Historically, prisons and jails have been loathe to give prisoners access to technology. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) didn’t even allow prisoners regular access to telephone calls until 2009. Access to internet-based services, which the non-incarcerated take for granted, is also forbidden by prison officials who cite vaguely-expressed ...

Former California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) guard Gregory Rodriguez, 56, was convicted on January 14, 2025, of raping nearly two dozen prisoners at California Women’s Prison in Chowchilla between 2014 and 2022.

Though reports of his abuse began to surface in 2014, the CDCR didn’t begin to investigate ...

Among a raft of executive orders issued the day of his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) signed one reversing a decision by his predecessor to remove Cuba from a “blacklist” of nations accused of sponsoring terrorism. Though cheered by hardline opponents of the Cuban government ...

On August 7, 2024, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the 2023 Restore the Vote Act (RVA), which returned the right to vote to individuals with felony convictions upon completion of their prison sentences. The law had been challenged a summer earlier by the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), and the group’s ...

On January 10, 2025, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), non-profit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN), filed suit in federal court for the Northern District of California against Sonoma County and its Sheriff Eddie Engram, as well as Dep. Melissa Parmenter, Division Operations Captain of the County’s ...

The stock price of Richmond, Virginia-based Indivior PLC was down 20% in the first 12 days of February 2025, after delayed approval from the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) of label changes on its Sublocade medication—a single injection that provides a 28-day extended-release dosage of buprenorphine for those recovering ...

by Matt Clarke

"People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed,” lockups where “[i]nmates are maimed, tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not-so-benign neglect.”

So began a scathing 93-page report published by the Civil Rights Division (CRD) of ...

Pointing to “reports of staffing shortages, physical and sexual assaults, murders and a 188% turnover rate among prison guards just last year,” the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on August 20, 2024, that it was launching a civil rights investigation into Tennessee’s troubled Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), ...

On January 16, 2025, days before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) returned to office for a second term, outgoing U.S. Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland withdrew the Department of Justice (DOJ) protocol under which condemned federal prisoners are executed with pentobarbital. A DOJ report released with the announcement found “significant ...

On November 5, 2024, the federal court for the Southern District of California approved a settlement under which the United States government agreed to pay $6,411,664.07 in legal fees and costs incurred by Plaintiffs in a class-action challenge to the migrant family separation policy implemented under the first administration of ...