by Ed Lyon
In 2014, a settlement was reached in Parsons v. Ryan, a lawsuit over healthcare in Arizona’s prison system. The state contracted with Corizon Health to provide medical services for the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), even though the company had been plagued with problems ...
by Ed Lyon
Illinois prisoner Kirk Horshaw paid an extremely high price for placing his trust in prison officials. He received a written note warning that he was going to be beaten because a prison gang leader felt he had not shown him the proper respect. Horshaw passed the ...
by Ed Lyon
The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, a 1,654-bed facility operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) that houses defendants awaiting trial, was without main and generator-supplied electricity between January 27 and February 3, 2019 – a frigid stretch of winter during which ...
by Ed Lyon
Estrella Tenorio was a nurse’s aide/medical technician employed by for-profit contractor HealthCare Partners, Inc. (HCP). HCP specializes in providing medical services to prisoners. Tenorio’s first assignment was at a jail located near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Her mother was a state prison employee and her father ...
by Ed Lyon
For aficionados of “U.S. Marshals” and “The Fugitive,” movies staring Tommy Lee Jones, it may come as a shock that art comes nowhere near to a true imitation of life. That was painfully evident in a 20-page memorandum released by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on December ...
by Ed Lyon
As a child, Raymond Tibbetts lived a life straight out of a movie – a horror movie. He and his brothers were bounced from one foster home to another. Along their journey to adulthood, they found themselves being tied to their beds, burned, beaten, thrown down flights ...
by Ed Lyon
A new law in Utah requires information about deaths in both the state’s prisons and local jails to be reported annually. The first death in custody report, released last November, revealed that around half of all prisoner deaths are suicides and that most jail deaths occur ...
by Ed Lyon
The Vigo County jail in Terre Haute, Indiana has a well-documented history of constitutional violations. In 2002, the county entered into a consent decree to cap the jail’s population at no more than 268 prisoners, among other relief resulting from a federal class-action lawsuit. ...
by Ed Lyon
Raudell Mercado initially entered the Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) in 2013 as a youthful offender at the Manson Youth Institution. In March 2015, he was formally admitted to the DOC as a pre-trial detainee; soon afterward he was transferred to the Cheshire Correctional Institution ...
by Ed Lyon
In just the four zip codes of Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, whose mainly black and Hispanic residents suffer high rates of poverty, civil asset forfeiture (CAF) proceedings netted 1,682 properties that were seized and sold by the District Attorney’s office between 1993 and 2018. During ...
