by Benjamin Tschirhart
It took a civil complaint to make Sheriff Chad Bianco talk. The five jails he runs for California’s Riverside County had seen 13 deaths in the first eight months of 2022 — the highest number for any year on record. And until the press conference on September ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On June 22, 2022, an attorney for theVirginia Department of Corrections signed off on an agreement to pay $87,000 to settle a state prisoner’s claims that he was kicked in the testicles by a guard.
The incident occurred on July 15, 2016, when a guard identified as ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On May 17, 2022, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that sheriffs may continue the decades-old practice of collecting commissions from charges for phone calls made by those incarcerated in the state’s jails.
At issue is the cost of communication for an extremely vulnerable population, which ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On October 3, 2022, the same day her jury trial was scheduled to begin for sexually abusing a prisoner, a former assistant warden with the Nebraska Department of Corrections (DOC) reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Admitting to a charge of “unlawful visitation or communication with an ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On September 29, 2022, former PLN Editor Alex Friedmann, 53, settled with the Tennessee Department of Corrections (DOC) in a federal action alleging his civil rights were violated when he was held 580 days in pretrial detention in an ‘Iron Man’ cell that he called “utterly barren ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
In November 2022, Dallas resident Christopher Arnone was charged with sexually abusing his son. He struck a deal and entered a plea of nolo contendere to one charge of injury to a child. The state court sentenced him to ten years ‘deferred adjudication community supervision,’ the conditions ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
The U.S. Constitution, in its idealistic fashion, guarantees citizens that they “shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” During the intervening centuries, the fine brush of precedent has filled in those broad, optimistic strokes.
But even a cursory examination will ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On November 18, 2022, almost four years after Congress passed the First Step Act (FSA) to reduce the population incarcerated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), new BOP Director Colette Peters finally clarified the agency’s policy to implement the law.
FSA was signed into law by ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
No one in prison expects to eat fine cuisine. The food served is merely intended to keep prisoners alive, with no thought given to how much it is or isn’t enjoyed. Yet certain people are seeing enormous benefits from prison food — just not prisoners.
In a ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Most prisoners quickly learn that slavery has never been fully abolished in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution allows prisoners to be compelled to work for little or no pay, and most jurisdictions take advantage of the provision. In California, some state prisoners are ...
