Prisoners rely on grievances as an early-warning system for dangerous conditions, from poor medical care to abuse. But in Illinois, experts say the system is sputtering, with little oversight, resulting in injuries to prisoners.
by Shannon Heffernan, WBEZ, ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica Illinois is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get weekly updates about our work. This article was produced in partnership with WBEZ, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Randy Liebich curled up in a ball on his bed inside Stateville prison, about an hour outside Chicago. It was June 2010, and he’d spent the night in a cold sweat, excruciating pain radiating from his back. For months, he’d been filing complaints with prison officials about the lack of medical care. But the forms, known as grievances, got him nowhere.
One was denied, in part because he’d already been to the doctor, and the denial noted he’d received acetaminophen pain medication. Another complaint was deemed moot.
Now Liebich was in the worst pain of his life. According to medical records, a kidney stone had made it impossible for him to urinate. The men in nearby cells ...
by Ed Lyon
A study released September 15, 2020 by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice shows that when it comes to employment and housing having a criminal record in the U.S. makes an enormous difference on the outcomes a person can expect.
According to the report, “Conviction, Imprisonment, ...
by Kevin Bliss
New York’s parole system is considered one of the nation’s worst, reincarcerating parolees at twice the national average, while parolees are the only segment of the state’s prison population that is still increasing. Reform advocates denounce the system as costly and harmful and call for the state ...
For decades, prisoncrats have claimed that if they were given an opportunity to rectify complaints by prisoners there would be no need for litigation. Everyone involved knows that is a lie. Since the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996, prisoners must exhaust internal administrative grievance systems ...
by Michael D. Cohen, M.D.
Widespread community transmission of COVID-19 disease continues in the U.S. New records have been set daily for numbers hospitalized, numbers in ICU and deaths. Total U.S. deaths were over 400,000 as of January 18, 2021.
All preventive measures undertaken by individuals to protect themselves and ...
by Maya Chaudhuri, Sharon Dolovich, and Aaron Littman
The UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project collects and reports on the rates of COVID-19 in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers across the country, in addition to tracking related legal filings and court orders, releases, and grassroots organizing. Since December, ...
by Derek Gilna
Health experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agree that keeping people from coming in close contact with one another through social distancing is the most reliable method to stop the spread of COVID-19. So is the need to quarantine positive cases from ...
by David M. Reutter
In a ruling August 3, 2020, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals encouraged a lower court to extend its supervision over a settlement agreement in a class-action lawsuit brought in 2009 against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) by prisoners placed in solitary ...
by Matt Clarke
During the summer of 2020, Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis went weeks without reporting a single case of COVID-19. That changed in September, when the number of cases at the over 600-bed prison exploded.
Between late September and mid-October, prison officials reported 28 new cases and, by ...
A judge finds that CoreCivic played a role in the family separation crisis.
by Madison Pauley, Mother Jones, December 11, 2020
he mother who would end the Trump administration’s family separation policy arrived at the US-Mexico border in November 2017 with her 6-year-old daughter in tow. Ms. L, as she ...
by Mark Wilson
On June 30, 2020, an Oregon county agreed to pay Albert Molina $625,000 to settle his claim that a jail guard fractured his skull in an unprovoked 2018 attack. Two days later, county prosecutors — who had initially declined to bring charges — obtained indictments against Washington ...
by Derek Gilna
Karla Bello, who claims that she was mistreated by Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office employees while in custody for 11 days for unpaid parking tickets, filed suit on September 10, 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleging violations of her civil rights. ...
by David M. Reutter
On January 6, 2021, a federal court in California issued an injunction extending the provisions of a temporary restraining order it had handed down two weeks earlier and excoriated officials from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their private prison contractor, the GEO Group, for ...
by Mark Wilson
On June 5, 2020, an Oregon federal court denied prison officials’ summary judgment on a prisoner’s First Amendment retaliation claim. Oregon prisoner Leumal Fred Hentz was assigned to work in the bakery at Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI). On November 6, 2016, Hentz, who is Black, filed ...
by Derek Gilna
According to statistics compiled by The Marshall Project, one in five U.S. prisoners has already contracted COVID-19, a rate more than four times that of the general population. The problem has been particularly acute in the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) and the separate federal prisons ...
by Daniel Rosen
Waylon Young Bird, a 52-year-old federal prisoner with serious kidney disease, wrote over a dozen letters to the judge who sentenced him asking for compassionate release. He died of COVID-19 in early November 2020, a week after his last plea was written.
“I’m afraid I may be ...
by Mark Wilson
On July 16, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a former California pretrial detainee’s suit for non-exhaustion.
Joshua Franklin Snyder was a pretrial detainee at two Riverside, California, detention facilities. While there, Snyder complained about unsanitary ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 10, 2020, the FourthCircuit Court of Appeals vacated a district court’s granting of summary judgment to Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) officials in a federal civil rights lawsuit over lack of due process in holding a prisoner in supermax solitary indefinitely.
Elbert Smith, a Rastafarian ...
by Dale Chappell
Need help paying for college while in prison? Getting financial aid in prison for college got easier on December 20, 2020. That’s when Congress passed a $1.4 trillion government spending bill for 2021 that included a provision to lift a 26-year-old ban on giving prisoners federal financial ...
by Douglas Ankney
Gerrymandering is defined in U.S. politics as “the dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.” Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary ...
by Ed Lyon
By December 2020, despite calls to release or parole prisoners at risk of COVID-19 — especially the elderly — the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had reduced its prisoner count by only about 20,000, or 15%, since the pandemic began nine months earlier.
With other large ...
by Mark Wilson
On July 21, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a prisoner’s religious freedom suit that had been dismissed as time barred.
California prisoner C. Dwayne Gilmore brought federal suit, alleging religious freedom claims in violation of ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
A Minnesota prison guard was fired on June 18, 2020, after evidence showed he used “chemical irritants” on an inmate, who was subdued following a prison brawl during which the officer, and two others, sustained non-critical injuries.
The death of George Floyd after being pinned to ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Recent public outrage over the needless killings of Black men at the hands of police has led to greater scrutiny of the many instances in which people of color die either while being arrested or while in police custody. The patterns of racism, casual violence, arrogance, and ...
by David M. Reutter
On May 7, 2020, Kentucky’s Larue County Detention Center agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging former guard Jerome Perry sexually abused nine prisoners.
The women’s lawsuit alleged that between February 1, 2018, and August 20, 2018, Perry “harassed, assaulted, abused, and sexually ...
by Kevin Bliss
The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York was investigated by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) concerning its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A report released November 10, 2020 stated that MDC was insufficiently prepared to cope with the pandemic ...
by Derek Gilna
Global Tel*Link (GTL) has long been one of the principal beneficiaries of the $1 billion prisoner call industry, through a combination of astute business practices, intense lobbying, and a business model of questionable propriety, if not illegality. GTL, which has been a defendant in multiple lawsuits by ...
Loaded on
Feb. 1, 2021
published in Prison Legal News
February, 2021, page 38
Monday, November 30, 2020, was a big day for a group of Georgia prisoners suing their phone service provider, Global Tel*Link (GTL), over the company’s allegedly hidden policy of confiscating any unused funds in their accounts after 90 days.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg granted the suit class action ...
by Mark Wilson
On July 20, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a Virginia prisoner’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) claim stemming from the denial of a prison job.
In 2006, Virginia prisoner Douglas Fauconier was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, ...
by Matt Clarke
Once darlings of Wall Street, CoreCivic and GEO Group — the nation’s two biggest publicly traded private prison companies — have suffered a precipitous drop in stock prices, following a pressure campaign by foes of mass incarceration that has resulted in divestment of their stock by major ...
by Kevin Bliss
The fourth director of the federal Bureau of Prisons and the man who developed the super maximum-security prison model, Norman Carlson, died August 9, 2020, in a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. He was 86.
Carlson grew up in Sioux City, Iowa where he summered with a local ...
by Dale Chappell
When historic wildfires burned through Arizona in June 2020, two out of three of the firefighters who brought the blazes under control were state prisoners who were paid just pennies on the dollar to do the same job as well-paid professional firefighters working right next to them. ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced in June 2020 that it would spend more than $5.25 million on a program to distribute large, curated collections of books to prisons and juvenile detention facilities across the country.
The program will provide the same 500-book collection to 1,000 prisons. ...
by David M. Reutter
The conditions under which residents exist at Parchman are subhuman and deplorable in a civilized society,” wrote Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional health-care consultant hired by lawyers representing Parchman prisoners, in a report to federal court filed June 8, 2020. “I’ve been to prisons in sub-Saharan ...
by Kevin Bliss
The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) stated that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency refused help controlling the COVID-19 pandemic in its detention centers, jeopardizing detainees’ lives and stonewalling efforts for intervention and information, as detailed in a September 10, 2020 story by Reveal ...
by Matt Clarke
In late 2020, the Board of Commissioners in Gallia County, Ohio, locked in $12.8 million in tax-exempt bonds to fund construction of a new jail. The move comes after two federal lawsuits were filed the previous summer over incidents at the current aging and overcrowded facility in ...
by Derek Gilna
A Correctional Emergency Response Team, also known as CERT, is under investigation for allegedly placing a noose on the bunk of a Black prisoner, Aaron Tyson, at State Correctional Institution Houtzdale, in Pennsylvania.
After guards searched their dorm room, Tyson and his roommates noticed something resembling a ...
by Douglas Ankney
An October 15, 2020 report from the Santa Fe New Mexican revealed that in March 2020, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower complaint that exposed deficiencies of private health-care provider Corizon Correctional Health Care (Corizon) and the NMCD’s failure to ...
by Darrell Cochran
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, nearly 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States right now, the largest per capita prison population in the world. But how do people get there?
There are a number of risk factors that make an individual more likely to ...
Prisoners, guards face danger from chronic understaffing by MTC
by Joseph Neff and Alysia Santo, The Marshall Project
This article was published in partnership with The Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi Today and The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
When Darrell Adams showed up for an overnight shift at the Marshall County Correctional Facility in rural Mississippi, he was one of six officers guarding about 1,000 prisoners.
Adams said he thought that was normal; only half-a-dozen guards had been turning up each night during the three months he’d worked at the prison, which is run by Management & Training Corporation. He didn’t know the state’s contract with MTC required at least 19 officers.
On April 3, 2019, Adams escorted a nurse to deliver medicine in a unit where the most dangerous prisoners were held in solitary confinement. The contract required a sergeant and an officer to be there at all times. But that night, Adams and the nurse said, he was the sole guard working the unit, and was also covering for six absent officers in three other buildings.
As Adams was leaving the unit, a prisoner slipped out of his cell, sneaked up behind Adams and smashed his head into the steel ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 21, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the proper standard of review to be applied to facially discriminatory prison regulations challenged as violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause is intermediate scrutiny, the standard previously applied to similar claims ...
by Daniel Rosen
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paid out almost a half-billion dollars in overtime in 2019, nearly twice what it paid in regular salaries, CalMatters reported in August 2020. Responding to a public records request from the publication, CDCR provided salary data on regular and overtime ...
by Laura Cassels, Florida Phoenix, January 5, 2021
With nearly 200 inmates killed by COVID-19, Florida’s state prison system is now ranked the deadliest in the nation for coronavirus deaths. But the public might not know there’s a COVID problem behind bars.
Why? The Florida Department of Corrections website doesn’t ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 5, 2020, the Idaho Supreme Court held that state prisoners have no right to paid or unpaid employment despite a state law stating that the board of correction “shall provide for the care, maintenance and employment of all prisoners,” Idaho Code § 20-209.
Idaho state ...
by Ed Lyon
The Alaska Police Standards Council (APSC) is charged with decertifying bad cops and preventing them from being rehired as cops elsewhere in the state. It was 37 years ago in 1983 when the APSC decertified Sitka city police Officer Dale Hanson. Through a convoluted chain of record ...
by Matt Clarke
A Texas city has used jail prisoners to move bodies of COVID-19 victims into refrigerated trailers that served as temporary morgues, paying them $2 an hour to do the dangerous and emotionally taxing work.
In November 2020, a surge of COVID-19 cases overwhelmed the health care system ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 21, 2020, a New York federal court issued an order denying the state summary judgment on some claims arising from a woman’s visit to a prison that resulted in her prosecution for bringing her seizure and pain medications into the prison.
Lisa Bobbit arrived at ...
by Ed Lyon
Javon Davis, aka James Lamar Davis, was talking to his girlfriend on the phone during the wee hours of April 12, 2014 as two men were gunned down while leaving their workplace at Target Field.
During what Hennepin County cops called an investigation, a statement was ...
by David M. Reutter
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) on August 6, 2020 agreed to pay $4.65 million to prisoner Cheryl Weimar, who was beaten “to within an inch of her life” two years earlier by guards at the Lowell Correctional Institution (LCI). The investigation into the beating continued ...
by Derek Gilna
A federal judge on September 8, 2020, once again ordered the California Department of Corrections (CDOC), to resolve numerous violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Rehabilitation Act (RA). The most recent litigation and court order affects only those prisoners confined at the R.J. Donovan ...
by Ed Lyon
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, South Dakota’s state prisoner population declined by a self-reported 11 percent as of late-September. The Associated Press and The Marshall Project showed an 8 percent nationwide average decline in state and federal felony prisoners during the same reporting period. ...
By Matt Clarke
According to a report by the United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics published in August 2020, the number of people in the U.S. under carceral supervision—prison, jail, probation, or parole—declined 2.1% from 2017 to 2018. This continued a more than decade-long decline in the ...
by Kevin Bliss
Colorado Governor Jared Polischanged the state’s coronavirus vaccination plan after Republican district attorney George Brauchler railed in a Denver paper op-ed that it was unfair for the state to inoculate someone like Nathan Dunlap, convicted of murdering four people at a Chuck E. Cheese in 1993, before ...
by David M. Reutter
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court’s grant of judgment for prison officials in a class action that alleged that the Tennessee Department of Corrections’ (TDOC) Hepatitis C treatment program violates the Eighth Amendment.
The district court’s judgment was entered after a four-day ...
Loaded on
Feb. 1, 2021
published in Prison Legal News
February, 2021, page 62
Afghanistan: As fighting continued between Taliban forces and the Afghan military on September 3, 3020, both parties announced they had nearly completed a prisoner exchange negotiated the previous February. According to a report by Japan’s public broadcasting company, HNK, the Taliban said all 1,000 Afghan prisoners it agreed to release ...
