by Derek Gilna
The slow decline in state prison populations cannot come soon enough for many Departments of Corrections, which are struggling to cover shifts in the face of rising staff turnover rates. States experiencing shortages of prison guards include Kansas, Tennessee, Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Michigan, Missouri and ...
The lies of Chicago police officers, as well as the concealment of clearly exculpatory evidence, kept Jermaine Walker in Illinois prisons for ten years – but he never stopped proclaiming his innocence. Plainclothes officers contended that on February 21, 2006, at approximately 8:30 p.m., they saw Walker hand cash to ...
Federal prisoner Michael Alan Crooker filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act alleging “malicious prosecution, negligence, and medical maltreatment by the United States Marshal’s Service (USMS) and the United States Bureau of Prisons (BOP).” Proceeding pro se, he survived a motion for summary judgment and eventually obtained an $8,000 ...
The County of Los Angeles, like most governmental agencies, receives funding from a variety of sources and relies on outside contractors to perform many services – including correctional services. L.A. County’s Probation Department was the subject of a July 2015 audit related to its budgeting process for juvenile halls, juvenile ...
Over the five-year period ending June 30, 2014, officials in the 6th Judicial District of the Iowa Department of Correctional Services misspent $1.2 million, mostly for improper payroll costs to workers at the Community Corrections Improvement Association, a non-profit agency started in 1991 by Gary Hinzman, a longtime district leader ...
Craig A. Childress was an Illinois state prisoner at the Big Muddy River Correctional Center who was released from custody to mandatory supervised release in 2010. At the time of his release, a prison official placed a computer disk containing Childress’ resume into his property, despite the fact that Childress ...
Samantha Hill, a male-to-female transgender prisoner in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), was raped at USP Florence in December 2013 – one of many sexual assaults the BOP failed to prevent through either neglect or incompetence, despite the requirements of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). ...
President Barack Obama made news in December 2015 when he commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners. However, with only one year left in his second term, it is unlikely that he will act on thousands of pending clemency applications – even after he made granting clemency a top priority ...
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s unanimous vote in April 2014 to reduce sentencing guidelines two levels for certain defendants convicted of nonviolent drug crimes was a major step in cutting the federal prison terms of both the newly-convicted and those currently incarcerated. [See: PLN, Aug. 2014, p.26]. The action was hailed ...
The American Humanist Association, affiliated with over 1,000 congregations in the United States, has been a recognized religion for decades – but it took a civil rights complaint by a federal prisoner at FCI Sheridan in Oregon to finally get the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to recognize it as such. ...
