by Benjamin Tschirhart
Ray Garcia was warden for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California. He served as supervisor at the lockup for regular audits conducted under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). But after his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
As of mid-January 2023, almost 100 minimum-security prisoners from the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) in Tucson were still being held in segregation at the nearby U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Tucson, six weeks after a fellow prisoner somehow got a gun and attempted to shoot his wife when ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Over 10 years ago, when former prison guard Robert Fletcher heard from a friend that a painting he owned was an early untitled work by artist Peter Doig, Fletcher was understandably elated; Doig is a renowned artist whose paintings normally sell for millions of dollars.
Fletcher had ...
by Casey J. Bastian and Benjamin Tschirhart
Citing “bureaucratic incompetence,” as well as “flawed, confusing and insufficient” policies and procedures, a December 2022 report by a federal government watchdog attempted to answer the question: How did a notorious but elderly criminal end up transferred by the federal Bureau of Prisons ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Calling conditions in Los Angeles County jails “abhorrent,” attorneys representing a group of incarcerated plaintiffs appeared before a federal judge on April 19, 2023, asking him to hold the county in contempt of a recently granted injunction. That was after three detainee deaths in just nine days ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
An October 2022 report by the Office of Correction and Law Enforcement (OCLE) in California’s Santa Clara County faults the county Sheriff’s Department (SCSD) for prematurely closing an investigation into the death of a mentally ill detainee during a transfer between county jails in August 2018. After ...
by Ben Tschirhart
On August 16, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the verdict of a federal jury, stripping $20,000 in damages awarded to a former federal prisoner in New York for mental and emotional injury suffered during confinement. In its decision, the Court made ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On September 29, 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed S.B. 1008 into law, barring government agencies in the state from collecting any part of the revenue from providing calls in prisons and jails. It also makes calls completely free at state prisons and juvenile detention facilities. ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
In July 2019, Jonathan Lee Smith was a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary near Kentucky’s Big Sandy River, when he got in a fight with another prisoner and guards responded. That led to allegations that two of them used excessive force against the prisoner: Lt. Terry Melvin ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On April 5, 2022, a former jail guard in Buffalo pleaded guilty to a first-degree felony count of promoting prison contraband. Jason Stachowski, 48, had already resigned from the Erie County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) on February 17, 2022, after investigators acting on an anonymous tip discovered that ...
