A Florida federal district court has denied a motion for a protective order filed by the defendants in a class-action lawsuit brought by five current or former residents of Thompson Academy, a juvenile facility managed by Youth Services International, Inc. (YSI) with funding from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice ...
by David M. Reutter
Speeding up Florida’s execution machinery is a top priority for state House Speaker Dean Cannon. Cannon’s efforts to achieve that goal have included abolishing a commission that oversees death penalty cases and trying to reorganize the state’s Supreme Court.
Most unexpected in the 2011 legislative session ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 27, 2010, North Carolina’s Supreme Court reversed a grant of habeas corpus relief to a prisoner serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, holding that prison officials acted properly in withholding various good time credits accumulated against his sentence.
Alford Jones, convicted in 1975, ...
by David M. Reutter
Citing $12 million in annual savings, the Washington State Department of Corrections (WDOC) has closed the 1,200-bed McNeil Island Corrections Center. A 2009 audit, however, found there would be no actual savings because it would cost the same amount to continue operating the island’s civil commitment ...
By David M. Reutter
The Michigan Department of Corrections’ (MDOC) efforts to comply with the requirement to deliver medical services are not effective. That is the conclusion drawn in an audit report issued in March 2008 by Michigan’s Office of the Auditor General. That conclusion comes as no surprise to ...
By David M. Reutter
In September 2008, The Washington State Department of Corrections (WDOC) began requiring its most violent sex offenders to wear a GPS monitoring bracelet for the first 30 days after release from prison. The new program is an expansion of a test program that was used on ...
by David M. Reutter
Despite the closed environment and high security features of prisons, prison officials continue to lose the battle against drugs and other contraband smuggling. The results of interdiction efforts are often the same as those in America’s decades-old “war on drugs” – a few skirmishes are won ...
By David M. Reutter
Georgia’s Fulton County has agreed to pay the widow of slain judge Rowland Barnes $5.2 million. Barnes was killed by Brian Nichols, who went on a killing rampage in March 2005 at the Fulton County Courthouse.
Nichols, who was on trial for rape in Barnes’ courtroom, ...
By David M. Reutter
With the expansion of the prison industrialization complex in recent decades, many communities have turned to prisons as a means to generate economic activity.
Considering the success of other small, rural areas in this endeavor, it comes as no surprise that the citizens of Hardin, Montana ...
by David M. Reutter
The Idaho State Board of Medicine’s Prelitigation Screening Panel found that a prisoner at the CCA-operated Idaho Correctional Center had “borne his burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that Dr. [Stephen] Garrett did not comply with the standard of care in failing to ...
