by Derek Gilna
In October 2017, a New Castle County, Delaware grand jury indicted 18 prisoners from the maximum-security James T. Vaughn Correctional Center, 16 of whom were charged with the murder of Lt. Steven Floyd, Sr. The guard was the only fatality of a February 2017 riot at the ...
by Derek Gilna
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech to all Americans, but apparently the Los Angeles, California City Council and the Los Angeles Police Department(LAPD) feel that their compliance with that core citizen protection is optional. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California ...
by Derek Gilna
California state prisoner Ronald Martinez filed suit in 2011, asserting that his Eighth Amendment rights had been violated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). He eventually obtained a $27,000 settlement from the state, which was finalized in January 2017.
The settlement was remarkable considering ...
by Derek Gilna
In June 2017, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Smart on Crime” initiative. Smart on Crime, instituted in 2013 under Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder, “encouraged federal prosecutors to focus on the most serious cases that implicate ...
by Derek Gilna
The parties in a class-action suit filed in federal district court, which alleged Bank of America (BOA) charged excessive fees for debit cards given to Arizona state prisoners upon their release, reached a preliminary settlement in April 2017. Prisoner advocacy groups had argued that BOA deducted fees ...
by Derek Gilna
In August 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the deportation of Audemio Orozco-Ramirez, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2013, confined at the Jefferson County jail in Montana and held pending a civil removal order. While incarcerated ...
by Derek Gilna
In July 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report highly critical of the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) policy of confining mentally ill prisoners in Restrictive Housing Units (RHUs). The report detailed not only the failure of the BOP to ...
by Derek Gilna
The non-profit, Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) published a report on May 31, 2017 that argued local jails, which hold “one of every three people behind bars” in the United States, have for too long been ignored by state policymakers. “Jails may be locally controlled, but jail ...
by Derek Gilna
U.S. District Court Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, of the Eastern District of Texas, issued a 193-page opinion on April 28, 2017 that effectively gutted what she termed a “discriminatory money bail system” in Harris County, which includes Houston.
PLN has long covered problems with the money bail ...
by Derek Gilna
After extensive research, Families Against Mandatory Minimum (FAMM), which advocates for sentencing reform, published a report in May 2017 that highlighted numerous suggestions for reducing recidivism rates for federal prisoners.
According to FAMM, “almost one-half (49.3%) of the offenders released in 2005 were rearrested for a new ...
