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Articles by David Reutter

Texas Guards Who Fought with Juveniles Disciplined but Not Prosecuted

Seven guards at a Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJ) facility have been fired or disciplined for assaulting teenage prisoners. Many of the incidents were caught on video.

The TJJ established the Phoenix Program in 2012 to calm and counsel incarcerated youths. Guards, who internal reports say were inexperienced and sloppily ...

Dead Convicted Rapist Cop to be Sentenced

A California court is scheduled to follow a victim’s request to sentence her rapist despite the fact that he committed suicide.

Anthony Nicholas Orban was an Orange County detective who was off-duty when he went out “boozing and stalking cute girls” with his prison guard roommate, Jeff Thomas Jelinek, on ...

Washington State Must Rehire 3 Guards Fired for Complacency

An arbitrator ordered the state of Washington Department of Corrections (WDOC) to rehire three guards fired on the heels of a guard’s murder. The arbitrator’s ruling found that “widespread… complacency” existed at the Monroe correctional Complex (MCC), which “cautioned” against singling out complacent front-line guards.

In 2011, guard Jayme Biendl ...

Threat of Lawsuit Pushes Florida to Allow Circumcision of Jewish Prisoners

With the help from students at the Stanford Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic, Pablo Manuel Diaz, 37, became the first Florida prisoner to be circumcised while incarcerated.

Diaz who is serving a life sentence at Blackwater River Correctional Facility, was born in Cuba to Jewish parents. Fear of political persecution ...

Texas Jail Expansion by another Name on Ballot Passes

Jail expansion was unpopular in 2007 with voters in Harris County and the City of Houston. Learning from that defeat, local politicians gained approval of an expansion of the jail, but they called it something else on the 2013 ballot.

That ballot proposal was “fundamentally different than what was asked ...

Mississippi First to Begin Conjugal Visits, Latest to End Them

After a century of using conjugal visits as prisoner –control practice, Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) Commissioner Christopher B. Epps has brought that privilege to an end. Only five states now allow conjugal visits.

In the Jim Crow days of the early 1900s, the warden of Parchman Farm, now the ...

Court Orders Oversight of Florida Prisoner Kosher Meal Program

In ordering the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) to provide prisoners with kosher meals, the federal district court overseeing the litigation brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) overruled FDOC”s objection to giving DOJ oversight authority into compliance with the injunction.

PLN previously reported on the court’s April 30, ...

Virginia’s Treatment of Jailed Mentally Ill Persons Found Lacking

Jails have become an essential part of Virginia’s mental health system, but they lack the capacity to satisfy the current demand for mental health services. That is a finding of a report by Virginia’s Office of the State Inspector General (SIG). The biggest factors in that systematic failure are a ...

Alabama Prisoners Dying on Death Row, but by Natural Causes

by David Reutter

Prisoners are sent to death row to die for their crimes.  The shortages of drugs used for lethal injection has delayed executions, resulting in many death row prisoners dying from natural cases or suicide.  The recent frequency of this in Alabama exhibits the hypocrisy of death sentence ...

$183,000 in Settlements for Sexually Abused Pennsylvania Prisoners

Pennsylvania prison officials have paid a total of $183,000 to settle lawsuits brought by three prisoners who alleged that guards at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Pittsburgh physically and sexually abused them.

One of the federal civil rights actions was filed in February 2012 against two guards and five current or ...