On June 2, 2025, the federal court for the Northern District of California issued a consent decree settling demands for injunctive relief filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) against California’s Sonoma County over censorship of publications at the Main Adult Detention Facility (MADF) in Santa Rosa. In …
by Chuck Sharman
Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University reveal that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to struggle with accurate reporting of the number of migrants it tracks through its Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. In just one week in …
by Chuck Sharman
On June 6, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted two employees of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in Virginia for allegedly showing deliberate indifference to a prisoner suffering a cardiac emergency that killed him in 2021.
Guard Lt. Shronda Covington, 47, and Registered …
by Chuck Sharman
A collection of graphic videos reported by the Los Angeles Times on June 24, 2023, pulled back the curtain on rampant violence and chaos inside Los Angeles County jails. The footage, saved on a discarded thumb drive, portrays a shocking lack of supervision …
On June 8, 2023, a judge in Alabama’s Lauderdale County handed a life sentence without parole to a state prisoner for escaping the county lockup with his jail-guard lover, who then committed suicide as pursuing police closed in. Casey White, 39, pleaded guilty to felony escape in a deal …
by Jo Ellen Nott and Chuck Sharman
Long notorious for harsh prison conditions, Alabama’s Department of Corrections (DOC) shows no signs of remediating them despite not one but two suits by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) for violating the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of state prisoners.
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by Chuck Sharman
Thirty years since its last reboot, the troubled U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta has gotten another one, after violence and corruption led the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to transfer most prisoners elsewhere in late 2021. [See: PLN, Jan. 2022, p.22.]
The lockup is …
by Chuck Sharman
On February 14, 2023, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced it was closing Special Management Unit (SMU) at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Thomson, Illinois, where seven deaths have been recorded since it opened in 2019, the highest death toll in any BOP facility.
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by Chuck Sharman
Ohio prisoners James O’Neal, Jerome Henderson and Melvin Bonnell were all scheduled to die by lethal injection between August and October 2023. However, on April 14, 2023, Gov. Mike Dewine (R) delayed each execution over two years.
DeWine was the state Attorney General when …
by Chuck Sharman
On May 3, 2023, the family of Joe Nathan James Jr., an Alabama prisoner executed in July 2022, sued Gov. Kay Ivey (R) and other state officials, claiming he suffered excessive pain and was unconscious too long before his death, thwarting his intent to apologize …
