by Chuck Sharman
Since its peak nearly two decades ago, New York’s prisoner population has fallen by half. Added to the millions of dollars it cost the state Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) to build the prisons are millions more to shutter them. Some closed properties were sold at auction, but in most cases the state recovered only a fraction of its initial investment. The remaining former prisons, often located in remote rural areas, have proven impossible to sell, leaving the state with white elephants.
Or maybe it’s better to call them chickens, hatched from mass incarceration, clucking loudly as they come home to roost.
DOCCS has closed more than two dozen state prisons over the past 15 years, six since the beginning of 2022 closed by Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). In some instances, investors purchased the properties but failed to find buyers who wanted to redevelop them. More often, it’s the state left holding the bag.
A rural prison creates its own mini-economy, with hotels and restaurants and convenience stores for those visiting prisoners, along with housing and services for those who staff them. All of that slowly goes dark when the prison closes. Hoping to revitalize ...
by Chuck Sharman
On January 23, 2023, just 10 days after Ryan Everson was put in Missouri’s Clay County Jail, the 42-year-old was found dead in his cell. That his three children no longer had a father is cruelly ironic, since Everson was behind bars for failure to pay $50 in child support.
The office of Sheriff Will Akin said the cause of death was suicide. But Everson’s family questioned why he was left alone in his cell despite having seizures. Moreover, they argue, jailing him was never going to help his children, ages 17, 19 and 20.
Instead it added to the growing number of deaths in the jail, the third in 21 months. With an average daily population of 313 detainees, according to Inside Prison, the jail’s annual death rate now stands at 548 per 100,000 – over three times higher than the U.S. average of 167 per 100,000 reported most recently by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Statistics on the number of parents jailed for nonpayment of child support are spottier. The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement in 2010 counted 662,000 incarcerated parents who owed child support, but the vast majority were behind bars for ...
by Chuck Sharman
After a media investigation found Illinois prisoners were forced to pay for abortion procedures – even covering the wages of guard escorts to and from medical providers – Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) ordered the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to change its policy.
As a result, DOC spokesperson Naomi Puzello announced on November 2, 2022, that incarcerated women would no longer have to cover these expenses, and those who previously paid for them could get reimbursed.
That’s especially important to a woman working a prison job, which in Illinois pays an hourly wage that tops out at 89 cents. Covering just one hour of the $47,508 starting salary for a state prison guard would require her to work four days or more.
Advocates for abortion rights expressed surprise and elation at the decision. Emily Hirsch, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, emphasized the importance of ensuring unfettered access to critical healthcare, including abortion, for every person in need.
“We applaud the Governor’s Office for taking an important step toward that goal,” she said.
Puzello confirmed that the new guidelines had been implemented and that DOC’s privately contracted healthcare provider, Wexford Health Sources, ...
by Chuck Sharman
On April 21, 2023, South Carolina prisoner Dexter Lawrence, 27, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release for his role in a “sextortion” scam that targeted U.S. military personnel. Two co-conspirators also previously received federal sentences for money-laundering. Two other state prisoners were sentenced for blackmail in a similar scheme that led a young soldier to commit suicide. All must complete sentences they are already serving with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) before they begin their new terms.
The prisoners ran the scam from their cells from 2015 to 2017, and it worked like this: Using contraband cellphones to access the internet, they created fake accounts on dating sites, pretending to be females as they targeted on-duty U.S. military personnel and enticed them to request nude photos. It’s unclear whose photos the prisoners sent. But after they did so, an accomplice phoned the recipients, pretending to be an irate father claiming the photos were of his underage daughter. Of course, the “dad” was not so angry that he couldn’t be bought off. [See: PLN, Apr. 2019, p.63.]
Threatened with arrest and dishonorable discharge on child pornography charges, some ...
By Chuck Sharman
An off-duty Florida prison guard was arrested on June 7, 2023, after he allegedly shot a woman several times outside her home.
Wilner Cyprien, 31, a state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard at Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown, was allegedly waiting outside the woman’s home in a ...
by Chuck Sharman
In a surprising shift, the Texas Legislature approved construction of new state-run prisons for youth and transferring some teenagers from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) to the more punitive adult prison system. The passage of SB 1727 on May 29, 2023, marked a departure from the ...
by Chuck Sharman
In a statement to a local Jacksonville news station on June 6, 2023, the healthcare provider for at the Duval County Jail denied wrongdoing in the death of a former detainee who missed critical doses of drugs to prevent rejection of his transplanted heart. Instead, Armor Correctional ...
by Chuck Sharman
During Ukraine’s successful offensive to liberate the southern city of Kherson in October 2022, retreating Russian forces took 2,500 Ukrainian prisoners with them. What followed was a Kafka-esque journey through five countries, at the end of which the same Russian army that led the prisoners out of jail detained them again – this time for violating immigration laws.
“They asked me, ‘How did you enter Russia?’” said Ruslan Osadchyi, one of the Kherson prisoners. “‘You brought me here,’” he recalled replying, “‘under the muzzles of automatic guns!’”
Curiously, the Ukrainian convicts were passed over by recruiters from the Wagner Group, a private mercenary army partially drawn from Russian lockups. Instead, as another Ukranian prisoner recalled, they “were received with shouts, beatings, [and] humiliations” upon arrival at a Russian-controlled prison.
“Face to the ground,” recounted Oleksandr Fedorenko, 47, “don’t look, don’t speak, and blows, blows, blows.”
Russian officials have not publicly acknowledged the transfer of Kherson prisoners into Russia, which would violate international law prohibiting the forced removal of non-combatants from an occupied zone. The prisoners suffering this haphazard treatment, many convicted of murder, kidnapping and rape, had also been left behind by Ukrainian forces retreating from Russian’s ...
by Chuck Sharman
A guard and a prisoner at Oahu Community Correctional Center in Honolulu were among four people convicted on federal conspiracy charges in a drug-and-gun-smuggling scheme at the lockup. All but the guard were sentenced in February and May 2023.
On February 10, 2023, prisoner Robert S. Gibson, 38, had 100 months added to his sentence for masterminding a plan to smuggle the contraband into the lockup. He was being held there for kidnapping, robbery and impersonating a law enforcement during a home invasion committed after walking off a work furlough in 2015.
Two days earlier, on February 8, 2023, his girlfriend, Ceceliacharity Hilo, a/k/a Cece Adams, was convicted of buying the meth for him and passing it to co-conspirators. For that she was sentenced to 27 months of time she had served plus two years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment.
Gibson’s stepsister, Keicha K.W. Brunn-Kekuewa, 30, pleaded guilty to setting up calls between the two in late 2019 and early 2020, as well as accepting the meth Hilo obtained. For that she got a 20-month prison term on May 10, 2023, plus two years of supervised release. She also lost her job as a ...
by Jordan Arizmendi and Chuck Sharman
A huge fire inside an immigration detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Mexican border from El Paso, killed 38 men on March 28, 2023. Another 28 were left with injuries, according to Mexico’s National Immigration Institute.
While smoke filled the building and ...
