by Matt Clarke

While crime may not pay, policing can be very profitable when law enforcement agencies are allowed to seize assets not only from criminals but also people merely suspected of breaking the law. No criminal convictions – or even charges – are needed before property or money can ...

by Derek Gilna

As noted in this issue's cover story, due to past abuses, restrictions were placed on the federal equitable sharing program in which state and local law enforcement agencies could partner with federal officials and share the spoils of civil asset forfeitures. The restrictions, implemented in January 2015, ...

by Matt Clarke

On April 13, 2016, Gary Mohr, Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC), announced plans to phase out farming operations at all ten of the state’s prison farms, and sell around 7,000 of the 12,300 acres of prison farmland.

Mohr’s announcement came just a ...

by Paul Wright

As the summer months wear on we are again reporting on the ongoing outrage of American prisons that are deliberately built without air conditioning in some of the hottest parts of the country. As an article in this issue of PLN notes, the death toll from heat ...

by Candice Bernd, Truthout

On a spring day in May, temperatures in Dallas, Texas were already in the 90s. Sunlight glinted off the barbed wire perimeter outside the Hutchins State Jail, located just a mile down the road from Hutchins High School. The first blooms of Castilleja, colloquially known here ...

by Derek Gilna

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington has held the state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) in contempt in a class-action lawsuit. The contempt order was entered after the court determined, following extensive fact-finding, that DSHS had failed to follow the recommendations ...

by Panagioti Tsolkas

It's a rare case when one state agency penalizes another with more than a slap on the wrist. This year, in a move that surprised local environmentalists, Tennessee joined the growing list of states where environmental agencies have imposed fines against prisons for chronic water quality violations. ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was stopped while driving in Prairie View, Texas. The 28-year-old Illinois native was in the process of moving to Waller County when she was stopped by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, allegedly for changing lanes without signaling.

A verbal altercation ensued ...

by Christopher Zoukis

On October 25, 2016, the Tenth Circuit remanded a case involving a federal probation violation for resentencing due to the improper admission of hearsay testimony from a probation officer.

Tremale Henry was on federal supervised release when he was allegedly involved in two assaults involving dangerous weapons. ...

by Derek Gilna

In a June 22, 2017 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to punish prosecutors for withholding potentially exculpatory discovery information from defense attorneys at the time of trial. In a case that was widely expected to extend the Brady v. Maryland doctrine, the justices refused to grant ...

In a December 15, 2016 ruling, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a trial court to re-sentence a prisoner who was illegally sentenced to an extra 10 years in prison. The Court issued the order even though it dismissed the prisoner’s appeal of his petition for judicial review challenging the illegal ...

A fight with his cellmate, Joe Greggs, led to the January 19, 2016 death of prisoner Alton Rodgers at the William P. Clements Unit in Texas. An official report listed Rodgers’ fatal injury as trauma consistent with having his head “slammed onto the concrete floor,” and his death was investigated ...

On March 16, 2016, a Tennessee federal district court granted PLN’s motion for a preliminary injunction to protect its Fourteenth Amendment rights from infringement by the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office. The county subsequently agreed to pay a $50,000 settlement.

PLN’s complaint, filed in October 2013, sought declaratory and ...

On June 13, 2016, the Eighth Circuit affirmed a district court’s denial of qualified immunity to several defendants on a civilly-committed sex offender’s inadequate nutrition claim.

Thomas Ingrassia was civilly committed to the Missouri Sexual Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services (SORTS) facility. He escaped in 2001 and was reapprehended in ...

by Derek Gilna

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court’s order barring the city of Cranston, Rhode Island from counting the 3,433 prisoners held at the Adult Correctional Institution (ACI), located in that city’s Ward Six, for census purposes.

The plaintiffs in the case, including four ...

by Lonnie Burton

On April 19, 2016, a panel of the Seventh Circuit reversed the decision of an Indiana prison hearings officer who had found a state prisoner guilty of possessing heroin. The appellate court held that because the prisoner was prevented from defending against the accusation, his due process ...

by Derek Gilna

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) prisoner Jared M. Villery filed three administrative grievances in 2014 concerning the failure of prison staff to properly discharge their duties. He alleged that staff failed to respond to his written grievances within the required time period, then petitioned for ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Ninth Circuit has ruled that the former warden at the California Institute for Women (CIW) is not immune from liability for failing to protect two female prisoners from repeated sexual abuse at the hands of a prison guard.

Jossie Ramos and Melissa Ortiz were incarcerated at ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The federal government's attempt to restrict a former prisoner’s First Amendment right to free speech has been reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Darren Chaker was convicted of a white collar crime related to a bankruptcy filing and sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. ...

by Christopher Zoukis

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the imprisonment rate for blacks is declining and has been doing so for many years. But the BJS data also indicates that the trend is headed in the opposite direction when it comes to white incarceration rates.

The ...

by Lonnie Burton

Three guards employed at a jail in Santa Clara County, California, in the Silicon Valley area, were convicted on June 1, 2017 of second-degree murder for the fatal beating of a mentally ill prisoner two years earlier. The charges also resulted in investigations into guards’ conduct as ...

by Lonnie Burton

On October 26, 2016, the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a suit filed by a California prisoner who claimed prison officials had wrongly punished him for reporting staff misconduct. The 2-1 decision vacated a grant of summary judgment to the defendants.

The case began ...

On May 13, 2017, police shot and killed Kane County jail prisoner Tywon M. Salters at the Delnor Hospital in Geneva after he took first one and then another nurse hostage while recovering from surgery. The nurses filed suit against Kane County, a jail guard and the hospital’s security contractor ...

by Derek Gilna

Disability Rights New York (DRNY), the state’s Protection & Advocacy group, which has a federal mandate to advocate for people with disabilities, issued a lengthy report critical of the treatment of prisoners in a mental health program at the Sullivan Correctional Facility (SCF). In its report, the ...

by Derek Gilna

South Carolina state prisoner Fred Gatewood, who worked in a prison industries job, thought he was to be paid $4.00 per hour subject to various state-mandated deductions, but in fact received less. He filed wage-related grievances, arguing his pay was subject to incorrect deductions. An Administrative Law ...

The California Court of Appeal held on June 1, 2016 that the one-year statute of limitations (SOL) for a prisoner’s negligence claim was tolled because he was not serving a sentence of life without parole.

California state prisoner Ernest J. Brooks was serving an indeterminate life sentence with the possibility ...

by Matt Clarke

On June 20, 2016, Rebecca Bond, chief of the Disability Rights Section of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), sent the Nevada Attorney General a letter calling out the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) for unlawfully discriminating against prisoners with HIV, mobility devices and other disabilities – ...

by Christopher Zoukis

Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Karen V. Murphy ordered the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) to turn over its Police Department Manual to the plaintiff in a wrongful death suit on October 6, 2015.

The manual was requested through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) petition filed ...

by Lonnie Burton

The California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Two, has invalidated a prison infraction that charged a hunger-striking prisoner with “participating in a riot, rout, or unlawful assembly,” as it was unsupported by “some evidence.” The ruling reversed the finding of a prison hearings officer made ...

by Lonnie Burton

In December 2015, California's Office of the Inspector General reported there was a “culture of racism and lack of acceptance of ethnic differences” among guards at the High Desert State Prison (HDSP), who engaged in “alarmingly” frequent uses of force against prisoners. That report prompted state corrections ...

The deaths of 25 Alaska prisoners over an 18-month period were examined in a November 2015 report provided to Governor Bill Walker, who then replaced the state’s corrections commissioner with the author of the report. The handling of the deaths, including a lack of staff training, was strongly criticized.

Calling ...

A Tennessee sheriff has admitted to using his authority to have sex with jail prisoners on several occasions and using excessive force on another prisoner. Fentress County Sheriff Charles Scott “Chucky” Cravens, 47, pleaded guilty on April 20, 2017 to three counts of honest services fraud and one count of ...

by Lonnie Burton

On October 4, 2015, Illinois State prison guards identified only as officers Boland, Bufford and Deal beat prisoner Terrance Jenkins to death at the Pontiac Correctional Center while he was restrained, and suffocated him by shoving a piece of paper down his throat.

Those are the allegations ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Fourth Circuit has reversed a district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials on a prisoner’s claim that his Eighth Amendment rights were violated.

Paul Scinto, Sr. was incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp in Butner, North Carolina between June ...

A pair of prisoners at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio built two computers from spare parts obtained from PCs they were dismantling as part of a recycling program, then successfully connected them to the prison’s network. The scheme was exposed when IT staff noticed unusual Internet activity levels on ...

by Derek Gilna

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now known as CoreCivic, and GEO Group (GEO), the two largest private prison companies, are major profit-generators for six U.S. banks – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, SunTrust, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo – according to a report issued by ...

by Christopher Zoukis

A fact sheet compiled by In the Public Interest (ITPI), a public policy research organization, indicates that Corrections Corporation of America – CCA, now known as CoreCivic – and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison firms in the nation, have spent a combined $2.2 billion ...

The Mississippi Court of Appeals has upheld the dismissal of a visitor’s claim for damages that resulted from a malfunctioning gate at a county jail.

The August 23, 2016 ruling upheld the dismissal of Ladonna Ware’s claim. Ware alleged that while delivering a package for her incarcerated husband in a ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals released an important decision concerning the rights of pretrial detainees on November 7, 2016.

The case involved allegations of unconstitutional conduct by authorities at the New Hanover County Detention Facility in North Carolina. The plaintiff, Michael Anthony Dilworth, claimed that he ...

Less than two hours after he was arrested for not paying an outstanding debt, Rex Iverson, 45, was found unresponsive in a holding cell at a jail in Box Elder County, Utah. An ambulance was summoned and he was pronounced dead upon arrival at a local hospital.

Iverson was jailed, ...

A May 2016 report from the Centre for Entrepreneurs found that 80% of prisoners in England and Wales are interested in starting their own business, as compared to about 40% of the general population. The report, “From Inmates to Entrepreneurs: How Prison Entrepreneurship Can Break the Cycle of Reoffending,” said ...

by Lonnie Burton

In what has been described as a "remarkable reversal of mass incarceration,” a newly-published report by Justice Strategies credited the New York Police Department (NYPD) for a massive decline in drug arrests that contributed to a sharp reduction in the state’s prison population. The study, co-published with ...

The Bradley County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) in Tennessee agreed to a settlement to resolve a lawsuit and end the use of its Facebook page to promote or further religious statements. In addition to the settlement terms that regulate Facebook postings, the Sheriff’s Office paid $41,000 in damages and attorney fees. ...

The Oregon Court of Appeals held on August 17, 2016 that the consensual use of another prisoner’s telephone PIN does not constitute the crime of identity theft under state law.

Jacob Thomas Ritter was incarcerated at the Marion County Jail, awaiting trial on domestic violence charges against his girlfriend.

The ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In August 2015, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of prison officials accused of being deliberately indifferent to a prisoner’s serious medical needs, and remanded the case for a trial on the merits. The defendants prevailed at ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In August 2015, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied a reporter’s attempt to obtain “graphic” drawings made by infamous executed child-killer John Joubert. Despite the efforts of state prison officials, however, the drawings were eventually obtained and published.

The reporter, Mark Pettit, was an investigative journalist when Joubert ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on October 12, 2016 that a two-month delay in ordering a biopsy of a prisoner’s potentially cancerous masses did not constitute deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs.

Calvin Whiting was incarcerated at the Shawnee Correctional Center in ...

by Christopher Zoukis

A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, released on September 7, 2016, revealed that the number of accused and convicted offenders required to wear some kind of electronic monitoring device has increased nearly 140 percent in the last decade.

Electronic monitoring devices generally consist of GPS and ...

In the wake of the exoneration of five North Carolina men, the state Supreme Court adopted a new ethics rule in March 2017 that requires any attorney who receives evidence suggesting the innocence of a convicted defendant to turn it over to local prosecutors.

At least sixteen other states require ...

by Lonnie Burton

In an April 5, 2016 ruling, the Seventh Circuit reversed an Indiana federal district court’s order dismissing a lawsuit filed by a state prisoner who claimed prison officials failed to protect him from assaults by other prisoners. The appellate court held the lower court had improperly found ...

by Derek Gilna

A new report, "Gavel Gap: Who Sits in Judgment on State Courts?,” by Professors Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon, of Vanderbilt Law School and Toronto Law School, respectively, found that state court judges at both the local and appellate levels are less diverse than the ...

Friends and relatives of at least 22 federal prisoners in Miami-Dade County and elsewhere paid  $4.4 million to a trio of con artists who promised sentence reductions in exchange for fees. Alvin James Warrick, 40, Colitha Patrice Bush, 36, and Ronald Bennett Shepherd, 32, pleaded guilty in March 2017 to ...

by Lonnie Burton

On April 25, 2016, the Fourth Circuit overturned a district court’s order dismissing a lawsuit filed by a South Carolina prisoner who alleged that the food served at a state prison was so inadequate and lacking in nutrition as to violate his Eighth Amendment rights. The appellate ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court’s order allowing across-the-board redactions by the government in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association submitted a FOIA request to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a division of ...

Alabama: A guard who worked as a materials handling supervisor at FCI-Aliceville was arrested on April 21, 2017, charged with bribery and making false statements after he was accused of smuggling contraband such as tobacco into the facility in exchange for cash bribes. Prosecutors said Eric C. Pendleton received payments ...