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 ...

As the Hughes fire exploded over more than 10,000 acres of Los Angeles County on January 23, 2025, Sheriff Robert Luna issued evacuation orders to some 31,000 residents in and around the town of Castaic. But no such orders were issued for nearly 4,700 prisoners held there at the county’s ...

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 ...

by Sam Rutherford

The United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and Tenth Circuits recently held that the government may not immediately appeal a district court’s order extending to new factual scenarios that the exemption to governmental immunity first identified in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal ...

On October 29, 2024, the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal highlighted a former “jailhouse lawyer” who succeeded in becoming a licensed attorney after release. Damon Davis, 47, is now a lawyer with the Hamilton County Public Defender’s Office in Cincinnati. But when released from a 47-month federal prison term for ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn, New York, has made the news repeatedly thanks to some high-profile detainees held there to await trial. But federal prosecutors have also charged nine detainees for a series of assaults on fellow detainees, including two murders.

Additionally, as 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 ...

Commissioners of Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County voted on September 19, 2024, to forgive $65,902,534.98 in debt owed by former detainees at the county lockup for unpaid fees they were charged during their incarceration. Such “pay to stay” fees have ballooned over the past few decades, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. ...

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry (DCRR) has faced bitter criticism for the healthcare provided to state prisoners, which a federal judge in 2022 called “plainly, grossly inadequate,” as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p.1.] So it wasn’t surprising when its early response to the COVID-19 pandemic ...

The Houston Police Department (HPD) fired Off. Deven Ortiz on January 7, 2025, following an investigation into multiple alleged uses of excessive force while he worked as a guard at the Harris County Jail (HCJ). That followed dismissal of charges against three other HCJ guards for assaulting a detainee, after ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 16, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the verdict and jury award of $6.4 million in compensatory damages against three nurses who worked for Corizon Health when it held the contract to provide healthcare at Michigan’s Kent County Correctional ...

by Matt Clarke

On July 18, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed an earlier holding by a three-judge panel of the Court, which found that § 241 of the Mississippi Constitution was unconstitutional. That’s the portion of the state’s Constitution that disenfranchises those convicted of ...

Rosie Martinez, then 49, was arrested in January 2015 after police searched her New York City apartment and found heroin that belonged to her boyfriend. While in custody at the 107th Precinct of the City Police Department (NYPD), she suffered a serious injury to her hand. Martinez said officers had ...

In 2018, former pretrial detainee Quintin Scott joined a lawsuit alleging unconstitutional dental care at the Cook County Jail in Chicago because it failed to employ an oral surgeon. For over a decade since 2007, detainees with serious dental issues had been referred to the surgery clinic at a local ...

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held on August 1, 2024, that mortality reviews prepared by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) following a prisoner’s in-custody death may properly be withheld or heavily redacted in response to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), ...

Alabama: Former Crenshaw County Jail Administrator Christian Alexander Porter, 33, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of excessive force, falsifying records and witness tampering on January 28, 2025. According to the Washington Post, the charges stem from an October 2021 incident in which Porter allegedly beat a ...