by Anthony Accurso
On November 10, 2025, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) of the Commonwealth of Virginia released a report detailing the long wait prisoners can expect when trying to participate in educational programming in the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) and the impacts such …
by Anthony W. Accurso
In January 2025, protests erupted outside the Tarrant County Jail (TCJ) in Fort Worth, Texas, with demonstrators holding signs that read “Sheriff of Shame” and “69 + Deaths = Mass Murder.” So many people showed up to Commissioners Court meetings that new rules were …
by Anthony Accurso
On July 29, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the dismissal of a case brought against a Wisconsin county jail relating to a detainee’s suicide, affirming the lower court’s ruling that the deceased’s family failed to meet the deliberate …
by Anthony Accurso
The Martuscello family, a practical dynasty within New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), manipulated the system to take power and avoid accountability while overseeing a system that perpetuated physical and sexual abuse of prisoners.
The killing of Robert Brooks occurred on …
by Anthony W. Accurso
A study analyzing the effects of a new jail-based rehabilitation program shows significant reductions in recidivism, and is upending the previous correctional mindset of “nothing works.”
Nearly 600,000 people are incarcerated in jails in the United States on any given day. Most are …
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a plaintiff’s claim of retaliation, finding the district court misapplied a waiver doctrine that prevented persons from filing the same claim in state and federal courts.
Lionel Harris is a prisoner at the …
On behalf of six prisoners in Delaware, the ACLU filed a civil rights complaint against a Warden and his Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) for assaults and abuse that occurred during a midnight raid.
All of the plaintiffs were prisoners held at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center …
In the first week of June 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted surprise inspection at six Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Food Service Departments, finding deficiencies at the facilities which “impair[ed] the administration of food service.”
The inspections occurred nearly simultaneously at one …
The cities of Gainesville, Florida, and Durham, North Carolina, experimented with providing guaranteed basic income (GBI) to prisoners who were reentering the community, and have released information about the outcomes created by the program.
Both programs enrolled just over one hundred former prisoners. The Gainesville cohort received $1,000 …
On April 23, 2024, the mother of a deceased Missouri prisoner prevailed on appeal against the state Department of Corrections (DOC), which a lower court had found knowingly violated the Missouri Sunshine Law when it denied her records about her son and his suicide, awarding her $59,508.99 in damages and legal fees.
Jahi Hynes, 27, was eight years into a 13-year term for burglary when he fatally hanged himself at Southeast Correctional Center (SECC) in Charleston on April 4, 2021. But it was a cascade of failures by staffers with DOC and its contracted medical provider, Corizon Health—now YesCare—that were ultimately blamed in the wrongful death suit filed by the dead prisoner’s mother.
Before she could file that complaint, however, Willa Hynes first had to battle DOC for more information than the phone call she received the day her son died, when a staffer told her that he had “hurt himself” and died, and that “the DOC could release no further information regarding the circumstances of his death.”
After months of fruitless email exchanges, Hynes retained counsel and filed a request pursuant to the state’s Sunshine Law for all records relating to her son, including …
