by Andrew Stewart
Every year, over 650,000 people are released from state and federal prison systems while 11.6 million cycle through local jails. Traditionally, the exit process has included the return of money held by the person prior to incarceration, and sometimes wages earned while serving their sentence or money ...
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson agreed to commute Willie Mae Harris’ sentence after 34 years in prison for accidentally shooting her abusive husband. She was released on June 5, 2020.
Harris, 72, from Bradley, Arkansas was charged with murder in 1985 after an argument with then-husband Clyde. She tried to beat ...
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for 2020. It has been an eventful year that no one expected or planned for in January. Two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, have announced vaccines for COVID-19 claiming effectiveness rates of over 90%. So far, we have seen nothing about plans to ensure ...
by Derek Gilna
Three Montana counties agreed on November 26, 2019, to pay $6 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit that accused their county sheriffs and employees of egregious civil rights violations that led to an innocent man serving 23 years in prison, and permitted the killer to ...
by Matt Clarke
Members of National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) maintained their place at the forefront of the movement for racial justice even while encapsulated in the National Basketball Association (NBA) bubble during the 2020 championship playoffs. The basketball court inside the Disney World bubble was proudly emblazoned with “Black ...
by Kevin Bliss
The University of Florida (UF) released a statement June 18, 2020 in response to a letter written by the Coalition to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS). The statement included initiatives addressing racism and inequality on the campus as well as agriculture prison labor operations.
Florida is one of ...
by Diana Claitor
In 2012, a 53-year-old Black woman named Edwinta Deckard was arrested on a misdemeanor theft charge and held in the Nacogdoches County Jail where she died after three days. Her death was an ordeal of dehydration and trauma, as repeated bouts of diarrhea were ignored by jail ...
by Derek Gilna
The administrator of the estate of the late James J. “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. filed suit on October 30, 2020, in federal district court in West Virginia, alleging that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and a number of its employees were negligent in failing to protect Bulger ...
by Ed Lyon
In late July 2020, about 30 protesters stood all day in the rain in Bailey Park near the Forsyth County Detention Center (FCDC) in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to demand answers and action from Sheriff Bobby F. Kimbrough, Jr., and District Attorney Jim O’Neill in the death ...
by David M. Reutter
For those with loved ones in prisons, the coronavirus pandemic has increased the desire for communication to ensure the well-being of the imprisoned. The exorbitant cost of such calls is straining already-stretched budgets.
Most prisons have curtailed visitation, leaving families to communicate via phone calls, video ...
by David M. Reutter
After releasing almost 1,000 inmates from state prisons and 700 more from county jails in April 2020, New Jersey’s Department of Corrections (DOC) announced it would release another 2,258 prisoners on November 5, 2020, with 1,000 more to follow.
The total number of releases announced represents ...
by David M. Reutter
A Pennsylvania prisoner whose death sentence was tossed by a federal court 17 years ago has finally won release from the state’s death row after spending more than three decades in solitary confinement there. In a September 1, 2020, ruling, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Former Vermont prison Superintendent Ed Adams has found himself the subject of repeated media scrutiny over the last few years, and his story is illustrative of the problems that surround prison reform, public records availability, and bridging the often jarring disconnect between societal norms and prison reality. ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 16, 2020, the estate of a woman who died while incarcerated at the Bi-State Justice Center Jail in Texarkana filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Bowie County, Texas, LaSalle Corrections and its parent company, Southwestern Correctional. The lawsuit alleges denial of medical care, which ...
by Derek Gilna
On October 22, 2020, New Jersey federal district court Judge William J. Martini ended a seven-year class action brought by New Jersey Department of Correction (DOC) prisoners complaining of excessive phone fees levied by Global Tel*Link (GTL), approving a settlement fund of $25 million. Prisoners had alleged ...
by Michael D. Cohen, M.D.
The U.S. is experiencing the most widespread COVID-19 epidemic so far. Daily new infections diagnosed are over 150,000. More than 70,000 are hospitalized on any given day. As PLN was going to press in late November, deaths exceeded 1,000 per day and more the 250,000 ...
by Kevin Bliss
Former prisoners gave testimony at a July 1, 2020, hearing at the Workgroup on Harassment, Sexual Assault and Misogyny in New Jersey Politics, founded by Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg. Speakers included six ex-prisoners of Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Union Township, New Jersey, regarding ...
by Derek Gilna
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of a Texas’ federal judge’s injunction compelling the Texas Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies to prisoners at the Wallace Pack Unit, a state prison with hundreds of geriatric prisoners infected with COVID-19. ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Mass incarceration has long been recognized as a serious and abiding problem in the American social landscape. Historically, mass incarceration has been attributed to a combination of the war on drugs, politically driven harsh sentencing, and the growth of a prison industrial complex. Recently, however, as arrest ...
by Kevin Bliss
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3228 (AB 3228) September 27, 2020, allowing U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) detainees to sue private detention facility contractors for alleged abuses of civil rights and violations of standard of care. The bill takes effect January 1, 2021.
In ...
by Derek Gilna
COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in jails and prisons across the county. The number of virus-related prisoner deaths reached 1,453 on November 17, 2020. This number exceeds the 1,406 prisoner executions in death penalty cases from 1990 to the present.
There the comparison ends. While executions come ...
by Ed Lyon
Whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up, people usually think of Texas, the capital of capital punishment in the United States. [PLN, November 2018, p. 15] However, even the death merchants in the nation’s most carceral, retributive states have paused in their rush ...
by Douglas Ankney
The chaplains of various faiths in the jails of Los Angeles County are united in a common mission: remind prisoners of their humanity. Often in one-on-one visits, the chaplains patiently listen to tragic stories of suffering, offer counseling, or share a prayer or religious teaching. A simple ...
by Matt Clarke
In August 2020, New York City agreed to settle a lawsuit over the death 15 months before of a Dominican-born transgender detainee who died of epileptic seizures while in segregation at the Rose M. Singer Center (RMSC) on the city’s Rikers Island jail complex. The $5.9 million ...
by Kevin Bliss
Daniel Ocasio committed suicide on August 12, 2020 at the Corrigan-Radkowski Correctional Center in Uncasville, Connecticut by tying the strings of his protective mask around his throat.
His death made national news because it is the third suicide this year within the Connecticut Department of Corrections. Human ...
by Ed Lyon
On March 24, 2020, Darell Chancellor and Darrell Richmond were ordered to be released from prison by a Wayne County, Michigan district judge who vacated their drug convictions. Chancellor had served nearly eight years, Richmond almost a year, before being freed through exoneration judgments.
Wayne County prosecutor ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
On March 27, 2020, a lawsuit filed in a county court the previous year against the Mississippi Parole Board (MPB) by state prisoner Anita Krecic was refiled in federal court, alleging MPB has discriminated and retaliated against her for 20 years by repeatedly denying her parole ...
by Kevin Bliss and Daniel A. Rosen
In a June 2020 report, an official with the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) determined that employees at the Cumberland County Jail (CCJ) in Portland followed “expected practices” in using pepper spray on detainees bound for a state psychiatric hospital.
The review by ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A recent audit at an Allegheny county jail revealed a series of shortcomings by a food service contractor tasked with providing meals to prisoners. Florida-based contractor Trinity Services Group was paid $3.5 million to provide three meals a day to prisoners at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center ...
by Matt Clarke
Thanks to a public records request by The Associated Press, news broke in March 2020 that Louisiana-based private prison firm LaSalle Management Company had settled for $177,500 a lawsuit over a 2016 incident in which five prisoners were pepper-sprayed while handcuffed and kneeling.
Adley T. Campbell, ...
by David M. Reutter
On October 20, 2020, after finding the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was deliberately indifferent to a prisoner’s COVID-19 risk, the state’s First Appellate District Court ordered the transfer or release from San Quentin State Prison and a reduction in its population to no ...
by Kevin Bliss
Higher education in prisons is being negatively impacted by the COVID-19 quarantine. Prisons are finding their post-secondary programs evolving into correspondence classes or falling away completely. Advocates fear that this will affect every aspect of an offender’s release up to and including his or her potential for ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 3, 2019, fourteen prisoners filed suit alleging repeated rapes and other sexual abuse at two federal prisons for women in Florida. Senator Marco Rubio demanded that the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) investigate the allegations. Nine months later, Rubio again wrote Attorney General William Barr, complaining ...
by Douglas Ankney
On June 10, 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) sent a letter to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper requesting information about the Department of Defense’s (“DOD”) reliance on the American Correctional Association (“ACA”) for accreditation of military confinement and corrections facilities.
“The importance of ...
by Ed Lyon
Texas may have bragging rights for the largest state prison system in the United States, but California still has the single largest female prison in the country. According to attorney Alison Hardy of California’s Prison Law Office, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is bound ...
by Anthony A. Accurso
The City of Rockford, Illinois, settled a lawsuit on March 2, 2020 brought by three men who were wrongfully convicted and spent 10 years in prison after police used illegal tactics to secure faulty evidence against them at trial.
Demarcus Hanson, 8, was fatally shot while ...
by David M. Reutter
Over 1,000 people signed a letter that urges the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) to evacuate Vienna Correctional Center (VCC) “until it can be renovated or shut down completely.”
The letter was sent to IDPH Director Dr. Ngozi Exile on June 10, 2020. It claims ...
by Keith Sanders
After being placed in solitary confinement at New York State’s Fishkill Correctional Center in 2014, 21-year-old Ben Van Zandt, a former honors student who struggled with an undiagnosed mental health condition, begged his family to get him out of isolation. He told his mother, Alicia Barraza, that ...
by Ed Lyon
On June 12, 2020, a former California prisoner suffered a setback in his legal battle to hold San Bernardino County accountable for the loss of his hand and legs due to illness that went untreated while he was in a county jail.
The former inmate, Perry Belden, ...
by Daniel A. Rosen
A 16-year-old in Mississippi has spent almost a year and a half in an adult jail without being indicted, according to a July 30, 2020, article in The Appeal. And his case is by no means unique; thousands more in the state are caught in ...
by Kevin Bliss
A major outbreak of COVID-19 has hit Alaska’s biggest prison. Nearly 300 prisoners out of about 1,300 inmates at the Goose Creek Correctional Center near Wasilla tested positive for COVID-19, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) reported in late November. One prisoner, 69, died from complications of ...
by Jayson Hawkins
California became the first state in the nation to roll back laws that allowed for the collection of fees and fines from people released from prison or jails. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Families Over Fees Act into law in late-September 2020. The law ends the collection ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As the extradition trial of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continued in London in September 2020, a series of witnesses were brought forth to describe the conditions Assange would face if extradited to the U.S.
Assange is under a 17-count indictment in the U.S. for violations of the ...
by Kevin Bliss
Melford Henson, a 65-year-old California resident serving time at the California Institute for Men (CIM) for a DUI, died May 6, 2020 of COVID-19. His wife, Tracy Henson, was informed that she would need to pay a $900 cremation fee should she wish to recover his cremains. ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 12, 2020, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit against four Texas police department employees alleging they knew a prisoner was suicidal when they gave him a blanket, failed to remove the blanket from his cell and failed to monitor him before he ...
by David M. Reutter
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed June 18, 2020 the grant of summary judgment for defendants in a prisoner’s lawsuit alleging deliberate indifference to his dental infection.
Illinois prisoner Aaron Murphy had a molar in his upper-left jaw extracted on May 4, ...
by Kevin Bliss
Angelina Resto filed suit against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2017, claiming discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She won her case in 2018 and was the first transgender prisoner in the U.S. to be transferred to a woman’s facility. She has since been ...
by David M. Reutter
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed the dismissal of an Iowa prisoner’s lawsuit alleging violations of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Newton Correctional Facility (NCF) former prisoner Michael T. Rinehart had been diagnosed with diverticulitis, a chronic colon condition that causes ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 11, 2020, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reinstated some of the claims brought by a couple seeking permission to marry, one of whom is an immigration detainee being held in a private prison operated by GEO, under contract with the federal Bureau ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 15, 2020, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that documents related to the procurement and use of drugs used in executions by lethal injection are subject to disclosure and such documents containing the non-disclosable names of members of the state’s execution team should be redacted, not ...
by David M. Reutter
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that to proceed under the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s (PLRA) three-strikes exception, the three-strike prisoner must demonstrate that he or she faced imminent danger when filing the lawsuit and upon filing the notice of appeal. The court also held ...
by Dale Chappell
A whistleblower at a privately operated federal detention center in Georgia prompted a joint complaint filed in September 2020 with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging inadequate and even suspicious medical care for the immigrants being held there. ...
by Ed Lyon
When many people think about eugenics, visions of a former European fascist regime trying to build a master race or science fiction stories come to mind. Attempts to purge societies of humans whose existence trouble the elite, or even “normal” people who did not want to see ...
by Jayson Hawkins
An August 2020 wedding in Millinocket, Maine, turned into the state’s largest super spreader event for the coronavirus. Within the next two months, over 170 cases and eight deaths could be traced back to the reception at the Big Moose Inn. The Maine Center for Diseases Control ...
Loaded on
Dec. 1, 2020
published in Prison Legal News
December, 2020, page 62
Alabama: Chanting “not one more,” about 30 carloads of protesters from “Alabamians Who Care” caravanned to the governor’s mansion in Montgomery on August 1, 2020, protesting a plan by Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to build three new “mega-prisons.” According to a report by Montgomery TV station WSFA, the protesters demanded ...
