by Leah Wang
Over 1 million people sit in U.S. state prisons on any given day. These individuals are overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Black, Native, Hispanic, and/or LGBTQ, and often targeted by law enforcement from a young age, as we detailed recently in our report Beyond the Count. And all ...
by Chuck Sharman
During Ukraine’s successful offensive to liberate the southern city of Kherson in October 2022, retreating Russian forces took 2,500 Ukrainian prisoners with them. What followed was a Kafka-esque journey through five countries, at the end of which the same Russian army that led the prisoners out of ...
by David M. Reutter
On December 16, 2022, a jury in federal court for the District of Colorado awarded $3.5 million to state prisoner Jason Brooks, whose complaint alleged simply that the “offer of adult diapers was not a reasonable accommodation” of his disability by the state Department of Corrections ...
By Paul Wright
One thing that has remained a constant in the past 33 years of publishing PLN has been the woefully inadequate medical care that prisoners receive around the country. A significant portion of our coverage involves reporting on healthcare that ranges from nonexistent to barbaric and it drives ...
by Keith Sanders
On January 31, 2023, a group of 26 prisoners housed in New York’s notorious Sing Sing maximum-security prison brought suit against the state for an assault on them by guards during a two-day prison-wide search in November 2022. The suit, filed for the prisoners in state Court ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 11, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted a motion to withdraw from an attorney appointed to represent a federal prisoner in Missouri appealing his civil commitment. Though allowing the appeal was “frivolous,” the Court denied a companion motion to keep ...
By Eike Blohm, MD
After two years of negotiations between the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC), an agreement was reached on December 20, 2022, to fix atrocious mental health care in state prisons, which the Feds consider so “cruel and unusual” that it ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On January 5, 2023, new Michigan Supreme Court Justice Kyra Bolden announced she had accepted the resignation of her formerly incarnated clerk, Pete Martel. In doing so, the justice bowed to complaints that Martel, who served 14 years for shooting at police during a 1994 robbery, ...
by Harold Hempstead
On February 17, 2023, an assistant to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) signed a settlement with a group of state prisoners, resolving claims they were subjected to retaliation after a January 2020 melee at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center (SBCC) that sent three guards to the hospital.
The ...
by Casey J. Bastian and Benjamin Tschirhart
Citing “bureaucratic incompetence,” as well as “flawed, confusing and insufficient” policies and procedures, a December 2022 report by a federal government watchdog attempted to answer the question: How did a notorious but elderly criminal end up transferred by the federal Bureau of Prisons ...
by David M. Reutter
Once it begins a lethal injection, the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) “will attempt to carry out the execution and not stop until it becomes clear that they are likely to run out of time under the death warrant, and during that time, will do anything ...
by Jacob Barrett
On December 5, 2022, a jury in federal court for the Western District of Michigan awarded $6.4 million to the estate of Wade Jones, 40, who was left to die from untreated alcohol withdrawal in his cell at Michigan’s Kent County Correctional Facility (KCCF) by guards and ...
by Ed Lyon
As retributive minded states likeTexas pursue ever more draconian measures and policies to deny housing to released prisoners (PLN, May 2021, pp. 34-35), California is beginning to enact measures and policies to assist released prisoners in obtaining housing.
Easing housing restrictions for the formerly incarcerated ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On December 15, 2022, the U.S, District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania reduced Rashidah Brice’s sentence by 30 months. Brice had filed a motion for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c) and presented three circumstances that might constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons to ...
by Chuck Sharman
A guard and a prisoner at Oahu Community Correctional Center in Honolulu were among four people convicted on federal conspiracy charges in a drug-and-gun-smuggling scheme at the lockup. All but the guard were sentenced in February and May 2023.
On February 10, 2023, prisoner Robert S. Gibson, ...
by Chuck Sharman
Since its peak nearly two decades ago, New York’s prisoner population has fallen by half. Added to the millions of dollars it cost the state Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) to build the prisons are millions more to shutter them. Some closed properties were sold ...
by David Reutter
An Arizona prisoner’s civil rights claim is headed to trial in June 2023, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it, saying his prison’s policy on material he is allowed cannot be applied inconsistently without trampling his First Amendment liberties.
The suit was ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
An Indiana jail guard and a jail detainee are headed to trial in the summer of 2023 on charges that the guard sold the detainee access to keys that he used to unlocked the female housing area to a group of male detainees. But officials at ...
by Matthew Clark
On December 14, 2022, the Minnesota Supreme Court took up a state prisoner’s claim that he was left with permanent nerve damage from restraints guards misused during a routine medical transport. The Court held that the proper standard to apply is whether the allegations show deliberate indifference, ...
by Keith Sanders
The COVID-19 pandemic is over but not forgotten. Highlighting the virus’s deadly toll on American prisoners, an analysis published by the New York Times on February 19, 2023, tracked the impact of the disease during its first year. The data reveal significantly higher rates of infection and ...
by Keith Sanders
On January 19, 2023, Corrections Minister Enver Erdogan announced that the Australian state of Victoria is booting the private healthcare contractor from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC). Effective July 1, 2023, Wellpath subsidiary Correct Care Australasia (CCA) will be replaced by the state-owned Western Health to ...
by Casey J. Bastian
The First Step Act of 2018 (FSA) was signed into law in December 2018. Among other hoped-for benefits was that the legislation would help reduce recidivism and decrease the overall prison population. However, data compiled by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) for the ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
A day before releasing a scathing report on the state’s execution procedures, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) fired the deputy commissioner of the Department of Corrections (DOC), Debbi Inglis, along with Inspector General Kelly Young. The last day of work for both was December 27, 2022. ...
by K. Robert Schaeffer
On October 7, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee granted judgment on the pleadings to Rutherford County and VendEngine, Inc., the contractor that digitizes prisoner mail in its jail, in a suit filed by Smart Communications that alleged infringement of its ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On November 2, 2022, California’s Monterey County agreed to pay $775,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the estate of Rafael Ramirez Lara, a mentally ill detainee allegedly ignored in the county jail while he compulsively drank water until he died.
An undisclosed portion of the ...
by Chuck Sharman
On January 23, 2023, just 10 days after Ryan Everson was put in Missouri’s Clay County Jail, the 42-year-old was found dead in his cell. That his three children no longer had a father is cruelly ironic, since Everson was behind bars for failure to pay $50 ...
by Casey J. Bastian
A report on the first investigation into federal pretrial detention on a national level was released in October 2022 by the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic (FCJC) of the University of Chicago Law School. Combing through data from over 600 detention hearings across four federal districts over ...
by David M. Reutter
In a decision reached on August 10,2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit stayed the hand that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had reached into the pocket of a federal prisoner in Missouri. Though ultimately Anthony Robinson lost nearly all of the ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
After a 2019 incident during which a prisoner gave birth in her cell – delivering a baby into the toilet while guards ignored her cries for help – Arizona’s Perryville Prison in Buckeye started inducing labor for pregnant prisoners.
Inducing labor involves intravenous administration of drugs ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Congress has yet to demand systemic changes that could seriously reduce deaths in custody of law enforcement. This reluctance may stem in part from the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) fails to accurately count the number of people who die in custody, despite being ...
by Jacob Barrett
Johnny Hincapie spent more than 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. On December 7, 2022, New York City agreed to pay Hincapie $12.875 million for his wrongful conviction, one of the largest such settlements in city history. A separate claim had previously ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On December 16, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a district court order permitting the government to seize nearly $3,737.89 from the inmate trust fund account of federal prisoner Adam Carson, 40. As the lower court failed to make necessary findings ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
Tuberculosis (TB) is an illness caused by a mycobacterium, a class of bacteria that is hard to see under the microscope, difficult to grow in culture, and has the audacity to live in the very immune cells (marcophages) that are tasked with hunting and killing bacteria. ...
by Keith Sanders
Two of four detainees have been recaptured after escaping from jail in Mississippi’s Hinds County on April 29, 2023. The other two are dead. Meanwhile control of the Raymond Detention Center (RDC) remains in limbo after the U.S. Court of Appeals to the Fifth Circuit granted a ...
by Ed Lyon
New data released in December 2022 by the federal Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showed a steady decline in prison population from 2011 to 2021 – nearly 25% overall. The number of people imprisoned today – 1,163,665 – reflects the largest slice of U.S. ...
by Keith Sanders
On September 30, 2022, nineteen-year-old Quafabian McBride was fatally stabbed in the heart during a fight between rival gangs at Georgia’s Phillips State Prison. McBride and fellow “Rolax Bloods” member Dejuan Cannon, 22, allegedly attempted to attack another prisoner, “Crips” member Antavious Simon, also 19. But Simon ...
by Harold Hempstead
On April 20, 2022, the federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee issued a highly unusal order enjoining the Davidson County medical examiner from performing an autopsy or collecting bodily fluids from a prisoner following his execution by lethal injection.
Oscar Franklin Smith filed his complaint ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Ray Garcia was warden for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California. He served as supervisor at the lockup for regular audits conducted under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). But after his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez ...
by David M. Reutter
On December 14, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit took up the latest in a “slew” of cases by Illinois prisoners alleging they are “housed like cattle” at Menard Correctional Center (MCC), “where cells meant for one person are routinely used to ...
by Chuck Sharman
After a media investigation found Illinois prisoners were forced to pay for abortion procedures – even covering the wages of guard escorts to and from medical providers – Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) ordered the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to change its policy.
As a result, DOC ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On May 31, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois awarded attorney’s fees and costs totaling $17,449.90 to a state prisoner who earlier convinced a jury that a prison nurse’s dilly-dallying deprived him of prescribed physical therapy. For unnecessary pain and suffering ...
By Casey J. Bastian
There are around 1.25 million prisoners in state prison systems. Prior to incarceration, most were poor, uneducated, disadvantaged or marginalized. But wait-lists for prison education and other programming indicate prisoners desire to better themselves. Yet prison systems are failing to provide the tools needed for post-incarceration ...
by Jacob Barrett
Despite finding a “paucity of reliable scientific evidence concerning the effect of large doses of midazolam on humans,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit didn’t halt its use in Arkansas’s three-drug execution protocol. To the contrary, it found the lack evidence of means that ...
by Jacob Barrett
On October 3, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a writ of certiorari to hear an appeal by a group of Connecticut prisoners, who lost a challenge to the prohibition on sexually explicit material by the state Department of Corrections (DOC). See: Reynolds v. Quiros ...
by Jacob Barrett
On October 18, 2022, officials in Louisiana’s Bossier Parish agreed to pay $2.75 million to settle a federal suit filed over the 2017 death of a detainee in the parish jail. Collin James Fletcher, 24, died five days after arrest for minor drug possession charges. The cause ...
by Jacob Barrett
On July 15, 2022, the federal court for the District of Nevada awarded $560,587.50 in fees to attorneys representing a state prisoner who earlier settled his medical neglect claim against the state Department of Corrections (DOC) for $7,500. In addition, DOC agreed to amend its policy effectively ...
by Matt Clarke
Just weeks before their trial was to begin on charges of involuntary manslaughter in a detainee’s death, four guards at Michigan’s Muskegon County Jail pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of Willful Neglect of Duty on
April 20, 2023.
That means Crystal Grove, Jamal Lane, Jeffery Patterson ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
Three years after retiring, and 16 years after the first rape allegations surfaced at Mississippi’s Noxubee County Jail (NCJ), former Sheriff Terry Grassaree has been indicted on federal charges. On October 5, 2022, Grassaree and a former deputy were accused of bribing a detainee with a cellphone ...
by David M. Reutter
The Supreme Court of Ohio issued a writ of mandamus to a state prisoner on December 15, 2022, awarding $3,000 in statutory damages for records he was denied in violation of the state Public Records Act (PRA) by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC). ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
As of mid-January 2023, almost 100 minimum-security prisoners from the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) in Tucson were still being held in segregation at the nearby U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Tucson, six weeks after a fellow prisoner somehow got a gun and attempted to shoot his wife when ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On October 28, 2022, the first graduates of the Offender Mentor Certification Program (OMCP) at California State Prison (CSP) in Lancaster received their certificates. The new class of 29 will offer peer-to-peer drug abuse recovery and counseling to prisoners across the state. Upon release they can ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
In its final rule that took effect on May 4, 2023, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) declared that prisoners placed on home confinement by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) under eligibility criteria expanded by Congress in response to the COVID-19 pandemic would not have to ...
by Chuck Sharman
On April 21, 2023, South Carolina prisoner Dexter Lawrence, 27, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release for his role in a “sextortion” scam that targeted U.S. military personnel. Two co-conspirators also previously received federal sentences for money-laundering. Two other ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 23, 2023, a federal judge who had earlier refused to reduce the sentence of the former head of the New York City jail guards’ union convicted in a costly bribery scheme, instead granted compassionate release to Norman Seabrook, 63.
The former president of the city’s ...
Loaded on
June 15, 2023
published in Prison Legal News
June, 2023, page 63
Arizona: A private prison guard in Arizona was picked up on drug charges in California on April 18, 2023, as he made his way back from Mexico with his wife and kids – along with almost 53 pounds of meth and heroin stashed in the gas tank. The Arizona Republic ...
