by Chuck Sharman
Making good on a 30-year-old threat, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California placed the mental health care system for state prisoners in receivership on August 27, 2025. The Court-appointed Receiver is former federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director Collette Peters, who …
by Chuck Sharman
No more waiting on someone to pick up the phone at Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Jail. As of June 23, 2025, to find out if someone is incarcerated in the Cleveland lockup, you can consult an online jail roster that is refreshed hourly with new booking …
by Chuck Sharman
In Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22, WWII airmen faced a conundrum: They could be relieved from duty for insanity, but any request to be relieved was treated as evidence that they were sane. The book’s title entered the language as a humorous synonym for contradictory …
by Chuck Sharman
On January 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of a former New York prisoner whose prostate cancer should have been diagnosed by medical personnel while in custody of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), …
With its sixth and seventh detainee deaths of the year coming just minutes apart on June 20, 2025, New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex eclipsed its death toll for all of 2024. Benjamin Kelly, 37, and James Maldonado, 56, were the latest of at least 40 people who …
A report issued by the Office of the D.C. Auditor (ODCA) on May 28, 2025, outlined the municipality’s “urgent need for a new jail.” The population of the existing lockup, spread over two adjacent buildings constructed between 1976 and 1992, soared to 1,945 in June 2024, from just 1,384 …
On September 25, 2024, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) agreed to pay $75,000 to a transgender state prisoner who accused a guard of raping her in December 2021 at Patuxent Institution, a treatment facility in Jessup.
As PLN reported, Leyleen Lillith Aquino, 39, …
A pair of former Illinois prisoners, each exonerated after spending 23 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit, accepted a total of $14.5 million in settlements from the City of Rockford, which voted in April 2025 to issue bonds to cover the debt.
Both Patrick Pursley, …
A young dad detoxing from fentanyl when he was booked into a Washington jail began exhibiting increasingly bizarre behavior, yet he was ignored until he climbed atop a metal sink and dived head-first onto the concrete floor, suffering a fatal spinal injury. That was the allegation made against staff …
A group of cases pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia paint a picture of senseless violence and petty retaliation by officials with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the U.S. Penitentiary-Lee near rural Pennington Gap.
At this same prison in 2023, …
