by Douglas Ankney
On March 16, 2021, Daniel Ruiz’s four children and his mother, Angelica Chavez, filed suit in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in relation to his death from COVID-19 that he contracted due to infected prisoners being transferred to San Quentin and the ...
by Douglas Ankney
As a surge in migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border made headlines in March 2020, the federal agency in charge was still trying to address deficiencies uncovered in an oversight report released the summer before.
According to a July 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office ...
by Douglas Ankney
As of March 11, 2021, there were more than 137 active cases of COVID-19 at the Northern State Correctional Facility (NSCF) in Newport, Vermont. James Lyall, executive director of the ACLU of Vermont said, “This was predictable and it was preventable. Just like the multiple other outbreaks ...
by Douglas Ankney
On September 8, 2020, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilkin of the Northern District of California ordered additional remedial measures—including body-worn cameras for guards—as relief in a class-action suit claiming allegations of abuse of disabled prisoners by guards at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility (“RJD”) in San Diego. ...
by Douglas Ankney
Law professors Shirin Sinnar (Stanford Law School) and Beth A. Colgan (UCLA School of Law) explored the viability of victim compensation and restorative justice as alternatives to sentencing enhancements for hate crimes in New York University Law Review’s September 2020 issue.
During the decades dominated by ...
by Douglas Ankney
In late September 2020, private correctional healthcare contractor Wellpath paid $4.5 million to settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a mentally ill teen who died from dehydration while incarcerated in 2016 at the Benton County Jail in Kennewick, Washington.
The family’s attorney, Edwin ...
by Douglas Ankney
Beginning in July 2021, California will stop accepting nearly all youth offenders at three facilities operated by the Division of Juvenile Justice (“DJJ”). This resulted from an August 2020 deal between Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature whereby the majority of offenders age 25 and younger ...
by Douglas Ankney
Gerrymandering is defined in U.S. politics as “the dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.” Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced in June 2020 that it would spend more than $5.25 million on a program to distribute large, curated collections of books to prisons and juvenile detention facilities across the country.
The program will provide the same 500-book collection to 1,000 prisons. ...
by Douglas Ankney
An October 15, 2020 report from the Santa Fe New Mexican revealed that in March 2020, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower complaint that exposed deficiencies of private health-care provider Corizon Correctional Health Care (Corizon) and the NMCD’s failure to ...
