by David M. Reutter

Much has been made of the “food desert” where America’s poorest citizens live: inner-city ghettos and rural backwaters where no grocery store is found, forcing impoverished residents—most lacking a car—to shop for food in high-priced and poorly-stocked gas stations and convenience stores.

But prisons also house ...

by Paul Wright

The financial exploitation of prisoners and their family is nothing new for readers of PLN. In the 34 years we have been publishing we have seen it spread across pretty much every interaction prisoners have with the outside world. But perhaps the longest running form of exploitation ...

by David M. Reutter

On April 5, 2023, a settlement was reached between the estate of a Virginia prisoner who died from untreated Hepatitis C and his physician with the state Department of Corrections (DOC). The agreement, which provided a $700,000 payout, followed a ruling by the U.S. Court of ...

Over two decades ago, in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) barred capital punishment for intellectually disabled prisoners—typically those with an IQ of 70 or below. Courts still wrestle with that ruling because IQ tests have a margin of error. That means ...

A high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia jail gang was murdered in Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail on August 4, 2023. The fatal stabbing of Joseph Hutchinson, 51, came just weeks after fellow gang member Michael Torres, 59, was also stabbed to death in his cell at Folsom State ...

After a gruesome toll of 10 detainee deaths in 2023, Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail (FCJ) recorded its first fatality of the new year on January 10, 2024. Michael Anthony Holland, 36, was found unresponsive in his cell and later died at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Holland had been held since May ...

On January 3, 2024, California state prisoner and Aryan Brotherhood (AB) member Patrick “Big Pat” Brady, 53, pleaded guilty in federal court for the Northern District of California to murdering a fellow prisoner at High Desert State Prison (HDSP).

As part of a plea deal on charges of violating the ...

by David M. Reutter

A $3 million settlement in the 2020 withdrawal death of Illinois pretrial detainee Elissa A. Lindhorst at the Madison County Jail was fully executed on May 10, 2023.

Lindhorst, 28, was another casualty of the opioid epidemic that has caught so many law enforcement and jail ...

Douglas Ankney

Prisoners beware: On June 5, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit refused to stop the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from “turn[ing] over the full amount” in a prisoner’s trust account to be applied toward “his outstanding restitution obligation.”

In 2019, Christopher Saemisch was ...

A former Maryland prisoner’s January 2023 exoneration marked the end of a long and painful chapter in a 1981 double murder he was unjustly convicted of. On July 5, 2023, state authorities awarded John Huffington, 61, nearly $2.9 million for 32 years he spent wrongfully imprisoned, including a decade on ...

Around 2:45 a.m. on July 16, 2023, a suspected carbon monoxide (CO) leak led to evacuation of staff and over 450 prisoners from the minimum-security satellite camp at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Coleman, Florida. Five people were hospitalized with possible CO poisoning, according to the federal Bureau of ...

by Kwaneta Harris

In prison, even learning about your own reproductive health is met with repression.

This essay originally appeared in Inquest on October 19, 2023. The original can be found at https://inquest.org/censoring-womens-health/

“It’s coming out! Down there!” my twenty-year-old handcuffed neighbor, Mina, says through clenched teeth as she passes ...

by David M. Reutter

On July 4, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to New York state prison officials who refused a prisoner’s judicially ordered enrollment in the state’s Shock Incarceration Program.

For a controlled substance offense, Michael Matzell was ...

by Douglas Ankney

In June 2023, the South Carolina Insurance Reserve Fund paid $8,700 to each of 23 former detainees at Berkeley County’s Hill-Finklea Detention Center (HFDC)—a total of $200,100—to settle claims they were exposed to toxic fumes while in custody.

According to the complaint they filed, the detainees were ...

On August 20, 2023, Connecticut newspapers reported that state Attorney General William Tong (D) announced his office would no longer defend a former state prison guard convicted of assaulting a prisoner in a civil suit filed over his subsequent death.

The unusual move leaves former state Department of Corrections (DOC) ...

by David M. Reutter

On July 3, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a lawsuit challenging a federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy that caps a prisoner’s phone calls at a total of 300 minutes per month.

The suit was ...

Results of a yearlong investigation released on July 10, 2023, found that a state-funded rehabilitation program for California parolees started in 2014—Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming (STOP)—has cost taxpayers $600 million, with little evidence to prove it is working.

STOP is part of a plan Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has ...

A deputy prison superintendent with the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) was arrested and charged with theft and bribery on July 25, 2023. Gerald E. Merrill, 61, is accused of using his state-issued credit card over the course of 10 years to steer purchases to vendors who then returned kickbacks. ...

In July 2023, writer Brad Bigelow learned his great-grandfather’s 1951 obituary was a lie—George Bartles had not died at his Seattle home. Newly released records revealed that the 74-year-old was instead an inmate at the now-shuttered Northern State Hospital, where he had been involuntarily committed with dementia for the last ...

Matt Clarke

On July 13, 2023, the Supreme Court of Ohio held that a state prisoner who previously settled his excessive force claim against the state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC) for $2,000 had no clear right to the names of DRC personnel involved in settlement negotiations.

In 2016, ...

When Charles Patton, 54, rolled out of Dixon Correctional Center in his wheelchair on July 19, 2023, he was the first Illinois prisoner freed under SB 2129, a re-sentencing measure passed two years earlier. The second was Derron Johnson, 37, who was released two weeks later. Patton had served 17 ...

On June 15, 2023, Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) published a report on suppression of prison journalism from the inside. The bottom line? Practicing journalism while imprisoned in most states is “extremely difficult and sometimes risky.”

News reporting by prisoners dates back to the 1800s. Until the 1990s, dozens of papers ...

How “Big Capital” Learned to Love Mass Incarceration

“Who is accountable for the imposition of punishment in our carceral system?” asked Laura I. Appleman, Professor of Law at Willamette University, in an article published on April 13, 2023. An answer is no longer simple, she notes, since responsibility for U.S. ...

by David M. Reutter

A July 10, 2023, report by Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) showed that measures of public safety after cash bail reform reflected “decreases or negligible increases in crime or re-arrest rates.” The report revealed that the type of pretrial reform did not matter, the results were the ...

by David M. Reutter

On July 17, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) Secretary James LeBlanc in a prisoner’s claim alleging his misclassification as a sex offender illegally extended his sentence ...

On July 17, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit deemed testimony by a pregnant mentally ill detainee no less credible than that of her Michigan jailers—one of whom allegedly kicked her in the stomach and caused her to lose her unborn child.

That presumption was extended, ...

by Mark Wilson

On August 24, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to a Minnesota jail guard in a prisoner’s claim that the guard grabbed and squeezed his penis during a strip search.

In December 2015, while incarcerated in the ...

Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark and New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) Commissioner Jocelyn E. Strauber announced on October 27, 2023, that a guard at the city’s Rikers Island jail complex had been indicted for evidence tampering, falsifying business records and official misconduct after placing “a sharp object ...

by Douglas Ankney

When Indiana state prisoner Tony Love participated in a brawl, he was apparently unaware of the severity of the consequences he faced. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit made sure he knew, ruling on July 7, 2023, that the loss of more than ...

On the last day of July 2023, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that Earth had just endured the hottest three-week period ever recorded, noting that “for vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe—it is a cruel summer.”

He didn’t have to tell prisoners spending the summer behind ...

by Douglas Ankney

On July 10, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed Texas prisoner Anthony Prescott’s appeal, once again explaining the requirement of 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g) that applications to waive filing fees and proceed in forma pauperis (IFP) must be denied where a prisoner plaintiff ...

by David M. Reutter

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Amy L. Solomon, Director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP), and National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Director Nancy La Vigne visited South Carolina’s Turbeville Correctional Institution (TCI) in June 2023 to inspect the Community Opportunity Restoration Enhancement (CORE) ...

by David M. Reutter

On July 24, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit concluded that “precedents conclusively establish that the use of a taser on a non-threatening and cooperative subject is an unconstitutionally excessive use of force.” The Court, therefore, reversed summary judgment for a Texas ...

A complaint filed on June 29, 2023, accused the former chaplain of Kentucky’s Eastern Correctional Complex (ECC), of repeatedly harassing and threatening a state prisoner, as well as subjecting him to abuse and sexual molestation. In addition, the suit alleged, former chaplain Todd S. Boyce, 55, had sexual contact with ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 11, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to an Oklahoma jail guard because a reasonable jury could find that kneeing a handcuffed pretrial detainee’s face “sufficed to show a legal violation.”

Jesse Wise had been ...

by Douglas Ankney

A report on July 6, 2023, from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (WLCCR&UA) exposed abuses suffered by prisoners at the hands of Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guards while confined in the now-closed Special Management Unit (SMU) at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 23, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published a report and recommendations concerning access to attorneys for pretrial detainees in federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities.

The report focused on detainees’ confidential communications with their attorneys, their ability to review discovery documents provided electronically ...

On July 26, 2023, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s award of $700 in damages to state prisoner Kimani E. Ware for a public records request denied by the Hamilton County court clerk’s office. However, the Court refused to overturn denial of Ware’s petition for a writ of ...

by Matthew Clarke

A federal indictment handed down in June 2023 accused Scott H. Jenkins, 51, Sheriff of Virginia’s Culpeper County, of taking bribes totaling more than $72,500 from three local businessmen to make them auxiliary deputy sheriffs—issuing them badges, identification cards, guns and body armor, even helping one get ...

by Matt Clarke

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” as former British Prime Minister William Gladstone famously said. On August 7, 2023, a former Illinois prisoner finally got a measure of justice for a botched release 13 years earlier. On that date, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ...

by Douglas Ankney

On July 13, 2023, Oklahoma’s Court of Criminal Appeals granted a new trial to state prisoner Robert Leon Hashagen III, 60, after finding his trial judge and his prosecuting attorney failed to disclose their prior sexual relationship to his defense team.

Hashagen was convicted by a jury ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 26, 2023, two sons filed suit for the estate of their schizophrenic dad, accusing officials at San Diego County’s Central Jail where he was incarcerated of letting him die from dehydration, starvation and pneumonia. The lawsuit raises the question: How should jail officials treat detainees ...

by Douglas Ankney

On July 7, 2023, Judge Marsha J. Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington found the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) in material breach of an agreement that settled a long-running class-action accusing the agency of “violating the constitutional ...

by Douglas Ankney

On July 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a suit alleging delayed medical care caused the death of Eugene Washington while he was held in pretrial detention at Illinois’ Winnebago County Jail (WJC).

Washington’s cellmate, Lamar ...

by Douglas Ankney

In a surprising twist to a horrific story, the State of Hawaii agreed on July 27, 2023, to pay six state prisoners whose federal civil rights suit alleged they were sexually assaulted at Women’s Community Correction Center (WCCC) a $2 million settlement—after a jury found they were ...

by Douglas Ankney

On June 21, 2023, Judge Anthony J. Battaglia of the federal court for the Southern District of California signed an order in a suit alleging violations at San Diego County jails of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126, § 12101 et seq. The Court ...

by Douglas Ankney

On July 13, 2023, Kendall Brian Morgan, 45, a former undersheriff in Oklahoma’s LeFlore County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO), was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison, followed by 36 months of supervised release, for beating a handcuffed detainee in the county jail.

Morgan was indicted in federal ...

by David M. Reutter

In a precedential opinion issued on August 21, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a federal prisoner incarcerated in the state need not satisfy a state-law requirement for a certificate of merit in order to proceed with a medical malpractice ...

Any prison or jail needs three things: guards, prisoners and money. Texas has money, at least enough to build more prisons and jails than any other state; the last state budget allocated $200 million for even more lockups. To keep them full, lawmakers have expanded the imposition of money bail ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 30, 2023, the federal court for the Eastern District of Arkansas gave final approval to a settlement agreement under which for-profit prisoner transport firm Inmate Services Corp. (ISC) agreed to pay a total of $949,379.48 to resolve claims that it violated the constitutional rights ...

When Oklahoma prisoner Anthony Sanchez, 44, was executed on September 21, 2023, for the 1996 killing of University of Oklahoma dance student Juli Busken, Rev. Jeff Hood was by his side. But the attorneys that Sanchez had by then fired, as well as advocates for a clemency grant that he ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 26, 2023, the Michigan Supreme Court held that journalists seeking release of videos from the state Department of Corrections (DOC) were prevailing parties and thus entitled to recover attorney fees—even if their attorneys were working pro bono.

Proceeding under the state Freedom of Information Act ...

Australia: Love was in the air at Clarence Correctional Centre on the last day of 2023, when a prisoner left his cell and climbed two fences to reach another cell where his girlfriend was held, and the two welcomed the new year together. Perth Now reported that guards found the ...

In separate decisions on the same day, the Supreme Court of Illinois and the Superior Court of Los Angeles County reformed their jurisdictions’ cash bail systems on July 18, 2023.

Illinois became the first state in the nation to eliminate cash bail with passage of the SAFE-T Act of 2021, ...