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Articles by David Reutter

Alabama Forced to Confront Criminal Justice Reform

“We’re at a fork in the road,” Alabama state Senator Cam Ward, chairman of the Prison Reform Task Force, said in June 2014. “We have two paths to choose from and neither one is easy. Those of us on the task force can solve, it or federal courts can do ...

$15 Million Award for Prisoner Rendered Paraplegic Due to Medical Malpractice Affirmed

The New York Supreme Court Appellate Division has affirmed a $15 million judgment awarded to a prisoner who became a paraplegic due to a prison doctor’s malpractice.

Following the judgment by the Court of Claims, the State of New York appealed; PLN previously reported the judgment. [See: PLN, Jan. ...

Florida’s Private Prison Movement Alive and Well

With the promise of saving taxpayer dollars to house a growing prisoner population during a cyclical crime wave in the early 1990s, Florida decided to experiment with private prisons. From the start, those involved in the push to privatize were tainted with ethical conflicts, and more than two decades later ...

Nonviolent Michigan Offenders Can Seek Expungement Under New Law

A recently-enacted Michigan law allows an offender convicted of a nonviolent felony or two misdemeanors to ask a judge to expunge their criminal record. The expungement bill had been in the works for several years before it was passed in a lame-duck session in December 2014.

The new statute amends ...

California Jail’s Psychotropic Medication Policy Leads to Lawsuit, Settlement

Cost cutting is a staple of most prison and jail systems. However, a mid-2007 decision by California’s Fresno County Jail (FCJ) to restrict psychotropic drugs for prisoners turned out to be a short-sighted exercise that resulted in human suffering and financial costs far exceeding any savings.

FCJ was accredited in ...

Hawaii Prisons Experience Security Failures, Other Troubling Incidents

Operations and management at two Hawaii prisons are under scrutiny following a series of incidents over the past several years that have ranged from prisoner deaths and escapes to sexual harassment by staff members and the beating of a prisoner that resulted in criminal charges.

Five deaths during a two-month ...

Fourth Circuit Finds 20 Years in Solitary an Atypical and Significant Hardship

On July 1, 2015, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found the “20-year period of solitary confinement” endured by a South Carolina prisoner “amounts to an atypical and significant hardship in relation to the general population and implicates a liberty interest in avoiding security detention.” It also found a triable ...

Excited Delirium Syndrome: Medical Condition or Cover-Up?

Debate is quietly raging within the medical and law enforcement communities about a diagnosis first identified more than 160 years ago which more recently has become associated with the deaths of people in police custody, many of whom were involved in physical altercations with officers or shocked with Tasers before ...

Architects’ Ethics Panel to Consider Boycott of Execution Chambers and Prison Design

by David Reutter

An advocacy group composed of architects, building designers and planners is hailing a decision by the National Ethics Council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to reconsider a proposal to prohibit its members from designing “execution chambers and spaces intended for torture or cruel, inhuman, or ...

Pepper-spraying Sleeping Prisoner Unconstitutional, but Case Loses at Trial

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that “using a chemical agent in an attempt to wake a sleeping prisoner, without apparent necessity and in the absence of mitigating circumstances, violates clearly established law.” The ruling came in an interlocutory appeal filed by a Michigan prison guard.

Prisoner Nicholas Roberson ...