Visits to Icelandic Prisons Shine Light on America’s Complacency Toward the Suffering of Incarcerated People
by Doran Larson
After 40 years of an inter-partisan tougher-on-crime-than-you arms race, sentencing reform (and a desire to reduce prison costs) is one issue that now brings Republicans and Democrats together. No other advanced democracy ...
by Paul Wright
COVID-19 has not gone away; indeed it seems to be worsening in prisons and jails around the country. But this month’s cover story on prisons in Iceland serves as a reminder that not all countries have, or want, a police state that cages one percent of its ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The direction of public policy in massive bureaucratic states tends to create an almost inexorable momentum all on its own, and that momentum often overwhelms not only the conditions that created the policy but also the public welfare it purportedly serves. It is extraordinarily difficult to break ...
by David M. Reutter
With the heat of summer’s arrival, Florida prisoners endure living in outdated infrastructure. The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), in a July 14, 2020 email to prisoners, said it “is making efforts to ease the negative impact of extreme heat in the coming months.” That email ...
by Ed Lyon
On June 16, 2020, North Carolina’s Wake County Superior Court ordered the state Department of Public Safety (DPS) temporarily to cease the majority of prisoner transfers. Except for medical emergencies or cases of life endangerment, ordered Judge Vinston Rozier, Jr., DPS may not move prisoners unless they ...
by David M. Reutter
In late April 2020, prisoners at Arkansas’ Cummins Unit knew that the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, was spreading among not only the prison’s inmates but also its staff. But a prisoner identified as Marco was shocked to learn that the state Department of Corrections (DOC) ...
by David M. Reutter
A $550,000 settlement was reached in a civil rights lawsuit alleging 19-year-old Jimmy Lucero laid in a catatonic state at Augusta State Medical Prison (ASMP) as he starved to death with little to no medical care in 2015.
Lucero entered the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC) ...
by Ed Lyon
On August 7, 2020, Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced that a prisoner at the Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC) had tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Until then, Hawaii’s state prison system had been the country’s only one to claim complete success ...
by David M. Reutter
On April 9, 2020, Preston Bennett,
a disabled prisoner at the Cook County Jail (CCJ) in Chicago, won class-action certification to represent all of the jail’s disabled prisoners housed in its Division 10 as he proceeds with a lawsuit alleging violations of federal laws protecting the ...
by Michael D. Cohen, M.D.
Recommendations for behaviors to reduce exposure to coronavirus and infection are changing as more knowledge is gained about the virus and the disease. Of course, implementing these behaviors in a prison setting is often impossible, but it’s worth passing on newer information so prisoners can ...
by Ed Lyon
here is one word that rarely, if ever, is used to describe anything that occurs in prisons. That word is fair. For example, study after study of prison demographics all conclude that although Black citizens are the minority of the U.S. population, they comprise the majority of ...
by Dale Chappell
The push to deport as many foreign nationals as possible under the Trump administration has helped to spread the coronavirus across Latin America, thanks to increased flights from overcrowded immigration detention centers across the country under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) program designed to speed up ...
Our updated analysis finds that the initial efforts to reduce jail populations have slowed, while the small drops in state prison populations are still too little to save lives.
by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative, originally published August 5, 2020
Source Material
At a time when more ...
Prison overcrowding has been quietly tolerated for decades. But the pandemic is forcing a reckoning.
by Dara Lind, ProPublica
This article was originally published June 18, 2020, by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Jason Thompson lay awake in his dormitory bed in the Marion Correctional Institution in central Ohio, immobilized by pain, listening to the sounds of “hacking and gurgling” as the novel coronavirus passed from bunk to bunk like a game of “sick hot potato,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Thompson lives in Marion’s dorm for disabled and older prisoners — a place he described to ProPublica in a phone call as the prison’s “old folks home” — where 199 inmates, many frail and some in wheelchairs, were isolated in a space designed for 170. As the disease spread among bunks spaced 3 or 4 feet apart, Thompson said he could see bedridden inmates with full-blown symptoms and others “in varying stages of recovery. While the rest of us are rarely 6 feet away from anyone else, sick or not.”
“Prison is not designed for social distancing,” said Thompson, who is serving ...
Mental-health problems, short staffing plague a Texas lockup in COVID lockdown.
by Keri Blakinger, The Marshall Project, originally published July 13, 2020
Source Materials
If things were a little too quiet in a particular cell in the Texas prison, the guards didn’t notice. If one of the two men locked inside didn’t stand up to be counted—a process that is supposed to happen at least nine times a day—no one reported it. If there was an awful smell, nobody said a word.
It wasn’t until Cornelius Harper asked prison staff to check on his cellmate that they realized the man was dead. Had been dead for at least three days. Had been choked and beaten so badly he had dried blood and bruises all over his face.
Given that the prison was on lockdown, there weren’t many suspects. Harper hasn’t been charged, but officials say he killed his cellie and tried to hide it, covering the body with a sheet that rippled in the breeze from the cracked window, mimicking movement.
Some officials have suggested that Harper may have done more, perhaps positioning and repositioning the body of 26-year-old Silvino Núñez to make it seem as if he were alive ...
by Ken Silverstein
Jodie Sinclair is the co-author of two nationally published non-fiction books and the author of a recently released memoir about her 25-year fight to free her husband from prison after a wrongful conviction, “Love Behind Bars: The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife.” She also co-authored ...
by Ken Silverstein
Corene Kendrick is a staff attorney with the Prison Law Office, a nonprofit public interest law firm based in Berkeley, California that offers legal assistance for people who are in prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities and who are on parole. She is the office’s lead day-to-day attorney ...
by Ike Swetlitz, Searchlight New Mexico, originally published July 22, 2020
Source Material
David, 28, was counting the days until January 6, 2012, when his prison sentence would end and he would be released on parole. He had earned his GED diploma inside and lined up some job options in ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As public opinion continues to turn against profiting on punishment, a law signed March 6, 2020, by Governor Jared Polis will study the economic effects of eliminating private prisons in Colorado over the next five years and recommend ways to diversify economics that now rely on private ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A pattern of deaths, escapes and alleged civil rights abuses statewide have spurred investigations of at least two major county jails and increased oversight of 313 detention facilities in Ohio, local media revealed in January 2020.
Governor Mike DeWine admitted back in June 2019 that the state ...
by Mark Wilson
We are never again going to take a commission or make money off of products and services provided to incarcerated people and their support networks, their families,” declared Anne Stuhldreher, director of the San Francisco Treasurer’s Financial Justice Project, as she announced the county’s unanimous July 14, ...
by Mark Wilson
The state of Maine and medical provider CorrectCare Solutions (now Wellpath) paid a 14-year-old $250,000 after two guards at a juvenile detention center “bashed” his face into a metal bed frame, knocking out two teeth when he was age 11. Parts of the December 9, 2019 settlement, ...
by Kevin Bliss
Even before he was found guilty in New York on two counts of rape on February 24, 2020, Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein hired a prison consultant – Craig Rothfeld, CEO of Inside Outside Ltd. – to teach him how to survive incarceration.
Weinstein, 67, joins a ...
by Chad Marks
An October 8, 2019, order from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin dismissed for procedural violations a lawsuit brought by prisoners at the state’s Prairie Du Chien Correctional Institution.
Filed on July 18, 2019, by Nicasio Cuevas Quiles III and nine fellow prisoners ...
by Matt Clarke
Violence perpetrated against prisoners by staff of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has risen dramatically over the past decade, according to the prison system’s own statistics. From 6,624 use-of-force incidents by staff against prisoners in 2009 — just over 40 per 1,000 prisoners – the ...
Loaded on
Sept. 1, 2020
published in Prison Legal News
September, 2020, page 43
A transgender woman who was housed with male prisoners at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. (MDC), sued the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on the grounds that staff ignored her requests for safety, resulting in her allegedly being repeatedly beaten and raped in a male housing unit.
The ...
by Bill Barton
A Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General report from September 24, 2019, found that an assistant director of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took part in a sexual and financial relationship with a former president of the prison workers’ union, who at the time was employed ...
by David M. Reutter
An unnamed Armor Correctional Health Services doctor was blamed for spreading COVID-19 at the Pre-Trial Detention Center in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said the doctor “had previously shown symptoms of the virus but failed to notify the jail personnel,” according to The Florida Times-Union ...
by Dale Chappell
Kentucky State law allows county jails to charge prisoners a daily fee during their stay while fighting their case. But what happens when the person is found not guilty of the charges and gets released? According to a February 14, 2020 ruling by the Kentucky Court of ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 10, 2020, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a grant of summary judgment in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that sought video from the Bureau of Prisons. It, however, affirmed as to a request concerning records related to a ...
by Kevin Bliss
Fine Cell Work is a London-based prison art initiative aimed at the possible rehabilitative and therapeutic value of creating works of art by the incarcerated. It works with prisoners throughout the United Kingdom, training them in the art of fine needlepoint.
The charity and social enterprise has ...
by Dale Chappell
The State of Rhode Island has taken the uncommon step of providing opioid-based medication to help its prisoners who battle drug addiction in prison. The bold move has not only saved lives but has also achieved something that has eluded prison officials for decades: keeping drug-addicted prisoners ...
by Ed Lyon
Born in 1972, Tennessean Nicholas Sutton suffered a life straight out of a 5-star horror movie. His father was a mentally ill drug abuser and his mother abandoned him to the notso-tender mercies of daddy dearest. Regularly beaten by his father, the boy’s arm was broken, he ...
by Douglas Ankney
Forty-three states, along with the District of Columbia and the federal government, passed “consequential legislation” in 2019 aimed at reducing barriers faced by people with criminal records.
The 152 laws significantly or completely eliminated obstacles to societal reintegration in areas of employment, housing, voting, jury duty and ...
by Mark Wilson
On November 8, 2019, three New York detectives agreed to pay $50,000 to settle false arrest claims brought by an informant they charged with conspiring to kill an Assistant District Attorney (ADA), the settlement agreement and court records show.
In March 2014, Russell D. Towner was a ...
by Douglas Ankney
On July 21, 2020, attorneys for New York state prisoner Imhotep H’Shaka, 46, announced that he had been released into the general population at Attica Correctional Facility after spending nearly a quarter century in solitary.
The announcement followed a March 12, 2020, ruling by the U.S. District ...
by Dale Chappell
Over the last 50 years, the number of prisoners serving life sentences has grown to exceed the entire prison population of 1970. While efforts are being made to “reform” the reforms enacted under the “tough on crime” regime of the 1990s that flooded the prisons, little attention ...
by Mark Wilson
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held on Dec. 6, 2019, that a lower court incorrectly granted guards summary judgment on a prisoner’s failure to protect claim.
Connecticut prisoner Christopher J.M. Lewis was a member of the PIRU or PIRU Bloods gang. He was ...
by Ed Lyon
By some standards, Kansas has a relatively small prison system. Numbering only around 10,000 beds, it is dwarfed by California’s and Texas’ penal institutions, which have 134,000 and 142,000 beds, respectively. Regardless of size, however, the aging of the system’s prison population is roughly the same ...
by Jayson Hawkins
In recent years, a growing outcry has been raised against the practice of confining prisoners in solitary, even for short periods, because of the connection between solitary and the impairment of overall mental health, especially post-traumatic stress disorder. Multiple studies have linked solitary confinement to heightened rates ...
by David M. Reutter
New York’s Suffolk County Legislature agreed on September 26, 2019 to pay $2.8 million to settle a lawsuit concerning the events surrounding the suicide six years earlier of pretrial detainee Jack Franqui.
The morning of January 23, 2013, started innocently for Franqui. He called friend Simon ...
by Ed Lyon
Until February 18, 2020, it cost pre- and post-trial detainees in the Dallas County, Texas jails .24¢ per minute to speak to their families on the phone. Urged by criminal justice reform groups and the citizenry, the Dallas County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to forgo any and ...
by Matt Clarke
In a resurgence of “tough-on-crime” sentencing reforms that swept the nation in the 1990s, many states enacted “three-strikes” laws mandating life sentences for those convicted of three felony offenses. Mississippi was among them (and harsher than most) with a mandatory sentence of life without parole (LWOP) for ...
by David M. Reutter
On June 11, 2020, a federal court in North Carolina found that 11 prisoners at the Federal Correction Complex (FCC) in Butner had failed to prove officials with the Bureau of Prisons were deliberately indifferent to preventing the introduction and spread of COVID-19.
BOP argued that ...
by David M. Reutter
A United Nations human rights expert has denounced the use of prolonged solitary confinement, which could inflict psychological torture on prisoners. His critique, given at a press conference on February 28, 2020, was aimed at conditions in Connecticut but has implications for the entirety of America’s ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 10, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Eastern Division, modified and approved a $1.25 million settlement of a lawsuit against Madison County, Tennessee that alleged Sheriff John Mehr violated the Federal Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), 29 U.S.C. § 201 et ...
by Chad Marks
A commission that was legislatively mandated recommended in an October 2019 report that New Jersey improve re-entry services for those leaving prison. The Reentry Services Commission outlined 100 steps to aid in a successful reentry. Those steps targeted addiction treatment, opportunities for training, employment and improved health ...
by Derek Gilna
Williams & Connolly LLP of Washington, D.C. and the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), parent organization of Prison Legal News (PLN), have won a federal civil rights judgment against the Southwest Virginia Regional Jail Authority in the United States District Court in Abingdon, Virginia.
PLN ...
by Kevin Bliss
On January 14, 2020, Judge Margaret Seymour of the Florence division of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina signed preliminary approval of a settlement order granting hepatitis-C (HCV) testing and treatment in the South Carolina prison system.
“This action today is going to save 1,184 lives,” ...
by Kevin Bliss
According to the latest surveys, the national female prison population is increasing more rapidly than males — and Kansas is one of the leading contributors to this trend.
A report put out by the Prison Policy Initiative and the American Civil Liberties Campaign for Smart Justice in ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A new law in Maryland approved last year required disclosure of wages paid to prisoners, information that The Baltimore Sun reported on January 2, 2020. The law covered the Division of Correction (DOC), which employs about 12,000 at 17 prisons and prerelease centers, and Maryland Correctional Enterprises ...
by Nicole D. Porter
The DC Council approved an emergency bill July 7, 2020 that included the Restore the Vote Amendment, authorizing voting by residents incarcerated in jail or prison with a felony conviction.
The District joins just two states, Maine and Vermont, which maintain voting rights for imprisoned citizens. ...
by Dale Chappell
On March 4, 2020, federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guard Colin Akparanta pleaded guilty to the 2017 sexual abuse of a female prisoner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, thereby also depriving the woman of her civil rights.
The 43-year-old naturalized citizen from Nigeria, ...
by Derek Gilna
The Prisoner Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) of 1995 barred prisoners from filing a new lawsuit “in forma pauperis (IFP),” or without payment of a filing fee, if the prisoner had previously had three actions dismissed for failure to state a cause of action.
In the case of ...
Loaded on
Sept. 1, 2020
published in Prison Legal News
September, 2020, page 62
California:In June 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) commuted 21 state prisoners’ sentences, a dozen of them were for murder convictions, patch.com reported. Seven were committed when the prisoner was 22 or younger. Half of the prisoners are now 59 or older. One commutation went to 62-year-old Thomas Waterbury, ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 4, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held an Indiana federal district court abused its discretion in denying a prisoner’s motion for appointment of counsel in a civil rights lawsuit.
That ruling came in an appeal brought by Indiana prisoner ...
