On September 19, 2024, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Mary Kathlin Sickel put the final signature on an agreement paying $325,000 to former state prisoner Darnell Price, settling his claims that a state Department of Corrections (DOC) physician ignored a mass on his leg which later proved to be cancerous. By ...
Since the passage almost 30 years ago of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, prisoners have been required prior to filing suit against their captors to exhaust all available administrative remedies, usually through the prison grievance system. A body of case law has since arisen defining the ...
When the Texas legislature adjourned its annual session on June 2, 2025, lawmakers had taken some steps to restrict bail and successfully fought back an effort to expand parole. Most other jail and prison reforms—including a bill to air-condition the state’s miserably hot lockups—were left on the table, too. Meanwhile, ...
On June 24, 2025, Florida’s Seventh Judicial Circuit Court for Putnam County ruled that Centurion of Florida, LLC was acting as the functional equivalent of a state agency when it contracted with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide healthcare to prisoners; therefore, it was obligated under the state’s ...
As states across the country push to end “prison gerrymandering”—the U.S. Census practice of counting prisoners in the typically rural and white areas where they are held, thereby diluting the voting power of the urban and non-white areas that they come from—the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) released a report ...
On January 6, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reinstated the claim of a now-exonerated Maryland prisoner against a trio of Baltimore cops who allegedly coerced a confession from an eyewitness that was used to convict him of a fatal shooting in December 1986. The false ...
On February 17, 2025, Paul Wright, Executive Director of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), signed an agreement accepting a $480,000 payment to resolve claims for records made in a suit filed in state court against Centurion of New Mexico LLC, the contracted medical provider to the state Corrections Department ...
To maintain and operate the prisons and jails that hold nearly 2 million American costs a lot—an estimated $82 billion a year, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Sep. 2023, p.56.] But that is just the direct cost to governments. What about the costs to prisoners and their families, for ...
In a letter dated July 8, 2024, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) confirmed a $2,800 settlement with state prisoner Trevor J. Teagarden, resolving claims for denied public records requests made to the state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC) pursuant to ORC § 149.43. An additional $1,000 was added by ...
Texas lawmakers took steps in opposite directions toward solving a crisis in state juvenile detention centers, after all five lockups operated by the state Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) were found to be violating the civil rights of youthful offenders by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ). In response, state Sen. ...
