by John Boston

"Equal Justice Under Law”—it’s carved over the door of the Supreme Court, but most of us know better by now. That’s especially true for prisoners, who are subject to the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which plainly prescribes unequal justice in cases that they bring. The PLRA, ...

by Paul Wright

This year marks the 25^th anniversaries of both the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and the Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which were both signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. We have been reporting extensively on the impact and effects ...

by David M. Reutter

The State of Washington Office of Corrections Ombuds (OCO) found in a January 14, 2021 report that the Department of Corrections (DOC) delayed cancer diagnosis that resulted in some prisoner deaths. Several other prisoners are expected to die as a result of the delay in treatment. ...

by Jimmy Jenkins, KJZZ.org

According to Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers, hundreds of incarcerated people who should be eligible for release are being held in prison because the prisoner management software cannot interpret current sentencing laws.

KJZZ is not naming the whistleblowers because they fear retaliation. The employees said they ...

by Katie Jane Fernelius, The Appeal, June 30, 2021

California’s legislature adopted a bill last year that would have limited the price of commissary items in county jails, and imposed new constraints on how the sheriffs who run those jails can contract with private companies that provide jail services. Advocates ...

by Daniel A. Rosen

Illinois has become the first state in the country to completely eliminate the use of cash bail. The bill signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker in February 2021 was the result of a multi-year effort by over 100 reform organizations, legislators, and the House Legislative Black Caucus ...

by David M. Reutter

A federal lawsuit alleges that Nexus Services, Inc., “preys on consumers held in federal detention centers by offering to pay for consumers’ immigration bonds to secure their release.” In exchange, the company “demands large upfront fees hefty monthly payments while concealing or most misrepresenting the true ...

by Kevin Bliss

The Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) has been negotiating with a newly organized company called Smart Communications (SC), per a March 24, 2021 article in Vice. Built by CEO Jon Logan, the company’s purpose is to take over the handling of all state or federal prisoners’ ...

Ecuador’s prison system has been operating in crisis mode for three years. Beginning in 2019, 24 prisoners were killed in overcrowded prisons holding over 38,000 prisoners which was designed and built to hold 27,000. That number soared to 103 deaths in 2020.

The main problem is alleged to be rival ...

by Matt Clarke

On January 21, 2021, the Supreme Court of Florida disbarred a lawyer who pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges related to multiple instances of making pornographic movies with female prisoners in attorney visitation rooms at two county jails.

Andrew Spark allegedly used his Florida Bar card ...

by Daniel A. Rosen

In the most comprehensive accounting to date of California’s pretrial detention population, a recent CalMatters investigation found 8,600 prisoners who had been jailed for more than a year, and 1,300 jailed longer than three years without being tried or sentenced. More than a quarter of those ...

by Matt Clarke

On April 1, 2021, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed into law a bill that ends long-term solitary confinement in that state starting in April 2022.

“Having spent a lot of time with the advocates who have direct stakes in this bill, this is deeply meaningful,” ...

The Ohio Supreme Court concluded that an official at Toledo Correctional Institution (TCI) violated the Ohio Public Records Act by failing to identify all records requested by a prisoner. In addition to ordering relief for the prisoner to obtain the records, the court awarded the prisoner $1,000 in statutory damages. ...

by Jayson Hawkins and Panagioti Tsolkas

The fantasy of those who profit off the Prison Industrial Complex has long been perpetual incarceration. This dream has seeped into reality in recent decades as many states began adopting LWOP (life without parole) sentences. Yet another means of warehousing people without a release ...

by David M. Reutter

Criminal justice reform advocates scored multiple wins in the closing weeks of the 2020 session of Ohio’s General Assembly. The new laws end the shackling of pregnant prisoners giving birth, allow people to do community service to pay driver license fines, make it easier for convicted ...

by David M. Reutter

In affirming an Illinois district court’s order denying a motion for compassionate release, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held there was no procedural error in the failure to consider the movant’s argument that his skin color “elevates his risk from COVID-19.”

The court’s February 23, ...

by Matt Clarke

On February 9, 2021, the Seventh Circuit court of appeals held that a district court erred when it departed significantly from Pruitt v. Mote, 503 F.3d 647 (7th Cir. 2007) in its consideration of a mentally ill Illinois prisoner’s motion to recruit counsel. The court held ...

Casey Holloway was killed while in the mental health observation unit at the notorious Rikers Island Correctional Facility. Artemio Rosa, another prisoner with a history of violence, strangled the 35-year-old Holloway as he sat in a chair. Holloway was in jail facing robbery charges when Rosa decided to strangle him. ...

by Matt Clarke

On October 29, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reinstated a claim against a Louisville, Kentucky jail classification officer who, contrary to jail policy, moved a prisoner to a segregation cell with a barred window despite recent suicide attempts and suicidal tendencies. ...

A three-hour uprising at a privately-run medium security prison in New Mexico on November 2, 2020, led to a few prisoner injuries, a fire and property destruction. It was an “incident [that] absolutely could have been prevented,” said said the state’s Corrections Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero.

But the clash between ...

by Daniel A. Rosen

At jails, prisons, and detention centers across Louisiana, in-custody deaths are not always made public. The state does not require officials to report on deaths behind bars, unlike many other states.

As a result of this knowledge gap, the Loyola University law school has undertaken an ...

by Kevin Bliss

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Agency Watch List published by the New York City Office of the Comptroller listed the NYC Department of Corrections (DOC) as an entity to be “closely monitored” for noncompliance to a Consent Decree issued against the agency in 2015. The City DOC ...

by David M. Reutter

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a Connecticut federal district court’s order that found a state law was an unconstitutional bill of attainder because it was intended to impose punishment upon prisoners on death row. It also affirmed the finding that the plaintiff was denied ...

A combined $11,000 settlement and default judgment was obtained by a pro se asthmatic prisoner in a lawsuit alleging guards were deliberately indifferent to the prisoner’s health during and after a cell block fire at the Indiana State Prison (ISP). One prisoner died during the fire.

Prisoner Dustin E. McGuire ...

by Keith Sanders

In recent decades, the inability of state corrections departments to procure the necessary drugs to carry out lethal injections and kill people has led to a gradual decline in the number of executions in America. Many states have put a moratorium on death sentences as a result, ...

by Kevin Bliss

The Healthy Start Act in Minnesota will allow mothers who give birth while incarcerated more time to bond with their children. Signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz, the bill transfers expectant mothers to transfer from prison to an alternate setting geared specifically to provide mothers and ...

by Michael D. Cohen MD

Worldwide Pandemic

As I write this in mid-July the pandemic has again changed direction and cases are rising throughout the world. Deadly surges are beginning or continuing in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Indonesia is having their worst pandemic yet. New estimates suggest that ...

The three biggest county jail systems in the U.S. demonstrate how incarcerated people are uniquely exposed to environmental hazards.

by Adam Mahoney, Environmental Justice Fellow with Grist.org

For more than half a century, 441 Bauchet Street has been the address where Los Angeles’ most stark social and environmental inequalities converge. ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

Despite an urgent and growing need for maintenance in Minnesota’s prisons, the governor and legislature are proposing a token amount be spent while deferring the vast majority of the growing problem.

Traditionally, the state of Minnesota passes a bonding bill, which funds the state’s expenditures not ...

by Dale Chappell  

A federal judge has rejected attempts by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to keep videos of staff force-feeding a prisoner on a hunger strike at the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, after the BOP had claimed a “law enforcement” exception under the Freedom of ...

by Derek Gilna

Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the parent organization of Prison Legal News (PLN), on May 12, 2021, settled its civil lawsuit filed in September of 2020 in U.S. district court for the District of Kansas against the Board of Commissioners of Johnson County, Kansas, and county sheriff ...

by David M. Reutter

For the last two decades, theFlorida Department of Corrections (FDC) has faced a staff shortage. Mark Inch, Secretary of the FDC, urged lawmakers earlier this year to provide $26.1 million to shorten guards’ regular work shifts.

Inch sought to expand upon a pilot program approved in ...

by Matt Clarke

In April 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) published two reports on prisoner deaths in the U.S.

Report number NCJ 255970 covered mortality in state and federal prisons 2001 - 2018 while number NCJ 256002 covered mortality in state and local jails ...

In May 2021, the former supervisor of Virginia’s Rockbridge County Regional Jail was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison after he was convicted for violating the civil rights of prisoners and public corruption.

Following a six-day federal bench trial in 2020, John Marshall Higgins, 62, was convicted on three ...

by Mark Wilson

"The law is clearly established that individuals in government custody have a constitutional right to be protected against a heightened exposure to serious easily communicable diseases,” concluded United States Magistrate Stacie F. Beckerman in denying Oregon prison officials qualified immunity for their coronavirus (COVID-19) response. “The Court ...

by Dale Chappell

A 2020 annual report on exonerations, released by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) on March 30, 2021, shows the disturbing fact that in more than half of the cases where those convicted of crimes were exonerated, misconduct by police and other government personnel accounted for thousands ...

by David M. Reutter

The Seventh Circuit Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a grant of summary judgment to a Wexford Health Sources doctor. It affirmed the judgment granted to Wexford and another doctor.

The court’s March 16, 2021 opinion was issued in an appeal brought by Illinois prisoner Michael Thomas. ...

by Keith Sanders

At 6:22 pm on March 14, 2021, Marvin David Scott III was arrested by police in Allen, Texas for possession of less than two ounces of marijuana. Soon after being transferred to the Collin County Detention Center and placed in the custody of the Sheriff’s Office, Scott ...

by Keith Sanders

Two prisoners recently filed suit against the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) alleging that guards used unmuzzled dogs to attack and maul them. The plaintiffs are represented by Kelly Jo Popkin, an attorney with Rights Behind Bars, and the D.C.-based firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.

On ...

Connecticut made history on June 16, 2020, when Governor Lamont signed Senate Bill 972, making the state the first in the country where prison phone calls will be free for all prisoners and their families, including incarcerated youth. The state Senate and House fully funded the bipartisan bill, allocating $11.2 ...

by Daniel A. Rosen

A sheriff’s deputy in California is suspected of burning a mental health prisoner with hot water to gain compliance, according to a statement released by authorities in Orange County.

Twenty days after the incident in April, 2021, the Sheriff’s department submitted the case to the county’s ...

by Kevin Bliss

Palmetto, Florida, Manatee County Central Jail (MCCJ) and the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) received criticism from prisoners’ rights activists when officials decided that 721 prisoners and detainees were exempt from the mandatory evacuation order issued as a result of the state of emergency declared by Governor ...

by Matt Clarke

The California Office of Administrative Law approved emergency regulations governing prisoners’ good behavior credits making tens of thousands of prisoners eligible for credits that shorten their time behind bars by more than was previously possible, effective May 2, 2021. 63,000 California prisoners who are serving time for ...

by Casey J. Bastian

Following a series of complaints resulting from the parole of 329 Virginia state prisoners in 2020, a whistleblower released several emails sent between members of the Virginia Parole Board (“VPB”) employees. The leaked emails were clearly intended to discredit the Parole Board, and likely the entire ...

by David M. Reutter

A Washington State federal district court found there was no mutual assent when a detainee who was issued a debit card in lieu of his monies upon release. The Court, therefore, denied the defendants’ motion to compel arbitration.

The Court’s June 2, 2021, order was issued ...

California’s Second District Court of Appeal vacated a juvenile court’s finding that an incarcerated father was a detriment to the child. It also vacated the order that removing the child from the father’s custody.

The court’s April 2, 2021, opinion was issued in an appeal brought by V.N., an imprisoned ...

Alabama: On June 9, 2021, a former guard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Aliceville, Alabama, agreed to plead guilty to federal charges that he had sexual intercourse with a prisoner in the laundry room at the women’s prison west of Tuscaloosa. According to the Birmingham News, Eric Todd ...

Calling the crime “reprehensible,” a Manhattan federal judge ordered a former New York prison guard on May 28, 2021, to pay $550,000 in damages to a prisoner he was convicted of sexually assaulting.

According to a report by the New York Daily News, the former Bedford Hills Correctional Facility ...