How Unchecked Power and No Oversight Gives Rise to Abuses

by Anthony W. Accurso

On December 15, 2000, Derwin Brown was returning from a party when he was gunned down. He was holding flowers he had purchased for his wife, Phyllis, when assailants opened fire, striking him at least 10 ...

by Paul Wright

Welcome to the first issue of PLN for the new year, as we enter 2022 and our 32nd year of publication. Last year we published an article in the June edition on the worst sheriffs in America, but like many things, that is a subjective opinion and ...

by David M. Reutter

A California federal court approved a $150,000 settlement on October 13, 2021, for the estate of a prisoner who died of valley fever at the Merced County Jail.

The prisoner, 29-year-old Luis Patino, was booked into the county’s main jail on June 24, 2017, dutifully reporting ...

by David M Reutter

On October 20, 2020, a federal judge in New York refused to overturn a $650,000 award made by a jury earlier that year to a state prisoner on his excessive-use-of-force claim.

The action took place in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ...

by Jayson Hawkins

A former guard at the St. Louis Justice Center (SLJC) was indicted by a federal grand jury on July 28, 2021, on charges that she allowed two prisoners to beat a third in March 2021. That was after she had pleaded guilty to state charges filed for ...

by Casey J. Bastian
The U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in southeast Atlanta, a federal complex that has been at the center of multiple scandals and allegations of corruption over the last decade, was “nearly vacant” at the end of August 2021, when press reports said that all but 134 of some ...

by Kevin Bliss

Black women in pretrial detention were treated worse than any other group of detainees due to the inherently racist, sexist, and economically prejudiced practices in the criminal justice system, according to an Al Jazeera report published July 7, 2021.

The United States currently incarcerates over two million ...

by Jayson Hawkins

On April 8, 2021, the Federal court for the Eastern District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) to preserve the status quo and halt the release by the Washington Department of Corrections of records containing personal information including documents related to identifying prisoners who are ...

by Douglas Ankney 

In August 2021, the Arizona State Bar disciplined a former state Assistant Attorney General, Michael John Hrnicek, for his misconduct while opposing a prisoner’s lawsuit against several employees of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

The prisoner, Tyson McDaniel, is a practicing Muslim who filed suit in ...

by Chuck Sharman

Tennessee-based Corizon Health, one of the nation’s largest private for profit health care providers to prisons, with annual revenues of at least $800 million, announced on November 3, 2021, that it had received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) “to expand distance learning and ...

by Ed Lyon

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, health and penology experts have urged state and federal governments to depopulate their prison systems. State governors remain under increasing pressure to use their executive clemency powers to achieve this purpose. Some are, some are not. Some can, some cannot. ...

The Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, California, about 20 miles southwest of Oakland, has had its share of publicity since it opened in 1974. Publishing heir-turned-bankrobbing-militant Patty Hearst did time there, as did “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, as well as actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin after pleading guilty to ...

by Jayson Hawkins

The private prison industry has been under fire recently across the country—from lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to federal policies mandating a slow and unsteady move away from for-profit prisons to scandals arising from inhumane conditions and rampant sexual assaults.

Feeling the heat ...

by Keith Sanders

In the 1950s, the timber mills in Susanville, California, began to shutter. For this isolated town of about 8,000 residents, the economic impact of losing its only industry was devastating. But in 1963 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) came to the rescue. The department ...

by Ed Lyon

Professor Michael Conklin recently released a law review article arguing the merits of allowing juries to consider imprisonment costs when they are deliberating sentences lengths, with the objective of lessoning mass incarceration. Conklin’s report is founded on and supported by dozens of statistical compilations, databases and statutes ...

by Ed Lyon

Of the many mysteries surrounding Jeffery Epstein, including exactly where the billionaire got his fabulous wealth before committing suicide in a Manhattan cell in August 2020—while awaiting trial on charges of sex-trafficking in underage girls—the question of who is responsible was officially decided when federal prosecutors accepted ...

by David M. Reutter

On December 11, 2021, New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court, County of Santa Fe, denied a motion to dismiss a suit filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of Prison Legal News (PLN) and Criminal Legal News (CLN), against Centurion Correctional Healthcare of New ...

by Casey J. Bastian

On May 19, 2021, the Court of Appeals of Indiana refused to dismiss a lower court’s ruling against a state prisoner whose prison account was garnished by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to satisfy a restitution sanction of over $8,000 for injuries a guard sustained ...

by David M. Reutter

On August 14, 2020, a federal judge in Colorado refused to set aside a judgment for a state prisoner who won $180,002 the year before when a jury agreed that guards retaliated against him for exercising “his right to grieve/complain.” Then the court added another award ...

by Ed Lyon

For many years PLN has reported on prison systems across the nation like those in Arkansas and Texas that pay prisoners nothing for the work they are required to perform. Others, like Louisiana, pay only pennies per hour, which is legal because the Constitution’s 13th Amendment that ...

by Ed Lyon

The COVID-19 pandemic is now a well-known, world-wide fact of life. Less well known is a lingering set of aftereffects that afflict some people infected with the disease, which the medical establishment has labeled “Long COVID.”

Some of Long COVID’s common symptoms include tiredness or fatigue, cognitive ...

On July 27, 2021, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled en banc that pre-trial detainees are entitled to jail time credit if they were unable to make bond except for jail time served after a parole revocation warrant issued.

Erick R. Allen was on parole for crimes he was convicted of ...

by David M. Reutter

In a ruling issued on January 19, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a lower court erred in dismissing a prisoner’s due process claim on grounds he abandoned it on appeal. The district court also erred in proceeding as if ...

by Matt Clarke

Recently, during an industrial conference, executives from Waste Management Services (which recorded $15.22 billion in 2020 revenues), discussed using immigrants as truck drivers, and other industry executives suggested using prison or work-release programs to fill openings in the sanitation, waste, and recycling industry.

But Chuck Stiles, director ...

A Michigan federal district court awarded a $493.80 default judgement on October 29, 2020, to a prisoner in a civil rights action alleging excessive use of force by guards at Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The prisoner, Donna K. Scrivo, had alleged her Eighth Amendment guarantee of protection ...

by Casey J. Bastian

Saying the unduly harsh confinement conditions he’d endured for nearly two years—without ever being convicted of a crime—likely violate the Fourteenth Amendment, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on November 23, 2021, granted a request for injunctive relief made by former PLN ...

by Mark Wilson

In a report on pervasive sexual abuse of prisoners at Oregon’s only women’s prison in 2017, Prison Legal News reached another five years back in history to quote Brian Lathan, an attorney for some of the women who warned in 2012, “It now really is an epidemic.” ...

On December 28, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a prisoner who was sexually abused by three guards must prove their supervisor had subjective knowledge of the crime to hold a supervisor liable. Because this was not done, it ordered summary judgment be ...

The Colorado Supreme Court has decided “that the Governor is an appropriate defendant in cases involving ‘his constitutional responsibility to uphold laws of the state and to oversee Colorado’s executive agencies.’”

The Court’s February 1, 2021, en banc opinion was issued in an appeal filed by Gov. Jared Polis (D) ...

On December 28, 2020, the Supreme Court of California held that California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) regulations excluding nonviolent sex offenders with from parole consideration under Proposition 57, the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 (Cal. Const. art. I, § 32), are invalid as the statute expressly ...

On August 9, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a Mississippi prisoner who had filed at least a dozen federal lawsuits pro se since 2004 and admitted using them “against his custodians as a means of intimidating them to comply with his demands for ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 5, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to reverse a district court and order an injunction against the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC) because, during the pendency of the lawsuit, DOC had improved conditions at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility ...

by Matt Clarke

A trio of pro se prisoner appeals denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on September 22, 2021, left intact an agreement approved earlier in the year by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, under which the Texas Department ...

by Casey J. Bastian

In August 2021, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) signed House Bill 3665 into law, allowing for the early release of certain prisoners housed in the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) who are either medically incapacitated or terminally ill.

Under the law, the definition of “medically incapacitated” ...

by Jacob Barrett

On January 8, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina approved a $2 million settlement to be paid by Buncombe County, North Carolina, for the wrongful death of Michele Quantele Smiley, a 34-year-old mother of six children left to die in a ...

by David M. Reutter

On Dec. 4, 2020, a federal district court in New York awarded $175,000 to a former state prisoner who was imprisoned for 686 days as a result of an unconstitutionally imposed term of post-release supervision (PRS).
The prisoner, Shawn Michael Vincent, entered into a plea agreement ...

by Matt Clarke and Dale Chappell

On August 9, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed the dismissal of a prisoner’s lawsuit alleging his due-process and access-to-courts rights were violated when the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to notify him it had censored a letter ...

But ICE Makes Sure That It Doesn’t Matter

by Jacob Barrett

On July 29, 2021 the Supreme Court of Washington ruled that a state prisoner was entitled to credit for all the time he was held in custody, even time outside the state, so long as he was being held ...

“Parole is the legal equivalent of imprisonment”

by Matt Clarke

On August 3, 2021, the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that the time a prisoner spent in prison in excess of that allowed by his sentence must be used to reduce his period of parole supervision.
Paulino Njango agreed ...

by C.J. Ciaramella, Reason.com

The family of a 23-year-old woman who committed suicide in a rural Washington jail in December 2019 says she tried to report sexual harassment by a guard, but her complaint was dismissed. Months later, that same jail guard was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting four ...

On December 22, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that when a lawsuit is removed to federal court from state court and then dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, the dismissal cannot be counted as one of the ...

Alabama: On November 17, 2021, a former Alabama state prison guard was sentenced in federal court in Birmingham to 87 months in prison. As reported by the Birmingham News, a search found the guard, Gary Charles Dixon, Jr., 36, with 497 grams of methamphetamine when he showed up to work ...