California state prison guard Scott Jones committed suicide in 2011, leaving a note that said, “the job made me do it.” His wife, Janelle Jones, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and four prison officials, and thus far has successfully defeated ...
Norman N. Shelton, confined in the Special Management Unit (SMU) at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, filed suit alleging that prison officials had “engaged in a pattern, practice, or policy of improperly placing inmates who are known to be hostile to each other in the same cell.” SMUs are ...
Federal prisoner Michael Patrick Giambalvo won a judgment against the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) action alleging medical negligence. The award by West Virginia U.S. District Court Judge Michael Siebert was for $250,000 in economic damages and $50,000 in non-economic damages. No award was ...
The number of homicides in the United States fell to a 42-year low in 2011, resulting in declines in the murder rate for males and females of all races, according to a December 2013 report released by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicides known to law enforcement ...
The former chief psychiatrist at the jail in Fresno County, California was placed on probation for five years and ordered to take additional training courses in the wake of numerous complaints that he provided substandard mental health care to prisoners, many of whom experienced worsening symptoms while incarcerated.
In a ...
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, held on January 25, 2016 that juvenile offenders can no longer be sentenced by state courts to mandatory life without parole (LWOP), even in capital cases. The Court ruled that its decision in Miller v. Alabama, 132 S.Ct. 2455 (2012) [ ...
Authorities in the western Canadian province of British Columbia have published a set of guidelines to govern the implementation of Mother-Child Units in provincial prisons as the result of a successful legal challenge that declared unconstitutional the B.C. government’s abolition of such units in 2008.
The guidelines, issued in August ...
The District of Columbia’s Court of Appeals has reversed a judgment against the D.C. government based upon the municipal liability standard set forth in Monell v. Dept. of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). According to the appellate court, the plaintiff, who had been wrongfully jailed following a parole ...
A recently-enacted statute, Mich. Comp. Laws § 28.725a(6), requires registered sex offenders to pay a $50 annual fee to help defray the cost of the state’s online sex offender registry. Offenders are required to pay the fee as long as they have to register, unless they are indigent.
“By requiring ...
The non-profit, Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) has released a comprehensive study on communication options for prisoners, focusing on email services while also citing issues related to phone calls, visitation and postal mail. According to the January 2016 report, a common thread among these communication options is the creative methods ...
