by Dale Chappell
In a federal appellate court filing on August 20, 2020, nearly five years after a federal judge ordered officials to stop recording privileged calls between attorneys and their clients waiting for trial at the Leavenworth Detention Center (LDC) in Kansas, the U.S. government refused to comply with ...
by Dale Chappell
If you’re one of the millions of Americans with a conviction barring you from serving jury duty in your state, maybe it’s not one of the rights you lost that you miss. After all, many people aren’t disappointed when they’re skipped for jury duty.
But state laws ...
by Dale Chappell
A new watchdog nonprofit in New Mexico is focusing on exposing the culture of secrecy in the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), which the group says interferes with the ability to monitor civil rights violations against prisoners.
Called the New Mexico Prison and Jails Project (PJP), it ...
by Dale Chappell
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri entered an order on November 12, 2020, finding that Missouri’s parole system was unconstitutional, handing down a laundry list of corrections needed.
The problem was Missouri’s handling of parole revocation proceedings, which the Court said violated parolees’ ...
by Dale Chappell
Need help paying for college while in prison? Getting financial aid in prison for college got easier on December 20, 2020. That’s when Congress passed a $1.4 trillion government spending bill for 2021 that included a provision to lift a 26-year-old ban on giving prisoners federal financial ...
by Dale Chappell
When historic wildfires burned through Arizona in June 2020, two out of three of the firefighters who brought the blazes under control were state prisoners who were paid just pennies on the dollar to do the same job as well-paid professional firefighters working right next to them. ...
by Dale Chappell
Apparently, it’s easier to release someone from jail and dismiss the charges if their issues become too much trouble, according to a lawsuit filed by James Bagley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Bagley was arrested in September 2017 for suspected driving ...
by Dale Chappell
Former prisoners who have turned to the nonprofit organization The Doe Fund in New York City for work and job training have found themselves making less than minimum wage, once the Doe Fund takes its fees out of their paychecks. Some say this is exploitation of those ...
by Dale Chappell
A whistleblower at a privately operated federal detention center in Georgia prompted a joint complaint filed in September 2020 with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging inadequate and even suspicious medical care for the immigrants being held there.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) added her voice to the chorus calling for OIG to thoroughly investigate the allegations of the whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, a full-time nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Ocilla, Georgia.
In the main part of her statement, Wooten alleged that medical staff at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility had responded maliciously to the coronavirus pandemic, refusing to test or treat immigrants showing signs of COVID-19, ignoring and shredding medical request forms and even falsifying medical records.
But she also made another startling allegation: Hysterectomies were performed on several female detainees without their informed consent. She said she and other employees were concerned that an outside doctor contracted by the facility “takes everybody’s stuff out.”
“That’s his specialty,” she said, referring to the doctor, an obstetrician and gynecologist later identified as Dr. Mahendra Amin. “He’s the uterus collector.”
If detainees complained, ...
by Dale Chappell
While the coronavirus runs rampant through the country’s prisons, medical treatment for even serious problems has taken a backseat, leaving prisoners to get creative and perform their own treatment. For one New Jersey prisoner, this meant cleaning his infected wound with bleach, his family says, making them concerned for his health.
The problem started with just a small scrape on his foot, probably caused by ill-fitting boots the prison forced him to wear, Patch.com reported on June 4, 2020. Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem for most people, but for this 36-year-old man housed at the Northern State Prison in Newark, a small cut on his foot could easily turn into a life-threatening dilemma: He’s a diabetic, and any wound to his feet puts him at risk for infection that could lead to amputation.
Soon, an ugly, open wound broke out and an infection went all the way to his knee. The prison gave him some antibiotic ointment and ibuprofen for pain, plus some oral antibiotics. This didn’t work, and he developed cellulitis and borderline septicemia, a systemic and life-threatening infection that is difficult to treat even in the hospital with IV antibiotics.
Finally, he was transferred ...
