led to the temporary shutdown of a program at the South Dakota Women’s Prison that helps prisoners maintain family ties and relationships. The Parent and Children Together (P.A.C.T.) program provides extended visitation for imprisoned mothers and their children. P.A.C.T. allows ...

Three alleged victims of an Arkansas judge filed a lawsuit in May 2016, claiming that Cross County District Court Judge Joseph Boeckmann had sexually abused them. Attorney Gary Green said on May 11, 2016 that a fourth man had joined the suit as a plaintiff against Boeckmann, who resigned earlier ...

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 ...

by Jack Smith IV, Mic

A new system called “video visitation” is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It’s inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence – but god, it makes money.

Losing Connection

The only way Lauren Johnson could see Ashika Renae Coleman at the Travis ...

The Wayne Brown Correctional Facility in Nevada County, California changed its rules in 2013 to prohibit defense attorneys from having contact visits with their clients, allegedly due to security and cost concerns. Several prisoners filed suit, and a superior court ruled against the county and reinstated the contact visits. The ...

Suicide is the leading cause of death among jail detainees according to an August 2015 report by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. While 80% of jails in the U.S. reported no deaths in 2013, six percent reported two or more. Florida’s Alachua County Jail (ACJ) fell into the latter ...

Ronald J. Beal, a Wisconsin state prisoner, filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging violations of his civil rights by Department of Corrections (DOC) staff who had subjected him to verbal harassment. After his complaint was dismissed by a magistrate judge during the initial screening process, Beal appealed. ...

About two dozen immigrants’ rights advocates picketed outside the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle on April 10, 2014, protesting the Foundation’s investments in the GEO Group, the second-largest private prison company in the U.S.

The demonstrators urged the Gates Foundation – whose co-chairman, Microsoft founder ...

Ryan K. Mathison, incarcerated at FCI Pekin, a federal prison near Peoria, Illinois, suffered from high blood pressure. One morning he awoke at 3 a.m. with a sharp pain in his chest; he summoned a guard, who called a lieutenant, who in turn contacted the duty nurse. Although the lieutenant ...

Esteban Gonzalez, while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan and the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, was confined to the Special Housing Unit (SHU) for stabbing another prisoner “with a knife-like object.” After being held in the SHU at both facilities for “an extended period of ...

In 2008, long before the issue became a focus of national attention, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Indiana filed a federal civil rights suit against the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC), challenging inadequate treatment of mentally ill prisoners. After years of litigation, the ACLU won a significant settlement ...

In 2012, Pendleton Correctional Facility prisoner Justin Addler was one of 40 people charged in connection with a cell phone smuggling ring at three Indiana prisons. The phones were used to arrange sales of methamphetamine, heroin and LSD outside the facilities. [See: PLN, Dec 2012, p.50].

Addler, 32, died on ...

When journalist Raven Rakia embarked on an investigation of “the Superfund State” of New Jersey, she found another layer to the environmental justice disaster that sits just south of New York City. While New Jersey leads the nation in federally-designated Superfund sites, with 113 listed for pending clean-up, there are ...

Connecticut state prisoner Tye Thomas won an important pretrial motion that found employees of the Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) were “grossly negligent” in failing to preserve key video surveillance footage of assaults he suffered on the recreation yard and in cells at the Northern Correctional Institution. On April 29, ...

Sherrice Richardson, a guard trainee at the South Mississippi Correctional Institution, was arrested on January 25, 2016 and charged for her role in a major contraband smuggling ring at the facility. Richardson, 22, admitted to prison officials that she had been paid about $700 by prisoners’ relatives to bring contraband ...

William Pierce, a prisoner held by the District of Columbia’s Department of Corrections (DCDOC), has won a $70,000 jury verdict for repeated violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Pierce, who suffers from severe hearing loss, was denied hearing aids and sign-language interpreters while he was held at the ...

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 ...

A local news station reported on March 29, 2016 that Joseph Safonte, 72, was placed on desk duty after becoming the target of an internal investigation into the theft of items from the lost and found at the courthouse in Broward County, Florida.

The veteran bailiff and president of the ...

Lake County, Illinois Sheriff Mark C. Curran, Jr. demoted a jail supervisor and suspended ten guards over an incident in which a prisoner was paralyzed after an altercation with jailers and later died. Three other guards were fired. Curran took the disciplinary actions after an almost $2 million settlement in ...

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reached a settlement that will end debtors’ prisons in Dekalb County, Georgia. The settlement is the latest in a string of lawsuits challenging contracts involving for-profit probation company Judicial Correction Services (JCS). [See: PLN, Jan. 2014, p.18].

The suit, filed in January 2015, ...

A February 2016 study by The Sentencing Project, “U.S. Prison Population Trends 1999-2014: Broad Variation Among States in Recent Years,” found there has been a 2.9% average decline in the number of state prisoners during that period. Over those 15 years, 39 states experienced declines and 11 had increases in ...

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites provide an interesting option for prisoners with imagination and originality to explore career-expanding opportunities, raise money and gain access to a commodity often in short supply behind bars – hope.

Basically, crowdfunding involves developing online campaigns for specific projects, charitable causes or services, or to ...

The federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), pilloried by one Congressional study that found it was unable to follow its own compassionate release policy, and by yet another criticizing endemic overcrowding, has again been called to task for failing to release prisoners at the conclusion of their sentences. The Justice Department’s ...

An understaffed, poorly-designed prison in Ontario, Canada has been under close scrutiny over the past three years after a prisoner serving a 165-day sentence was bludgeoned to death on Halloween night by a possibly intoxicated cellmate with a history of violent attacks on other prisoners.

Adam Kargus, 29, was two ...

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, ...

Pfizer, Inc., the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, recently announced new restrictions on the distribution of drugs used to execute prisoners.

The May 13, 2016 announcement detailed “distribution restrictions” that the company is placing on certain drugs used in lethal injection protocols, including pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, propofol, midazolam, hydromorphone, rocuronium ...

The fact that prosecutors and corrections officials read emails between prisoners and their lawyers comes as no surprise to most defense attorneys, many of whom find it ironic that the very public officials paid to enforce the laws do not hesitate to disregard long-established professional confidentiality standards when it suits ...

Information collected by the federal government has revealed the conspicuous inequality between private prison executives and the guards that their corporations employ. According to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median salary for private prison and jail guards in 2015 was $32,290. One in four ...

A 55-year-old mother of seven died in a Pennsylvania jail cell on June 7, 2014 while serving a 48-hour sentence for failure to pay truancy fines and court costs that totaled about $2,000.

Eileen DiNino was jailed by Berks County District Judge Dean Patton for debts that had been accruing ...

Tobias Payton, a prisoner at the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, was denied access to a number of adult magazines depicting naked or scantily clad women, and filed suit in federal court alleging violation of his First Amendment rights. Those rights, he argued, included “access to, as well as creation ...

On May 27, 2016, Amnesty International reported that the South Sudan was using repurposed shipping containers to house prisoners at a detention site in Gorom. Amnesty’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, Muthoni Wanyeki, warned that detainees were ” suffering in appalling conditions and their ...

Maurice Walker, 54, was arrested in the City of Calhoun, Georgia for public intoxication in September 2015, and told that if he posted a $160 bond he could go free until his first court date. Unfortunately Walker was indigent, living on a small fixed income and could not afford to ...

Alabama: Federal and state officials raided the Sumter County Jail on March 8, 2016 as part of an investigation into the Sumter County Sheriff’s Department. The search led a grand jury to recommend the impeachment of Sheriff Tyrone Clark and issue an indictment against him the next month. A ...