by David M. Reutter

A settlement approved by the federal court for the Eastern District of California on January 16, 2024, recalls an all-­too familiar jail story. A wheelchair-­bound detainee named Gregory Cantu was denied anti-­seizure medication after arriving at Kings County Jail in Hanford on a probation violation. Despite ...

In September 2023, an elderly prisoner went into cardiac arrest at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, Texas, after the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Medical Director had assured her sentencing judge that he would personally see to her care yet failed to do so.

“That was my mistake,” Dr. ...

By Paul Wright

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Sadly, the history of prison privatization in America is anything but farcical. Through much of the 19th century many prisons and jails in the US were privately operated or run with the prisoners being ...

Leaving office at the end of 2024, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) faces pressure from a coalition of 22 nonprofits to commute the sentences of all 136 prisoners on the state’s death row now. Pressing that plea, more than 200 advocates from the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the ...

After a 20-­year veteran guard at Michigan’s Bay County Jail was caught drunk in the wrong home in July 2023, he tried to exert his privilege by demanding to speak to the county prosecutor when police arrived. They ignored him, though, so Sgt. Lester A. Cousineau, Jr., 48, appeared in ...

A federal lawsuit filed on October 26, 2023, seeks class-­action status for a group of Wisconsin prisoners challenging poor healthcare and conditions of confinement in the state Department of Corrections (DOC), resulting from “a prolonged, unnecessary and unexplained lockdown” that has so far lasted seven months at Waupun Correctional Institution ...

On October 1, 2023, phone calls became free for some 860 jail detainees at the jail in Florida’s Alachua County, whose Board of Commissioners voted for the change six months earlier. That brought the cost from 21 cents per minute to zero, though for no more than three daily calls. ...

Although Colorado voters amended the state constitution in 2018 to ban slave labor inside state prisons, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) has continued to discipline prisoners for refusing to work—14,000 times just since 2019, according to a November NPR News report.

That bolsters the claims of two state prisoners ...

A former Pennsylvania prisoner is now a chef at a Philadelphia pizzeria, which was named one of the 50 best in the U.S. by the Washington Post on August 31, 2023.

Those held in the same cell block with Mike Carter may have already tried his pizza, though with more ...

On September 26, 2023, Louisville Metro Corrections Department (LMCD) suspended guard Terry Henderson after he crashed his car into a vehicle driven by fellow guard Andrew Young. Responding Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officers reportedly suspected Henderson was drunk, but no charges were filed. Young was treated at a hospital ...

On February 28, 2024, prisoner advocates held a press conference outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, demanding that state lawmakers address twin afflictions in the state’s beleaguered Department of Corrections (DOC), whose 51,000 prisoners now represent its highest population in 15 years, even as the number of prison guards ...

A riot broke out at Ironwood State Prison on January 31, 2024, triggering a “threat assessment” that locked down every facility run by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Eight staffers and one prisoner were hospitalized after the brawl. All were released the following day.

A huge group ...

As of December 31, 2023, Los Angeles County jails had recorded 34 detainee deaths in seven months—over one every week, far more than New York City’s notorious Rikers Island complex, which recorded seven deaths during the same period.

Overcrowding is blamed for the spate of dying. The jail system averaged ...

October 11, 2023, the Sentencing Project reported that the share of Black men who will experience incarceration at some point in life has declined from one in three for those born in 1981 to one in five for those born in 2001 and just now entering full adulthood. But while ...

by Matt Clarke.

Condemned Texas prisoner Scott Louis Panetti, 65, was taken off the state’s death row on September 27, 2023, when the federal court for the Western District of Texas found him too insane to kill—or as the Court said, because he “lacks a rational understanding of the connection ...

by David M. Reutter

On January 16, 2024, Maine’s Superior Court for Kennebec County ordered state officials to pay $130,600.02 in attorney fees and legal costs to PLN’s publisher, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), after making a rare finding that the officials exercised bad faith in repeatedly denying the ...

On August 9, 2023, the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed a decision by the state Board of Parole and Post-­Prison Supervision (BPPS) deferring parole consideration for Gerald O. Person.

Sentenced as a “dangerous offender” for crimes committed in the late 1980s, Person was up for parole in 2020 when BPPS ...

On September 20, 2023, the Maryland Board of Public Works approved over $340,000 in compensation to Demetrius Smith, who spent years unjustly incarcerated—more than a year of that time after his innocence had been established. Gov. Wes Moore (D), who chairs the three-­member Board, personally apologized to Smith, who was ...

David M. Reutter

On April 6, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of a suit filed by a pretrial detainee challenging the contraband policy at the Cook County Jail (CCJ) in Chicago, after guards took and destroyed approximately 30 of his books.

The lawsuit ...

by Douglas Ankney

On August 23, 2023, a jury in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma made a massive award of $33 million to the family of Terral B. Ellis, Jr., an Ottawa County Jail (OCJ) detainee who allegedly died begging for medical attention while a nurse ...

by Matt Clarke

On October 3, 2023, the Wisconsin Department of Justice sent a check for $9,000 to a state prisoner in settlement of his claims that he suffered a heat-­related illness, fell and injured himself after state Department of Corrections (DOC) guards ignored his pleas for help. In addition ...

by David M. Reutter

On August 16, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed dismissal of a Michigan prisoner’s lawsuit with an outrageous-­sounding opinion that a guard “may have violated a prison use-­of-­force policy or committed a state-­law tort,” yet that “does not necessarily” mean there ...

When a new production of “Dead Man Walking,” the opera based on the 1993 memoir of Louisiana death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean, opened at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in September 2023, there was a rare offsite performance—at the state’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, with lead singers ...

David M. Reutter

One alternative to incarceration that criminal justice reformers clamor for is probation or parole. A May 2023 report by Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) counted nearly 3.7 million people in the U.S. under some form of community supervision, nearly twice the number held in prisons and jails. The ...

Condemned Louisiana prisoner Darrell Robinson got off death row on January 26, 2024, when the state supreme court found his 2001 trial was tainted and granted a new one. Robinson, 55, was the only one of 57 state prisoners awaiting execution who didn’t file a clemency request in 2023, when ...

by David M. Reutter

The Washington city of Lynnwood agreed on September 20, 2023, to pay $1.75 million to settle a lawsuit alleging guards at the Lynnwood Municipal Jail were negligent in the suicide death of Tirhas Tesfatsion two years before. An investigation after her death found “significant” lapses between ...

by Douglas Ankney

Delays in improvements mandated in a 2020 consent decree resulted in at least six preventable detainee deaths at Sacramento County jails, according to a grand jury investigative report on June 2, 2023.

As PLN reported, the County’s two lockups were the subject of Mays v. Cty. of ...

by Douglas Ankney

On September 27, 2023, the Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC) appeared to back down from a fight over providing state prisoners materials from a Wiccan shop—though it maintained a ban on correspondence from the shop owner and an associated coven.

For at least 20 years, MoonShadow Coven ...

Quietly, on October 4, 2023, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law a measure to boost transparency in the state’s local jails, also adding a layer of oversight vested in a new statewide “detention monitor”—who will act much like an Inspector General to identify problems and make recommendations to ...

by Douglas Ankney

On April 3, 2023, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts called a medical parole denial by the state Commissioner of Correction arbitrary and capricious because it was made without a standardized risk assessment for prisoner applicant Martin McCauley, as required by Title 501 Code Mass. Regs. §17.02. ...

by Douglas Ankney

On September 19, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed dismissal of prisoner Tremayne Durham’s suit blaming employees of the New Jersey Department of Corrections (DOC) for injuries he suffered in a shower slip-­and-­fall, after they denied him access to his cane and ...

In just a month in early 2024, nine employees were arrested at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, the lockup run by South Carolina’s Richland County. The state Department of Corrections (DOC) opened an investigation at the jail in Columbia in July 2023, prompted by a series of stabbings, escapes ...

“Truancy” sounds old-­fashioned. But after two mothers were convicted of letting their kids miss too much school, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld their incarceration sentences for the misdemeanor on September 15, 2023.

The Court’s ruling came in the consolidated appeals of Caitlyn Williams and Tamarae LaRue, who were convicted of ...

On October 17, 2023, a month after a Topeka Correctional Facility prisoner fell and had to crawl back to her cell because guards refused to help her, the Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC) fired two high-­ranking guards at the prison and disciplined six others for neglecting her medical needs. No ...

by Kate Weisburd

No one should be made to give up their rights in exchange for being spared from prison.

The same scene unfolds in criminal courtrooms across the country every day. After someone has been found guilty by a jury or pled guilty, a judge imposes a sentence. The ...

On September 20, 2023, the New Jersey Civil Service Commission upheld a decision by an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) allowing the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to fire a state prison guard involved in a mock killing of George Floyd during a Black Lives Matter protest. Joseph DeMarco, an 18-­year ...

On September 19, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit revived a claim by Brian Davis, a Jamaican national held for four years at Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley Correctional Center (MVCC). The prison is privately operated by the Florida-­based GEO Group, Inc., primarily housing low security noncitizens for ...

Aleksei Navalny, 47, a Russian attorney who led opposition to Pres. Vladmir Putin, died on February 16, 2024, in a penal colony inside the Arctic Circle. The country’s Federal Prison Service said he collapsed after a walk, just a day after appearing healthy, though gaunt, in a video court hearing. ...

by Matt Clarke

Since 2018, at least seven vulnerable detainees have died at the 366-­bed Pottawatomie County Public Safety Center, 30 miles east of Oklahoma City. Yet despite state law requiring deaths be reported within five days to the Oklahoma Health Department’s jail division, the jail failed to report five ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 19, 2023, the Commonwealth of Virginia, the County of Henrico and its Sheriff Alisa A. Gregory agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle claims arising from the death of Irvo Otieno, 28, at Central State Hospital (CSH) in Petersburg.

As PLN previously reported, Otieno ...

On December 19, 2023, the federal court for the Western District of Washington granted final approval to an $11.6 million settlement between Rapid Investments, Inc. and a class of prisoners released from over 1,500 lockups around the U.S., which forced them to accept return of money confiscated during their incarceration ...

Nearly two years after Sheriff Kris Coody of Georgia’s Bleckley County publicly groped television Judge Glenda Hatchett’s chest, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor sexual battery in state court on August 21, 2023. Coody, 59, was then sentenced to 12 months of probation and ordered to pay a $500 fine, plus ...

by Matt Clarke

On September 5, 2023, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina reinstated a parolee’s parental rights that had been stripped for lack of contact with his minor daughter, after finding it was conditions of his parole which had prevented him from contacting her.

Crystal was born to ...

In a remarkable series of rulings on August 15, 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Miller, Jr. granted summary judgment in favor of 22 Indiana state prisoners who had filed separate lawsuits alleging unconstitutional conditions of confinement at the Miami Correctional Facility (MCF). Each plaintiff raised similar claims, naming ...

Once Alabama’s longest-­serving sheriff, Mike Blakely, 72, will continue serving a three-­year sentence for corruption handed down in August 2021, after the state Board of Pardons and Paroles (BOPP) deadlocked over his parole application on March 7, 2024. The 1-­to-­1 tie vote meant no parole for Blakely, who has so ...

At Massachusetts’ maximum-­security Souza-­Baranowski Correctional Center (SBCC), 19 prisoners held in the Secure Adjustment Unit (SAU) began a hunger strike in October 2023, alleging conditions like solitary confinement despite state law reforms limiting its use.

The protest began with a letter to Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D) on October 18, ...

by David M. Reutter

In an en banc ruling on February 1, 2023, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that a Georgia prisoner’s case dismissed for failure to exhaust administrative remedies might amount to dismissal “for failure to state a claim”—an enumerated ground for a ...

by Matt Clarke

On September 22, 2023, a jury in federal court for the Central District of Illinois awarded a total of $19.3 million to a former state prisoner who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a counselor with the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Identified as “Jane Doe,” the prisoner—a ...

After banning state prisoners from receiving physical mail the year before, the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) extended the ban on September 25, 2023, to include books sent to prisoners from family or friends.

The rule change means the only way to send a book to a state prisoner is ...

by Matt Clarke

On October 11, 2023, the Supreme Court of Arizona reversed a grant of partial summary judgment to Corizon Health, the former private medical contractor for the state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (DCRR), in a suit filed over a state prisoner’s death from allegedly untreated diabetes. ...

On August 31, 2023, the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) completed implementation of a new policy permitting staffers to carry naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote, while on duty. But allowing guards to carry the life-­saving drug—used to counteract the effect of a prisoner’s overdose—doesn’t mean that many will do ...

A suit filed in Washington state court on September 22, 2023, challenges disciplinary sanctions imposed on prisoners by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) based on presumptive drug test results.

DOC uses inexpensive colorimetric drug tests to examine incoming mail and other paper items, turning them a certain color if ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 25, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal of Louisiana prisoner Brandon LaVergne’s Eighth Amendment claim, finding the alleged restrictions on his visitation and email access while in “restricted custody”—solitary confinement—were not so bad that they were unconstitutional.

The ...

Douglas Ankney

On September 15, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut granted a transexual prisoner’s motion for summary judgment in a suit accusing the state Department of Correction (DOC) of violating her Eighth Amendment rights by failing to treat her gender dysphoria (GD).

Veronica-­May Clark is ...

by David M. Reutter

On August 23, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to Anne Precythe, Director of the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC), in an Eighth Amendment complaint filed by a state prisoner accusing Precythe of failing to protect ...

by David M. Reutter

On August 15, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed dismissal of an Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference medical claim by a federal prisoner against officials holding him for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in California. However, the Court affirmed dismissal of Roscoe ...

by Douglas Ankney

On September 7, 2023, five former detainees at Arkansas’ Washington County Detention Center (WCDC) informed the federal court for the Western District of Arkansas that they had accepted payment of $2,000 each to settle claims alleging that a jail doctor without their knowledge or consent dosed them ...

On March 11, 2024, FBI agents raided the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California, the troubled federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) lockup plagued by staff sexual assaults on prisoners—so many that it has become known as the “rape club.” Warden Art Dulgov and Associate Warden Patrick Deveney were walked ...

Alabama: On January 11, 2024, two state prison guards at Elmore Correctional Facility (CF) were arrested when their contact information was found in a prisoner’s contraband cellphone, WSFA in Montgomery reported. Eli Charlie DeRamus, 33, and Bunion Thomas, 24, were then accused of smuggling food items in exchange for bribes ...