by Douglas Ankney

“If we refused to work we had to stand on top of a wooden box in the sun. It was called ‘doin’ the scarecrow’ and some guys passed out from the heat”—Florida prisoner Ronald Smith, quoted by formerly incarcerated journalist Ryan Moser in Slavery and the Modern-Day Prison Plantation, JStor Daily (Nov. 2023).

That quote is not a relic of the 19th century. Smith was talking about 1988, when he was part of a “gun squad”—a group of prisoners who toiled outdoors under the eye of guards on horseback armed with 12-guage shotguns.

As PLN reported, prisons have not been left out of the modern effort to erase the names of slavers and Confederates from public buildings that once honored them. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.32.] Name changes are easy. But what about the men and women caged inside the prisons, who are still routinely coerced to work for little or no pay? While most elected officials disavow any ambition to return to America’s slaveholding past, the ugly practice continues. Slavery is almost “mandated” as appropriate “punishment” for crime in the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, the United States cannot break from the desire shared ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover article discusses the current state of prison slavery in America. This has been an ongoing topic of coverage for Prison Legal News since we first started in 1990. The legal slave status of American prisoners is currently enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution which does not ban slavery but limits it to people who have been convicted of a crime. We are slowly seeing efforts to chip away at this, efforts that began in the 1970s as part of that era’s prison reform movement.

The issue of prison slavery is multi-faceted and has a wide variety of impacts throughout society. The first and most obvious is the removal of 2 million-plus people from the active work force by caging them. Second is the fact that at least a million people are directly employed to guard the prisoners. Third is the impact the tiny percentage of employed prisoners has, coupled with the reality that prison slave labor is what keeps the American gulag running with the unpaid/nominally paid labor of the prisoners working in kitchens, laundries, landscaping, maintenance, industries, etc., for the prison and jail system.

It is gratifying to see ...

The Claremont Institute, “nerve center of the American right,” honored Sheriff Chad Bianco of California’s Riverside County on November 9, 2023, with its annual Sheriff Award for being a “longtime patriot and tireless defender of America’s founding principles.”

For $450 a plate, subscribers attending the award dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Huntington Beach kicked off Claremont’s 2023 Sheriffs Fellowship — a hush-hush program that schools law enforcement officers in far-right ideology of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a controversial group whose member sheriffs embrace a discredited reading of the U.S. Constitution to proclaim authority superseding that of state and federal government officials.

Bianco may be a hero to the Claremont Institute and its members who long for a “Red Caesar” to ride a reactionary wave into despotic power, but to the Press-Enterprise of Riverside County, Bianco presides over a dysfunctional and chaotic jail system that spawns misconduct among its deputies and deaths among its detainees. The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights calls Bianco “one of many sheriffs who hide behind constitutional sheriff mythology to justify law enforcement abuses of power.”

Riverside County jails saw 19 in-custody deaths in 2022, the most since 2005, ...

A massive manhunt was underway in France on May 14, 2024, after a prison van was ambushed at a highway toll booth by four armed accomplices of prisoner Mohamed Amra, 30. He escaped in the ensuing shootout, which also killed two guards escorting him and seriously wounded three others. The four attackers and Amra, nicknamed “La Mouche”—or “the Fly”—escaped in two vehicles later found abandoned and burned.

Amra has an extensive record of mostly mid-level crimes, the latest a burglary conviction with an 18-month prison term handed down on May 11, 2024. But he is also suspected of having ties to the “Blacks,” one of several Marseilles drug-running gangs, which have been blamed for at least 50 fatal shootings in the past year. Amra’s suspected involvement in a gang kidnapping that turned deadly brought him from Val de Reuil prison to a court hearing in Rouen, after which he made his escape.

Prosecutors say that gang drug trafficking is exploding across France. One of them, Nicolas Bessone, said that the gangs were successfully bribing unnamed court workers in Marseilles, which is considered the epicenter of the country’s illegal drug trade. Before leaving the prison to attend the hearing, Amra made ...

On October 3, 2023, the federal court for the Middle District of Georgia denied a motion to dismiss filed by defendant state prison officials in a prisoner’s challenge to isolation in conditions he called “deplorable.”

While incarcerated at Georgia State Prison (GSP) from November 1, 2018, to January 7, 2021, Khalid Mouton was held in the Tier II program, a benign-sounding name for segregation that lasted 23 to 24 hours a day, with “restricted access to property, visitation, phone calls, religious services and the prison’s programs,” according to the complaint he filed. Out-of-cell recreation time, in outdoor steel cages, was often denied for “weeks or months,” he added. The extremely unsanitary conditions included broken plumbing, toilets that only guards could flush from outside cells, plus insects, vermin and mold in showers. Prisoners were not given cleaning supplies, either.

Due to these “deplorable” conditions, the complaint stated, Mouton’s mental health reached a “crisis point”: he experienced hallucinations, paranoia, panic attacks and began cutting his wrists. As a result, he was repeatedly sent to the Acute Care Unit (ACU), where conditions were, almost unbelievably, even worse: He could wear only a suicide prevention smock or paper gown; the bunks were covered in ...

Five days after the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) took over a state prison from private operator CoreCivic on October 1, 2023, a ceremony was held to rename the former Davis Correctional Facility. On the same day, October 6, 2023, a prisoner stabbed a guard at the medium-security facility now known as Allen Gamble Correctional Center (AGCC)—in memory of another guard fatally stabbed at another DOC lockup—underscoring violence that continues to plague the prison and the 1,600 men incarcerated there.

CoreCivic failed to maintain sufficient guard staff, which dwindled to just 161 before the takeover. Since then, staffing is down even more to just 106 guards, DOC said. Some couldn’t pass the state background check, according to DOC spokeswoman Kay Thompson. But 28% of the prison’s staff opted to stay with CoreCivic and transfer to another of its lockups. CoreCivic’s hourly pay for guards starts at $22.10, significantly higher than the $20.46 rate offered by DOC.

Oklahoma Corrections Professionals director Bobby Cleveland called low staffing a “big mess” for his union members, with a dangerously low ratio of one guard for every 15 prisoners. By comparison, the Arkansas DOC’s ratio is just 1:8. DOC boosted guard pay 30% in 2022, ...

Dressed in maroon shirts—not prison jumpsuits—three prisoners joined the “Dynamo” program at Missouri’s Northeast Correctional Center in November 2023. That brought total enrollment to 17 since the state Department of Correction (DOC) launched the initiative in April 2023, modeling it after Norwegian prison efforts to focus on re-entry, rather than punishment.

For Dynamo prisoners, that means keeping keys to their housing unit and exercise yard, with no restrictions on its use except to maintain the grass. Moving freely to their prison jobs or the library—even the canteen—they also share use of a dayroom furnished with a sofa, TV, laundry and refrigerator, plus plants and an aquarium. The men are responsible for maintaining their own cells, whose bright colors enliven a corner of the sprawling gray prison. Warden Clay Stanton says, “In a sense, they run it.”

“We took them out of a structured environment and put them in a responsible environment,” he explained. “They are now responsible for all aspects of upkeep of the place.”

Importantly, he reported no fights, drugs, overdoses or rules violations, things that are also rare in Norway’s prisons. As Columbia University law and doctoral student Alia Hahra noted, “That is so not how American prisons ...

by Douglas Ankney

On December 14, 2023, the New York Court of Appeals refused to hold officials with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) liable for malpractice committed on a state prisoner by Dr. Jun Wang. Why? Because Wang is an employee of private pathology group Cortland Pathology, which is not under contract to DOCCS, so he is not entitled to indemnification by the state.

The underlying facts unfolded after Omar J. Alvarez developed a mass in his right armpit while held at Auburn Correctional Facility in 2012. Pathologist Dr. R. Wayne Cotie, who was under contract with DOCCS to provide medical services to state prisoners, removed a biopsy specimen and sent it to the pathology department at Cortland Regional Medical Center (CRMC) for examination.

Cortland Pathology had an exclusive contract with CRMC to perform all pathology examinations. Wang, a member of Cortland Pathology and also Medical Director of CRMC’s pathology department, examined the specimen and concluded it was benign. But about one year later, the prisoner was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Meanwhile he developed paraplegia from spinal cord compression attributable to the delayed Hodgkins diagnosis.

Alvarez brought a medical malpractice action against CRMC, which subsequently ...

Transgender Rikers Island jail detainee Dylan “Ali” Miles sued the City of New York and its Department of Correction on August 24, 2023, alleging her civil rights were violated when she was housed with men for two months before an August 2022 transfer to stand trial in Arizona.

Filed in federal court for the Southern District of New York, the suit notes that Miles was “born with male genitalia” but “identifies as woman” and “is in the process of transitioning into a woman” via hormone therapy. After her arrest, a Legal Aid Society attorney noted she was transgender to a Bronx criminal court judge, who allegedly promised, “I’ll mark that down.”

But Miles was placed in a jail housing area with men, where one guard allegedly responded to her objections: “We don’t do the trans thing here.” Another guard conducted a strip search and reportedly told her: “Nice tits, and that’s one hell of a pussy.” She was then placed in a cell with a detainee who raped her, forcing her to cover the security camera with her own shirt. When she complained, she was placed in a protective custody cell, where another detainee forced his way inside and raped ...

On April 11, 2024, a Texas bankruptcy court rejected a proposed $54 million settlement that would have paid just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars owed to prisoners who won judgments or secured settlement agreements from Corizon Health. Citing concerns about timely access to court documents for incarcerated claimants—many proceeding pro se—Judge Christopher M. Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas chastised lawyers at both tables before his bench for not knowing whether affected prisoners were “even aware that there is a settlement.”

As PLN reported, Corizon Health executed a “Texas two-step”: It first spun off its profitable ongoing prison and jail healthcare contracts into a new firm called YesCare, and it then shunted its liabilities onto a separate company called Tehum Care Services, Inc., which promptly filed for bankruptcy protection. The ploy almost worked, too, before an inappropriate relationship was revealed between the settlement mediator and a lawyer working for Corizon Health. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.29.]

One Arizona prisoner claimant who objected to the proposed settlement, Anant Kumar Tripati, 69, sent copies of prison mail logs showing that there was no way he could have attended at least ...

by Douglas Ankney

Two former guards with Inmate Services Corporation (ISC), a private contractor that provided prisoner transports across the U.S., have been sentenced to federal prison for raping detainees in their charge. Marquet Johnson, 45, was sentenced on April 16, 2024, to 30 years in federal prison followed by five years of supervised release; he must also register as a sex offender. Fellow ISC guard Rogeric Hankins, then 37, was sentenced on July 11, 2023, to nine years in prison and three years of supervised release.

ISC provided transport for individuals arrested on out-of-state warrants. Hankins drove his ISC van to the jail in Olympia, Washington, on March 31, 2020, to transport detainee Jennifer Seelig to another lockup in St. Paul, Minnesota. En route, he parked at a Missouri rest stop on April 3, 2020, to let the detainee use the restroom. When she finished, Hankins took Seelig into the men’s restroom and began forcing her shirt up. The detainee tried to resist, but Hankins forced her to “perform a sexual act on him,” according to his plea agreement, before he “bent the victim over a toilet and raped her.”

Johnson admitted raping other detainees he bent over ...

by Matt Clarke

On November 7, 2023, a Vermont court ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, in its request for records from Centurion of Vermont related to its contract to provide medical, dental and mental health care to prisoners of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) between 2015 and 2020.

Pursuant to the Vermont Public Records Act (PRA), 1 V.S.A. subchapter 3, HRDC requested that Centurion disclose records related to any legal claims that resulted in expenditures of $1,000 or more. Centurion responded that it was not subject to the PRA. Aided by Burlington attorney Robert Appeal and in-house counsel, HRDC sued Centurion for disclosure.

The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment. Centurion alleged it was not subject to PRA, and if it was, the records were not public records, and, if they were, the records were exempt from disclosure pursuant to 1 V.S.A. § 317(c).

But the Court found controlling the decision in Hum. Rights Def. Ctr. v. Correct Care Sols., LLC, 263 A.3d 1260 (Vt. 2021), agreeing with the nonprofit that Centurion’s contract with DOC made it an “instrumentality” of the state and subject to ...

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has faced challenges in implementing the First Step Act (FSA) since it was signed into law in December 2018 by then-President Donald J. Trump (R). Aimed at reducing prisoner population and associated costs, the law provided sentence credits earned with good behavior, enabling earlier release to halfway houses or home confinement. But by the end of 2023, the primary issue remaining was lack of halfway-house room for those who have earned enough credits to begin the release process. As a result, many release-eligible prisoners remain locked up.

BOP is struggling to meet demand for space at halfway houses, which play a crucial role in prepping prisoners for transition back into society, as it has exploded under FSA. That has left thousands of prisoners in their cells longer than intended. It took five years after FSA was enacted before BOP said it had finally solved seemingly intractable delays in the law’s implementation—first with an inability to calculate earned credits and then with changing rules on credit acquisition—only to run face-first into a crushing lack of halfway house space.

One potential solution: the Federal Location Monitoring (FLM) program, which allows minimum-security prisoners to be monitored on ...

On November 30, 2023, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmir (D) signed HB 4983, a measure that makes voter registration automatic for state prisoners upon release. With that, the state became the first in the nation to make voter registration the default option for some 8,000 prisoners that it releases every year, though they may opt out if they wish.

The state has provided prisoners at release with the option to register since 2020, part of a program to supply them a state driver’s license or I.D. Driver’s license offices have also registered thousands of other state residents when they obtain, update or renew a license or state I.D. since 2018, after a ballot initiative passed that year, Proposal 3.

The new law adds the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to the list of state agencies making automatic registrations, as well as Tribal Governments that are authorized to issue I.D.s and the state Medicaid program. Ben Gardner, who is state campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, called the 2018 ballot measure “a huge step” that nevertheless left out “a lot of people” who weren’t transacting with a driver’s license office—hence the new bill and its push “to reach people where they’re ...

On December 1, 2023, phone calls became free for detainees and prisoners in Los Angeles County jails. The county’s Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 on November 22, 2023, to amend the existing phone service contract with ViaPath Technologies—formerly Global Tel*Link (GTL)—to shift the cost of calls from the county’s approximately 12,000 detainees and their families to the jail system’s Inmate Welfare Fund (IFW).

When the Board first voted to study the idea in 2021, audits revealed that GTL kickbacks dumped about $15 million annually into the IFW. Along with profits from detainee commissary purchases, the fund balance grew to $32 million, use of which is limited by state law to goods and services provided for the benefit and education of detainees.

The county Sheriff’s Department (LASD) taps the IFW for about $9 to $20 million each year for programming and another $5 to $14 million for facility maintenance. Under the revised ViaPath contract, up to $12.9 million will now come from the fund for calls. But since the county is losing the kickbacks, the hit on its budget is expected to be twice that amount.

The contract provides that the county will be billed no more than 4.2 cents per ...

Faced with repeated jail admissions of people suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses (SMI), the city of Miami has developed one of the nation’s most comprehensive diversion programs, focusing on treatment and community integration rather than incarceration for those charged with misdemeanors or low-level felonies. The brainchild of state Circuit Court Judge Steve Leifman, it is being studied by other jurisdictions, including North Carolina, where Leifman traveled in October 2023 to meet with state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby and officials with the North Carolina Department of Health.

Approximately 1.7 million people with SMI cycle in and out of U.S. jails every year—that is, if they aren’t killed before getting out. Suicide, drug overdoses and fatal beatings by violent guards take their toll in local lockups, where the rate of SMI is four to six times higher than in the general population. Leifman’s program is the result of his decades-long mission to restructure the way the county’s criminal justice system handles mental illness.

Defendants sent to diversion must follow a strict treatment plan, including therapy, 12-step meetings and regular court check-ins. Participants are shepherded by a team that includes a court case manager and a peer specialist ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 6, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana issued a Remedial Order (RO) to correct unconstitutional healthcare at Louisiana State Prison in Angola. In a companion opinion, the Court found the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) did not provide Angola prisoners “care at all, but abhorrent and unusual punishment that violates the United States Constitution.”

But rather than use the state’s resources to address the deficiencies, DPSC is spending even more in attorney’s fees on a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which agreed to hear the case and stayed the RO on March 6, 2024. See: Parker v. Hooper, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 5445 (5th Cir.).

The state’s decision is sadly predictable. Over 26 years have passed since the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found in 1989 that DPSC failed to provide adequate medical and psychiatric care to Angola prisoners. A 1992 class-action lawsuit that DOJ joined attempted to address provision of healthcare. But a 2009 report ordered from consulting prison healthcare giant Wexford Health Sources still “found multiple medical care deficiencies.” The district court said “the human cost” of ...

After two years of decline driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of Americans held in federal and state prisons at the end of 2022 jumped 2% to a total of 1,230,143, according to a November 2023 report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Covering both state and federal prison systems, the report also highlighted a remarkable geographic divide: The 11 states of the former confederacy accounted for 16,969 of those additional prisoners, representing two-thirds of all U.S. prison population growth. The remaining 39 states, by contrast, collectively added only 8,087 prisoners, or fewer than half as many.

Of those 11 former slave-holding states, only Virginia showed a reduction in its prison population. Within the group, almost all combined prison population growth—15,201 additional prisoners—occurred in the five states abutting the Gulf of Mexico: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Texas continued to hold the most prisoners and Florida third-most, behind California. Populations in all state prison systems together grew by 2%, while the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) saw its prisoner count rise just 1%. At 12.9%, BOP’s share of the country’s total imprisoned population was a full 1% lower than it was in 2013.

The increase in ...

On April 17, 2024, the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center—which publishes PLN and Criminal Legal News—filed suit in federal court for the Middle District of Florida on behalf of Willie Williams, Jr., 79, seeking redress for over 44 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated for armed robbery and attempted murder based on a misidentification made under police hypnosis. Williams, who was paroled in 2020, spent another three years under state supervision before the state’s Fourth Judicial District Conviction Integrity Review (CIR) unit discovered both the spurious identification and that police had destroyed evidence of the hypnosis session used to obtain it.

Williams was 31 on October 8, 1975, when he was a passenger in his own car—his license had been suspended—being driven by acquaintance Alfred Mitchell, 30. Unbeknownst to Williams as he waited in the car’s passenger seat outside the Wesconnett Produce Store in Jacksonville, Mitchell went inside and robbed shop owner Katherine Farrah, 35, and a customer, David Phillips, 28, shooting each three times.

Based on the account of eyewitness Robert West, who was some 150 feet away from the store at the time, Jacksonville cops chased a green Buick as it sped away with two Black men inside, ...

A lawsuit filed on November 26, 2023, lays out the bizarre story of a Virginia Sheriff’s deputy who “catfished” a California teen and murdered her family before abducting her and then turning his gun on himself as police closed in.

Austin Lee Edwards was a Virginia State Trooper near Richmond before resigning to become a deputy of Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis—300 miles away in the small town of Abingdon—on November 16, 2022. Nine days later, the 28-year-old drove 2,275 miles across the country to the Southern California home of a 15-year-old he had allegedly been “catfishing” over the internet by pretending to be a 17-year-old boy.

In the suit filed in federal court in the Central District of California, Mychelle Blandin, the aunt of the young victim, “B.W.,” recalled that Edwards pretended to be a police detective in order to gain entry into the Riverside home shared by the girl and her mom, Brooke Winek, 38, who was Blandin’s sister, as well as their parents, Mark Winek, 69, and Sharie Winek, 65. A neighbor who saw the girl leave with Edwards grew suspicious and called the cops.

They arrived and found the three Wineks shot dead inside the home. ...

Two detainees at Florida’s Okaloosa County Jail were sentenced to federal prison on April 5, 2024, for smuggling fentanyl into the lockup and providing it to a detainee, who overdosed and died on Christmas Eve 2022. Gary Chase, 30, and Joshua Gervais, 28, were sentenced to 30 and 14 years, respectively, after pleading guilty to distributing fentanyl that resulted in death of another. Each was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release.

Chase had been arrested on December 22, 2022, for allegedly menacing a woman with a gun. Gervais’ arrest six days earlier was for allegedly causing an auto accident that resulted in property damage and fleeing the scene. The office of county Sheriff Eric Aden also did not release the overdose victim’s name. However, a jail booking was recorded on December 23, 2022, for a probation violation by Nicholas Leeray Hughley, 22, and an obituary said he died the following day.

More troubling than the lack of details from the sheriff was that the death was one of five recorded at the 594-bed lockup in just over three months, including fatalities of other unnamed detainees on October 19 and December 19, 2022, as well as January 17 ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

On December 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that an Illinois prisoner’s challenge to civil commitment as a sexually violent person after release cannot be raised under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, unless the underlying civil commitment is first terminated in his favor or shown to be invalid “through another outlet.” The ruling extended application of the principal laid out in Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), that a civil rights challenge to prison disciplinary action is barred whenever a favorable ruling for the prisoner would necessarily imply that it was invalid.

After serving his eight-year Illinois state sentence for sexual assault, Timothy Bell was civilly committed under the state’s Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act (SVPCA), 725 ILCS §§ 207/1 - 207/99. Pursuant to that law, he remained incarcerated in an Illinois prison for another 16 years.

Bell filed a pro se federal civil rights action against state Attorney General Kwame Raouo (D) and the assistant attorney general who conducted his commitment proceedings. Proceeding pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, he challenged his continued incarceration for exceeding an alleged 15-year statutory cap. But during screening pursuant to 28 ...

Two Ohio prisoners have pleaded guilty to assaulting guards, while trials of two other guards accused of assaulting jail detainees in the state resulted in one conviction and one acquittal.

On October 25, 2023, Ohio prisoner Drequan K. Abdullah, 24, was found guilty of throwing urine on an unnamed guard two months earlier at Trumbull Correctional Institution. For that, he had six months added to the nine-year term he is serving for robbery and weapons violation convictions, pushing back his release to April 2027.

Another state prisoner, Marco Cardena, 34, was found guilty of assaulting an unnamed guard at Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in December 2021. He was handed an additional conviction for possessing a firearm at the lockup and sentenced on November 8, 2023, adding 54 months to the minimum 21-year term he is serving for a fatal shooting in October 2011.

The following day, on November 9, 2023, a mistrial was declared when a jury could not reach a verdict for guard Mark Cooper, 56, the only one of five members of a “cell extraction” team charged in the 2019 death of Alex Rios, 28, at the Richland County Jail. The county paid $4 million in December 2021 ...

By Jeffrey St. Clair

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch on October 6, 2023. It is reprinted here with permission. Read the original at https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/06/the-mind-breakers-the-case-of-ramzi-bin-al-shibh/

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of Al Qaeda. In one of the incursions, the Pakistanis captured a young Yemeni man named Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. Three days later, the Pakistanis turned Bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash, a 17-year-old Saudi, over to the CIA, who renditioned the pair into what was known as the Dark Prison outside Kabul, where, according to an account Bin al-Shibh later gave to the International Red Cross, he was stripped of his clothes, denied food and water and kept shackled from the ceiling in a painful position for the next three days while loud music was blasted into his cell.

This was just the opening act in the prolonged torture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh that took him to torture chambers in at least seven different countries in four years– Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Gitmo, Romania, and Lithuania–and left Bin al-Shibh a broken man, psychologically shattered and physically depleted.

After four days in ...

Formerly incarcerated residents of New York City appeared to land a punch in their fight to secure housing in the city’s notoriously tight real estate market on August 14, 2023, when the Fortune Society, a nonprofit founded in 1967 that provides numerous reentry services—including housing assistance—to former prisoners and other justice-involved individuals in the city, agreed to settle a federal lawsuit for $500,000, plus policy changes to remedy housing discrimination against people with criminal records. However, a bankruptcy filing now threatens that agreement.

Fortune filed suit in 2022 against iAfford NY, LLC, a contractor hired by the city to handle applications for “hundreds, if not thousands” of subsidized housing units across its five boroughs. The company serves as a compliance monitor for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), acting as gatekeeper for housing assistance applications.

HPD policy prohibits blanket bans on applicants with past criminal records; rather, a case-by-case assessment is required that takes into account the nature of the offense and evidence of rehabilitation, among other factors. That policy is consistent with guidelines issued by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2016 and 2022.

After a Fortune client applied for housing and ...

by David M. Reutter

Before he retired in July 2023, Warden Thomas Bergami was sent by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Thomson, Illinois, with a mandate: Clean the place up. But Begami said he got little support for his reform efforts and was in fact actively opposed by guards—some of whom even goaded prisoners to assault him.

            The latter claim was first made in a handwritten letter from 14 prisoners that arrived at prison nonprofit advocacy The Marshall Project (TMP) in late December 2022, headed “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ISSUE!!!” The prisoners who wrote it said that guards angered by Bergami’s reform efforts attempted to bribe them to attack him and one of his captains, offering to “poorly tighten their hand restraints” during the warden’s walk-through so that they could slip free and assault him.

As PLN reported, USP-Thomson inherited the Special Management Unit (SMU) from USP-Lewisburg in Pennsylvania in 2018, while a lawsuit was pending there over abuse alleged by prisoners held in the high-security unit. By July 2023, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs had found evidence that 82 prisoners in the SMU at USP-Thomson had ...

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” goes the line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As Coleridge dramatized, water is essential to life, yet most people take it for granted. For those incarcerated, their access to drinking water is entirely dependent on prison officials. At the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women (NCCW), prisoners have long complained about the quality of the water, which contains sediment, has a strong odor and is cloudy. New arrivals are told by other prisoners to avoid drinking it and not to wash their hair too often. Now a lawsuit filed on December 1, 2023, alleges it’s so bad that it violates their civil rights.

State officials are well aware of this problem. As early as 2014, a water sample taken at the prison tested high for copper. Excessive amounts of copper can cause stomach ailments as well as liver and kidney damage. Copper levels were nearly twice as high in the lockup’s nursery. The state Ombudsman’s Office has received over 20 complaints concerning the water at NCCW, and the state Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) has reportedly spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on improvements to the water system. Regardless, prisoners at ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

According to a federal civil rights action filed by Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project attorneys Matthew A. Feldman and Evangeline Wright on November 15, 2023, a Black Jamaican migrant held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Pike County Correctional Facility (PCCF) was subjected to racial slurs by guards, who choked and pepper- sprayed him while he was strapped into a restraint chair. The infraction that brought down this terrible punishment? Guards said that Damion Davis, 44, used a homemade envelope to send his wife a letter, in violation of jail rules.

Born in Jamaica, Davis came to the U.S. in 1989. Though his father was a naturalized citizen, U.S. law then did not automatically extend derivative U.S. citizenship to Davis. A 2000 change in the law also was not made retroactive. He has thus been detained by ICE for violating immigration law since 2019 and held at PCCF pursuant to ICE’s contract with the county.

On December 2, 2021, Davis wrote his wife a letter, sealed it in a homemade envelope and gave it to a guard to be mailed. The guard told him that homemade envelopes violated jail rules, so Davis would ...

An emergency ordinance passed by the Quorum Court of Arkansas’ Pulaski County on April 22, 2024, demanded answers from county Sheriff Eric Higgins to questions about a TV show filmed at the jail in Little Rock. The county also returned a $60,000 payment from the producers of Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, which quickly shot to the top of the ratings after its release on the Netflix streaming service on April 10, 2024.

Filmed over a six-week period in 2023 by production company Lucky 8, the eight-episode documentary series follows detainees in a general-population area at the Pulaski County Detention Center (PCDC) as the Sheriff conducts an “experiment” that extends to them many of the same chances to earn privileges that had already been successfully implemented in a separate area for detainees preparing for release and re-entry into society.

But a turf war erupted in March 2024 when county Judge Barry Hyde got wind of the show, and he loudly protested that only he could contractually obligate the county to Lucky 8. The Quorum Court quickly passed an ordinance calling Higgins to task for a “no locks” tagline in the show’s advertising, to which the Sheriff replied that guards were ...

When sentenced to Texas’ death row in 1988 for a murder committed the year before, Syed Rabbani was a healthy 23-year-old. Now 57, he is psychotic and blind, left almost entirely unable to move or speak by a stroke. An appeal he filed was lost by Harris County prosecutors for nearly three decades before it was granted by the state Court of Criminal Appeal in September 2023, tossing his death sentence and substituting one for life in prison.

“This case says nothing good about the way we treat the human beings in our criminal justice system,” said Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robin Maher. “That a man so vulnerable could be simply forgotten is just inexcusable.”

His attorney, Texas Office of Forensic and Capital Writs Director Ben Wolff, said he found Rabbani in “the most disgusting prison circumstance” ever witnessed in a 25-year career, his cell walls smeared with feces, the floor littered with dirty bed pads, mold furring the toilet.

Originally set to die in 1993, Rabbani was spared after pro bono appellate counsel Dick Wheelan filed a habeas petition, which triggered a psychiatric evaluation that resulted in a 1994 diagnosis of “mental illness of psychotic proportions.” Wheelan ...

by Douglas Ankney

On February 28, 2024, Idaho halted the execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, 73, after the all-volunteer team assigned to kill him was unable to find a suitable vein to establish the intravenous connection necessary for his lethal injection.

Creech, convicted of five murders in three states, was initially sentenced to death in 1983 for the murder of fellow prisoner David Dale Jensen in 1981. At the time of Jensen’s murder, Creech was serving two life sentences for the murders of house painters John Wayne Bradford and Edward Thomas Arnold. But Creech “admitted to killing or participating in the killing of at least 26 people,” as the Supreme Court of the U.S. recalled when hearing his appeal in Arave v. Creech, 507 U.S. 463 (1993), and “[t]he bodies of 11 of his victims—who were shot, stabbed, beaten, or strangled to death—have been recovered in seven States.”

Placed on a gurney, Creech was wheeled into the execution chamber at Idaho Maximum Security Institution (IMSI) at 10:00 a.m. Three members of the killing team tried eight times to establish an IV in Creech’s arms, legs, hands, and feet. But they could not access a vein of sufficient quality. ...

On October 1, 2023, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) implemented a temporary policy raising the maximum age for guard candidates to 40. The previous upper age limit was 37. The new policy is aimed at solving a staffing crisis that has left nearly a third of guard positions vacant as the overall workforce at the agency has shrunk 20% over the past seven years.

Increased prisoner violence has been blamed for the chronic understaffing by officials at unions representing the guards, who also point to BOP’s history of mismanagement and its failure to adequately address safety concerns. They point out that the crisis affects the mental and physical well-being of prisoners, too.

The new policy, effective through the end of the fiscal year in October 2024, is the latest effort by BOP Director Colette Peters to address the problem, which she has attributed to low wages and a lack of training, as well as mandatory overtime that results from shortstaffing, prompting even more in a negative feedback loop.

The new policy risks potential age discrimination claims from older candidates unable to meet the physical demands of the job. While BOP has a commitment to a “young and vigorous workforce,” ...

On August 7, 2023, a new law took effect in Colorado directing judges to provide bonds and alternatives to incarceration for defendants who are pregnant or who recently gave birth. HB23-1187 was signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis (D) in May 2023 after it was adopted by state lawmakers goaded by release of video of the horrific ordeal suffered by Diana Sanchez, who gave birth alone in a cell in the Denver County Jail on July 31, 2018.

As PLN reported, Sanchez was eight months pregnant when she was booked into the jail for writing a bad check. She had a high-risk pregnancy, and following a medical examination a nurse told her to call for help if she went into labor. When she began having contractions the next day, she informed a guard, who told a nurse—who took no action. No ambulance was called, either. Instead, jail staff watched on security video while she went through five hours of labor before giving birth unattended in her cell. “That pain was indescribable,” she said. “What hurts me more though is the fact that nobody cared.” [See: PLN, Oct. 2019, p.49].

Represented by attorney Mari Newman with Killmer Lane & ...

The number of American prisoners awaiting execution continued a decrease that began at the turn of the century, dropping to 2,331 in 2023, a 4.3% decline from 2022. Yet even though just five states executed prisoners during the year— Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama—the total number of killings jumped by one-third by the end of 2023.

On a brighter note, the number of new death sentences was lower than the number of executions for the first time in 2023, with only seven states adding to their death rows: Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas. The federal Bureau of Prisons also picked up its first new condemned prisoner since the 2021 inauguration of Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D): On August 2, 2023, a federal judge sentenced Robert Bowers, 50, to die for fatally shooting 11 people and wounding seven more at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest assault on Jews in American history.

More Americans than not still support the death penalty, 53% to 44%. But in 2023, a Gallup poll for the first time found more people believe it is unfairly administered, by a margin of 50% to 47%. That may reflect ...

On April 2, 2024, the California Superior Court for Sacramento County ordered the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to release results of internal investigations that had been sought by KQED in San Francisco on behalf of the California Reporting Project, a coalition of news organizations across the state.

In 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 1421, known as the “Right to Know” law enforcement transparency act, allowing the public to obtain records of internal investigations into peace officers accused of dishonesty, serious use of force and sexual misconduct. Another law enacted in 2021 set a 45-day deadline for government agencies to respond to records requests.

In 2019, KQED requested five years of internal investigation records from CDCR, the state’s largest employer of peace officers. But prison officials fought disclosure for over three years. They claimed to provide a total of 260 cases, but KQED found at least 10 more that the agency failed to disclose. Even more failures were found by Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, a law firm that has represented a number of California prisoners in civil rights lawsuits.

Alleging these were also failures to comply with the Right to Know law, KQED filed ...

On November 14, 2023, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) secured a budget recommendation from the state Permanent Building Fund advisory council for a new $25 million facility jointly operated by the state’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) and its Department of Corrections (DOC), providing a secure treatment facility for “dangerously mentally ill” patients.

The state will soon be the last to hold civilly committed patients in prison, once New Hampshire completes its new 24-bed forensic psychiatric hospital; ground was broken in September 2023 with completion expected in 2025. After that, those deemed too dangerous for the state psychiatric hospital will no longer be sent to prison in the Granite State—leaving Idaho alone to throw its mentally ill citizens in a cell without any charges.

Little made a similar request in the current legislative session. But even sitting on a $1.4 billion surplus at the beginning of 2023, lawmakers killed an effort to build the state its own secure psychiatric facility, which would have cost just $24 million. The most recent effort before that was led by former Republican leader of the state legislature Joe Stegner, who said the proposal’s defeat in 2008 drove him from politics.

Currently, civilly committed ...

More cases have surfaced in which families report organs missing from the bodies of loved ones who died in custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC). As PLN reported, the first was the family of Brandon Dotson, 43, who was murdered by a fellow prisoner at Ventress Correctional Facility on November 16, 2023—and whose body was returned to them five days later without a heart. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.12.]

            But it turns out that after 85-year-old Arthur Stapler died on September 23, 2023, during a 10-year incarceration for child sex abuse at the Hamilton Aged and Infirm Center, his son hired a private pathologist who found “an empty cavity” where his organs should be. Billy Stapler then phoned the autopsy department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to ask for the organs, only to learn “that they possibly got thrown away.”

The family of Kelvin Moore, 42, said his body was also returned without organs after he died of a fentanyl overdose at Limestone Correctional Facility on July 21, 2023. When UAB completed an autopsy, it turned over his body to a mortician, who reported most of his organs were missing—leaving no way to ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 7, 2023, the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government in Kentucky agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a civil rights action alleging constitutional violations in the wrongful murder convictions and imprisonment of Jeffrey Dwayne Clark and Garr Keith Hardin.

Both now 54, they were 22-year-olds when found guilty in the 1992 stabbing death of Hardin’s girlfriend, Rhonda Sue Warford, 19. Prosecutors charged the killing was part of a satanic ritual, pointing to Hardin’s admitted involvement in satanism. But that admission was a lie made up by a dirty cop, who also tied the two to other evidence found at the crime scene. After 22 years of wrongful imprisonment, they were exonerated and freed in 2016 when DNA analysis of that evidence failed to find a match to them. But there was more to cast doubt on their 1995 murder conviction.

The lawsuit that they filed in 2017 alleged that disgraced Louisville police detective Mark Handy fabricated and manipulated evidence to wrongly convict them. The complaint noted that Handy had a reputation among colleagues as a “closer who could wrest a confession out of anybody.” He falsely reported that Hardin admitted to performing satanic rituals ...

by Matt Clarke

In a settlement agreement effective October 23, 2023, California’sAlameda County agreed to pay $7 million to the estate and progeny of a detainee who died while incarcerated at the county’s jail in Santa Rita. The large settlement amount reflected the egregious neglect that allegedly contributed to the death of Maurice Monk, including a failure to provide the mentally ill detainee with necessary medication and ignoring his obviously deteriorating mental and physical health until he died, while also falsifying wellness checks.

Monk’s corpse was found in his jail cell on November 15, 2021, lying in a puddle of his own urine that had been there for days. The floor of his cell was littered with unopened meal trays and unused cups of medication that guards and medical personnel had left there, allegedly without trying to see if he was in medical distress.

This sad story has even more tragedy at its core because Monk probably should not have been in jail at all. He was arrested the previous month after a verbal altercation with a bus driver who refused to let him board because he was not wearing a face mask, as required by COVID-19 protocols then ...

Once upon a time, parole and probation officers actually helped those under their supervision. In the rehabilitation-oriented 1970s, for example, they assisted in finding housing and employment, knowing that more support for a newly released prisoner made reoffending less likely. That approach changed during the get-tough-on-crime era which began in the 1980s and continues to this day. Now, parole and probation officials are more inclined to strictly enforce supervision conditions, sending people back to prison for “technical” violations.

But according to a report issued on November 8, 2023, by Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a data driven non-profit organization that advocates for criminal justice reform, “no-association” conditions of community supervision that prohibit contact with those who have past criminal records—even family members, and even when the offense occurred decades before—often hinder successful completion of community supervision.

Approximately 3.7 million people are on parole or probation in the U.S., relying heavily on support networks of family, friends, co-workers and counselors. “Though research supports the unique benefits of these social connections,” the report noted, “many states actually prohibit people on supervision from this contact, under the false impression that it will lead people into criminalized behaviors.”

PPI counted 29 jurisdictions—including D.C. and the ...

On October 17, 2023, the estate of a detainee who committed suicide in Florida’s Escambia County Jail accepted $300,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit. Lukas MacKenzie Snelson, 24, was arrested on December 30, 2021, for second degree homicide of his grandmother, Fran Fournier, 75, grand theft of her automobile, and resisting arrest. As he was being booked into the jail, Snelson made suicidal comments. He was given a mental health evaluation and placed under observation in the infirmary for three days, then transferred to a cell.

The next day, Snelson began a suicide attempt by hanging himself from the cell bars with a bedsheet. At the time, guard trainee Gregory Morgan Oglesby and fellow guard Spiros Leonida Mumtzis were working in Snelson’s housing area. They were responsible for making periodic cell checks to determine detainees’ welfare. Despite multiple “checks” that they recorded, though, Snelson was left hanging for more than 40 minutes before he was found and released from his bedsheet ligature. When Emergency Medical Services (EMS) arrived about 15 minutes later, Snelson’s heart had stopped beating. EMS was able to resuscitate him for transport to a hospital, but he died two days later when he was taken ...

On December 1, 2023, Harris County, Texas, began sending up to 360 detainees from the county’s jails to a prison in Mississippi, under a contract with its private operator, CoreCivic. The County Commissioners Court approved the $11.3 million one-year agreement, which has renewal options, on November 14, 2023, just weeks after regulators from the state Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) ordered the county to reduce population in its overcrowded jail.

Criminal court backlogs are blamed for overflowing the jail with 9,378 detainees—70% of whom are awaiting trial. Harris County Sheriff’s Office Chief of Staff Jason Spencer said the county looked at proximity, price and track record before choosing Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi, agreeing to pay CoreCivic $85 a day per detainee sent there to await trial from Houston, over 500 miles away.

Critics point to the prison operator’s track record, with numerous accusations of short staffing, excessive force and substandard health care in some 100 lockups nationwide. TCJS has no authority to go after CoreCivic for jail standards violations outside the state and no counterpart in Mississippi to do so, either. The Mississippi DOC provides no oversight for the lockup, which also holds detainees under contract from ...

In the final hours before Oklahoma killed Phillip Hancock on November 30, 2023, he was attended by a chaplain, like almost all condemned prisoners. Unlike most though, Hancock was an atheist. So was his chaplain, Devin Moss. As the last minutes of Hancock’s life ticked away, the two shared encouragement from the Christian New Testament to meditate on “whatever things are true.”

Hancock, 59, was convicted of the 2001 murders of Robert Jett, Jr., 37, and James Lynch, 58, reputed members of an outlaw motorcycle gang who lured him to their home and tried to cage him before he wrestled a pistol from one and shot both dead. His pleas of self-defense went unheeded at trial but eventually persuaded the state Pardon and Parole Board to recommend clemency on November 8, 2023.

By then, Hancock was scheduled for lethal injection. With just hours to go, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) refused to commute his sentence, without offering an explanation. In a viral video shot a year before, Stitt—who attends an Assembly of God church—offered a prayer in which he claimed “every square inch” of Oklahoma “in the name of Jesus.”

Hancock was also raised in an Assembly of God church, through ...

A lawsuit filed on November 18, 2023, accused the Shelby County Jail in Memphis of routinely and deliberately denying release to eligible detainees. That’s how Marcus Donald’s family alleged the 38-year-old was still in the jail despite a court-ordered release earlier on November 17, 2022, when he was then murdered by cellmate Stephen Robinson.

The suit was filed in federal court for the Western District of Tennessee against Sheriff Floyd Bonner. Donald was one of 44 detainees to die at the jail since he assumed office in 2019. Most galling of all, the suit said, is that Donald shouldn’t have been in the jail, since he earlier in the day pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge and was sentenced to time served.

But instead of being released, he was returned to the jail and placed in a cell with Robinson, who was being held for first-degree murder. The complaint recalled that Donald repeatedly begged jailers to move him for fear of Robinson, but his requests went ignored. So did jailers’ assigned cell rounds, the suit continued, which were supposed to occur every 30 minutes; instead, surveillance video showed, Donald’s cell was left unchecked for 79 minutes, during which time ...

Washington’s Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) issued an advisory to healthcare providers on December 13, 2023, to test for tuberculosis in anyone incarcerated by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) during an outbreak of the disease in 2021. Over 800 people were released from prison before officials identified their exposure to TB, and many still have not been notified or tested.

            Washington state prisons had no tuberculosis cases from 2014 to 2020, when COVID-19 disrupted the system’s healthcare protocols. The outbreak reported in 2021 then became the state’s largest in 20 years. Thousands of prisoners were unknowingly exposed to the highly infectious disease. As it spread beyond prison walls, at least 28 people were infected and 2,900 more exposed. Many may be still carrying the disease.

DOC spokesperson Chris Wright said the outbreak was caused by suspending annual TB testing during the pandemic. Prisoners known to have had tuberculosis in the past were normally tested for TB on their birthday. A five-year absence of tuberculosis cases and overlapping symptoms with COVID-19 compounded delays in detecting cases. DOC leadership acknowledged the seriousness of the outbreak but defended their efforts to implement testing and prevention measures afterward.

Dennis Oya said he was patient ...

In an essay published in Slate on December 14, 2023, former Florida prisoner Ryan Moser said that officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) were “essentially playing whack-a-mole” in their efforts to combat an epidemic of “jailbreaking” prison-issued electronic tablets.

The tablets are issued free to prisoners under DOC’s contract with messaging service provider JPay, a subsidiary of prison telecommunications giant Securus Technologies. The devices connect to the internet at kiosks unless prisoners hack into the operating software to enable connection via a contraband cellphone—a process known as “jailbreaking.”

Moser said the only time he used a jailbroken tablet was one Thanksgiving when phones were down—which happens a lot, he added—so he risked disciplinary measures to make a desperate call his family via WhatsApp. Providing free messaging would reduce the problem, he said. But JPay collects one 39-cent “stamp” for each message a prisoner sends, while DOC pays prisoners exactly nothing for the work they are compelled to do during their incarceration.

DOC could also give prisoners cheaper and more reliable access to phone calls, which are currently provided by Securus competitor ViaPath—formerly Global*Tel Link—at a charge of 13.5 cents per minute. Though some prisoners use jailbroken tablets to ...

In a monitoring report on October 6, 2023, the Compliance Director with operational control over Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) in New Orleans found continued problems at the jail, such as an increase in prisoner-on-prisoner violence, overdoses and unnecessary use of force by guards. As PLN reported, unsafe and unconstitutional conditions at the jail, including high levels of violence, led to a class-action lawsuit that resulted in a 2013 consent decree and construction of a new jail facility. [See: PLN, Dec. 2017, p.12] As part of that agreement, the Compliance Director is tasked with issuing a monitoring report every six months.

The most recent report, running 162-pages, covered the six-month period ending with March 2023. It noted that “[t]oo often the failure to follow policy is blamed on lack of staff or training,” but “[n]either is an acceptable excuse.” Problems at OPP have been exacerbated by a growing population: Some 1,140 people were housed at the jail, more than a 40% increase since mid-2021.

The consent decree includes 174 provisions related to security, safety, violence reduction and medical care. The monitors found that OPP was in substantial compliance with just 76—44%—of those requirements, though it was in non-compliance with just 12, ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 16, 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) agreed to pay $5 million to the estate of Thomas Henry Giles, 31, a mentally ill prisoner who died after guards left him for hours locked inside a cell on fire at Augusta State Medical Prison (ASMP). It was reportedly the largest payout ever for a state prisoner’s death.

As a form of protest for being denied access to his counselor, Giles set fire to the mattress in his cell at about 2 p.m. on October 28, 2020. Guards Robert Roberson and Marcus Phillips watched as he used a shank to expose wires in a light fixture and sparked the blaze. But they took no action to stop him. Nor did they try to extinguish the fire. They also made no attempt to remove Giles. As smoke escaped the cell and filtered into the hallway, Sgt. Reggie Crite opened the food flap on Giles’ cell door. But no one did anything else to dissipate the heavy smoke filling the cell. Crite did, however, open a door to vent smoke from the cell block.

Giles begged guard Brittney Seals to render aid and remove him from ...

Lack of expert testimony halved a $500,000 award made by a federal jury to Pennsylvania prisoner Michael Sherman Allen on November 1, 2023, for injuries sustained in a brutal 2019 beating at the hands of Robert Hollowood and fellow guards at State Correctional Institution (SCI) in Fayette.

Allen, who is an African-American, was previously held at SCI-Graterford when he filed an earlier complaint against several guards in July 2015. Before that case went to trial, one of the named defendants—guard Edward Settle—died. SCI-Fayette guards, apparently aware of the case and blaming Allen for Settle’s death, called the prisoner a “snitch” and a “scum bag.”

It was against this background that Allen observed Hollowood and two other guards—Juan Macias and Paul Gaffey—enter his cell at SCI-Fayette on February 25, 2019. Allen at the time was on the telephone, so he terminated his call and approached his cell to see why the guards were inside, finding that Hollowood was destroying his CPAP machine.

Gaffey prevented Allen from entering the cell to attempt to save the device and ordered him to strip naked in front of the other prisoners on the cell block. Allen complied. Surveillance video then captured Hollowood as he ran ...

by David M. Reutter

When confronted with prisoner complaints, officials often produce glowing inspection reports and blame prisoners for destroying prison infrastructure. All too often, though, inept supervision is to blame for failure to maintain facilities. As many prisoners will tell you, when an inspection is looming, the prisonis transformed in preparation.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has a new “on-sight inspection program.” The second unannounced inspection made under the policy occurred from May 22 to 26, 2023, at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Tallahassee, a low security prison built in 1938 that was converted in 1992 to house female prisoners for the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). A satellite detention center for males was opened in 1996. Inspectors highlighted four areas of concern in their report on FCI-Tallahassee: food service, facilities condition, staffing shortages and prison safety and security.

A June 2022 survey of prisoners resulted in 55% rating food quality poor. Surveyed prisoners also said that outdated food was being served. The unannounced OIG inspection found “alarming conditions” in food service and storage. “[M]oldy bread had been served” at lunch and “discolored and rotting vegetables were being stored,” perhaps ...

A lawsuit filed on January 18, 2024, accuses retail giant Macy’s of employing faulty facial recognition technology that falsely identified a Texas man as an armed robbery suspect, landing him in a Houston jail where he was raped by fellow detainees. Harvey Murphy, Jr., 61, was released from the Harris County Jail shortly after the October 2022 assault, when prosecutors verified his alibi that he had not even been in Texas the previous January when the robbery occurred.

In fact, Murphy was in Sacramento when someone held up both a Houston Macy’s department store and a nearby Sunglass Hut in January 2022. Anthony Pfleger, head of loss prevention for Sunglass Hut parent Essilor Luxottica, reviewed surveillance footage of the robbery suspect from cameras installed by property owner Kimco, using Macy’s facial recognition software to match the face to Murphy. A salesclerk held at gunpoint during the crime also identified him as the robber when shown a photo by police.

When Murphy returned from California to Texas later that year, he tried to renew his driver’s license and was arrested on the outstanding warrant. Denied bond, he spent 10 days in jail before three unnamed detainees sexually assaulted him in a ...

by David M. Reutter

Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) leaders have come before the state legislature repeatedly to warn that it is a system operating in crisis. In a presentation on November 15, 2023, by global consulting firm KPMG, which was selected in 2022 by the state Department of Management Services to present a 20-year DOC master plan, the prison agency’s “current path” was described in one word: “Unsustainable.”

Lawmakers responded to the crisis in recent years by raising pay for DOC guards to $45,760 annually as of July 2023. Despite that and signing bonuses, too, DOC continued to experience a 26.3% turnover rate. Yet many of those same politicians have rejected overtures for criminal justice reform as part of the solution.

“We have asked for too long for DOC to do too much with too little,” said the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice, Sen. Jennifer Bradley (R-Clay). “The salary increases have been helpful in changing the trajectory of our staffing challenges, but aging infrastructure, making sure that we have enough beds to meet increasing projections, remain big challenges.”

DOC currently cages about 85,000 prisoners, 14,000 of them serving life sentences, so its ...

On October 10, 2023, a settlement was reached in a suit filed by Disability Rights Washington (DRW), a federally funded agency that advocates for the rights of people with disabilities, accusing the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) of violating the rights of transgender prisoners by denying medical and mental health care.

DRW was the sole plaintiff in the complaint, which accused prison officials of denying gender-affirming treatment to trans prisoners; discriminating against them due to disabilities including gender dysphoria; and subjecting them to routine cross-gender strip and pat-down searches—all alleged violations of their Eighth Amendment guarantee of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. ch. 126, § 12010 et seq., and the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 701 et seq. DRW and DOC had entered into a negotiated pre-litigation agreement in 2019, which culminated in the complaint filed concurrently with the settlement.

The complaint notes that the suit was prompted by DOC’s failure to provide adequate gender-affirming care to transgender, non-binary and intersex prisoners—including hormone replacement therapy, facial hair removal, voice therapy and counseling. Further, prison medical staff “discouraged people from seeking medical care related to their gender identity” and even ...

by Matt Clarke

On September 28, 2023, the federal court for the Western District of Michigan awarded a state prisoner $16,975.00 in attorney fees and $4,459.91 in costs in a civil rights lawsuit over his sexual abuse by a state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard. The Court had previously awarded $50,000 in compensatory damages to Patrick Grover on June 30, 2023, including $30,000 to reimburse the costs of counseling sessions.

Grover was incarcerated at Oak Correctional Facility in September 2019 when guard Traci Lange (now Perez) began working in his housing unit. She soon approached him and “commented favorably on his physique,” according to the complaint he later filed. She added that “he needed a woman like her and that she could pull strings to get him home.” Grover recalled he was “uncomfortable” with her “interest and tried to distance himself from her.” But she began “blowing him kisses during rounds, and she wrote him letters in which she stated that ‘she wanted to have sex with him.’”

“On a number of occasions,” the complaint recalled, Perez asked him “to show her his private parts,” and she took him to closets and other places off-camera “to have sex with ...

In a lawsuit filed in federal court for the Northern District of Ohio on March 18, 2024, state prisoner Darryl Smith accuses Mansfield Correctional Institution (MCI) guards of ignoring warnings he was being threatened by his cellmate, cheering when he followed through on those threats and assaulted Smith.

Smith, 72, is serving 102 months for arson and parole violations. He was held in protective custody (PC) at Turnbull Correctional Institution before a December 2021 transfer to MCI. But officials there allegedly ignored PC instructions from the state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC) and placed him in general population.

Within two months Smith notified them that cellmate Daniel Williams had alcohol and a homemade knife fashioned from a “spork” eating utensil, with which he had threatened Smith. Later that same day, on March 18, 2022, Williams made good on his threat and stabbed Smith. But rather than intervene, guards allegedly cheered on the attack, calling Smith a “snitch” and a child molester. According to his complaint, Smith has never been accused of child molestation.

Smith was taken to the infirmary, where photos were taken of his injuries only to be destroyed later, he said. He was also charged with fighting ...

Former New Hampshire prison guard Matthew Millar, 39, was arrested on February 8, 2024, and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Jason O. Rothe, 50, a detainee in the Secure Psychiatric Unit (SPU) at New Hampshire State Prison. Prosecutors allege Millar killed Rothe by kneeling on his back for several minutes during restraint, causing him to suffocate.

The state Department of Corrections (DOC) initially cleared Millar and five other guards involved after reviewing the April 2023 incident. However, a statement confirming that was retracted, and DOC admitted that no review was ever completed. Rather it was halted when state officials learned that the federal Department of Justice was investigating Rothe’s death.

Millar’s employment with DOC ended on December 13, 2023. His attorney said he would plead not guilty to the charge. Prosecutors said they do not intend to charge other guards involved in Rothe’s restraint, though DOC spokesperson Jane Graham reported that those guards were placed on administrative leave and then returned to work in areas without patient contact for an unspecified period before resuming full duty.

Rothe was civilly committed to the state psychiatric hospital in 2019 before safety concerns prompted a transfer to SPU in 2022. ...

In what will surprise few prisoners, a report by an appointed panel of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) released on September 26, 2023, found “shocking” human rights violations and “staggering” racial disparities in U.S. criminal justice agencies.

The report was authored by panel members Yvonne Mokgoro, former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tracie Keesee, president of the Center for Policing Equity; and law professor Juan Mendez, who previously served as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and inhumane treatment.

Pulling no punches, the panel called stark racial disparities evidence of the “worst version of a racist criminal legal system,” part of “a direct legacy of slavery [that] dates back to the foundation of the country.” Rejecting the “bad apple” theory that minimizes the role of institutions in discrimination, Mendez cited “strong evidence suggesting that the abusive behavior of some individual police officers is part of a broader and menacing pattern.” In a country where police kill over 1,000 citizens every year, Black people are three times more likely to be killed by cops than whites and 11 times more likely to suffer from police misconduct. Meanwhile few police officers —just 2% over the past ...

Georgia’s Telfair State Prison went on lockdown on March 21, 2024, after a prisoner stabbed Warden Andrew McFarlane with a homemade knife. McFarlane, 54, a 25-year veteran of the state Department of Corrections (DOC), was not seriously injured in the attack, according to DOC spokesperson Joan Heath, who added he was “examined by facility medical personnel for superficial wounds and is expected to be okay.”

The assault occurred during a contraband shakedown about 11:30 a.m., when a limited lockdown order went ignored by prisoners in one housing area. McFarlane was stabbed during an ensuing disturbance. The number of times that he was stabbed was unknown.DOC also didn’t say how many prisoners were involved in the disruption nor how long it lasted.

Responding guards deployed “less-lethal munitions,” Heath said, clarifying that meant tear gas. The entire prison was then placed on lockdown, though no additional injuries were reported and only minimal damage. Housing 1,400 of the state’s most dangerous prisoners in “close custody,” the prison is severely understaffed; at the time of the assault there were just 36 guards, one for every 38 prisoners. That’s over four times the 1:9 average ratio reported by the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Source: ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 27, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin denied state prison officials’ motion for new trial. That left standing a jury verdict finding that prisoner Adam Young was denied procedural due process in a disciplinary action, awarding him $700,000.

Young and several other Kenosha Correctional Center (KCC) prisoners were transported to work for a local employer on July 30, 2017. A guard dropped them off and left. But the employer was closed that day. The prisoners were left stranded in the parking lot in 80-degree weather. Realizing that no one was coming to pick them up for at least 11 hours, they started walking back to KCC. When they came across a phone, they called to be picked up.

Young was arrested the next day at the work site and issued a major disciplinary report for “escape” before transport to Racine Correctional Institution. At a disciplinary hearing, he was found guilty, sentenced to 60 days disciplinary separation and lost his work release privileges. After exhausting administrative remedies, Young filed a civil rights action alleging a procedural due process violation.

The case proceeded to a jury trial in July 2023. ...

A settlement reached on November 1, 2023, between the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) and current or former state prisoners resulted in changes to prison mail policies. While incarcerated at Monroe Correctional Complex (MCC), Adam Bauer, David Cochran, Dylan Downey, Michael Morales and Jessien Perry joined Carmella Holt, one of Morales’s family members, in filing a suit challenging the prison mailroom’s practice of “unlawfully censoring constitutionally protected mail” between prisoners “and their family, friends, legal counsel, and the courts.”

Specifically, Plaintiffs alleged that photos of fully clothed women were rejected by mailroom staffers who found them “too provocative”; however, pictures of mostly nude men were not intercepted. Furthermore, prisoners’ legal mail was opened outside their presence and sometimes rejected, with rejection notices often not provided, in violation of prisoners’ due process rights. Lastly, Defendants—including MCC mailroom Sgt. Melvin E. Hopkins—allegedly retaliated against prisoners who complained about prison conditions in their correspondence with others.

The complaint alleged violations of DOC’s mail policy with respect to both written letters and e-messages sent to and from prisoners through a service provided by private vendor JPay. With respect to legal mail, the complaint described several incidents wherein mail from courts and attorneys was improperly ...

Alabama: Four months after a judge found no probable cause to prosecute former Mobile Metro Jail guard Kimberly A. Henderson, 32, for contraband smuggling, charges were reinstated in a new indictment that resulted in her rearrest on March 22, 2024, WPMI in Mobile said. As PLN reported, Henderson was fired after her initial arrest in September 2023. [See: PLN, Nov. 2023, p.63.] But Mobile County Judge Zack Moore made his probable cause ruling on November 2, 2023, when Henderson described how she was on the phone at the jail relaying a question from a mutual friend and not trying to slip it to detainee Jessica Odom, a former fellow co-worker fired and arrested two weeks earlier on suspicion of smuggling fentanyl to jail detainees. Another judge, George Zoghby, reduced Odom’s bail from $1 million to $750,000 in December 2023; she has yet to be indicted.

Alabama: Autauga Metro Jail Warden Larry Nixon told the Montgomery Advertiser that termination proceedings had already been started against Jesse Morgan Rogers, 37, when the guard showed up at the jail in uniform on April 16, 2024. It was unclear why he was being fired then, but the process was fast-tracked after Nixon told ...