by Ed Lyon
On May 1, 2010, Pedro Temich was arrested in Meriden, Connecticut. He was taken to jail, where video cameras recorded officer Evan Cossette pushing Temich, who was handcuffed and not resisting. Temich fell, hitting the back of his head on a concrete bench.
Cossette then entered the ...
by Ed Lyon
In December 2017, a Texas State Bar committee issued a scathing report concerning the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), which oversees the State Counsel for Offenders (SCO) – an agency that provides legal representation for prisoners in certain cases.
SCO attorneys represent prisoners accused of committing ...
by Ed Lyon
When Wilson County, Kansas Sheriff Pete Figgins instituted a postcard-only correspondence policy at the county jail, prisoners were only allowed to send and receive letters to and from attorneys. No notice was provided when mail was rejected under the new policy.
In April 2016, the ACLU Foundation ...
by Ed Lyon
On December 7, 2017, Ryan Partridge, a mentally ill prisoner, sued the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office and other county employees, claiming they failed to provide him with adequate mental health care and abused him. The 31-year-old, who suffers from psychosis, eventually gouged out his own eyes; in ...
by Ed Lyon
A tide of complaints has surfaced around Florida-based Trinity Services Group, one of the largest food service providers to correctional facilities in the nation. At issue is the provision of adequate, nutritious and healthy meals, since one study has found prisoners are six times more likely to ...
by Ed Lyon
California is getting serious about reversing its long history of mass incarceration. From a 2008 state supreme court ruling that abolished parole denials based on the seriousness and nature of the offense to a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering California to reduce its prison population, the ...
by Ed Lyon
The City of Adelanto in San Bernardino County, California owns a detention center – not a prison – according to Pablo Paez, a spokesman for the GEO Group, a private prison firm. “The ICE Processing Centers operated by our company are very different than local jails and ...
by Ed Lyon
Antonia Barrone of Albany, New York posed as an attorney from September 2012 to April 2017. She went by various male aliases, including Mario Vrendenburg, Antonio Barrone, Mario Stacchini, Mario Helems and Mark Vredenburg, and primarily targeted prisoners seeking legal representation for parole denials.
She defrauded over ...
by Ed Lyon
Data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), released in an August 2017 report, found that female prisoners are nine times more likely to have HIV than non-incarcerated women. With the total HIV-positive female population ...
by Matt Clarke and Ed Lyon
Global Tel*Link (GTL), one of the largest prison and jail phone service providers in the United States, has steadily expanded into other services that target corrections agencies. The telecom firm is now competing with Securus Technologies for a share of a lucrative and unregulated ...
