by Ed Lyon
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, South Dakota’s state prisoner population declined by a self-reported 11 percent as of late-September. The Associated Press and The Marshall Project showed an 8 percent nationwide average decline in state and federal felony prisoners during the same reporting period. ...
by Ed Lyon
One of the late great singer Karen Carpenter’s hit songs was Bless the Beasts and the Children, wherein she lamented that neither has choice nor voice. Such was the case with young Cyntoia Brown, who found herself being trafficked into a life of prostitution in Nashville ...
by Ed Lyon
On June 5, 2020, as Louisiana entered the second phase of its reopening program following shutdowns ordered to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic, the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) suspended a panel it had appointed less than two months earlier to consider state prisoners for ...
by Ed Lyon
Anyone who has done time in a jail or prison has seen that one lone person, or sometimes two, who sits at a dayroom table for hours on end with pencil and paper. A few have colored pencils and some ink pens. They produce beautiful greeting cards ...
by Ed Lyon
In precolonial days, U.S. jails and prisons were nothing like today’s in concept, practical use or design. Lengthy sentences and pretrial detentions for those pending trial were the exception rather than the rule. Back then, they were a place where debtors were confined until they paid what ...
by Ed Lyon
Anyone even vaguely familiar with prison operations know how quick prison officials are to allege any contraband found inside a prison had to have been brought in by a visitor.
Investigators with the Tennessee Department of Corrections’ (TDOC) Office of Investigation & Conduct and Internal Affairs, working ...
by Ed Lyon
In late July 2020, about 30 protesters stood all day in the rain in Bailey Park near the Forsyth County Detention Center (FCDC) in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to demand answers and action from Sheriff Bobby F. Kimbrough, Jr., and District Attorney Jim O’Neill in the death ...
by Ed Lyon
Whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up, people usually think of Texas, the capital of capital punishment in the United States. [PLN, November 2018, p. 15] However, even the death merchants in the nation’s most carceral, retributive states have paused in their rush ...
by Ed Lyon
On March 24, 2020, Darell Chancellor and Darrell Richmond were ordered to be released from prison by a Wayne County, Michigan district judge who vacated their drug convictions. Chancellor had served nearly eight years, Richmond almost a year, before being freed through exoneration judgments.
Wayne County prosecutor ...
by Ed Lyon
Texas may have bragging rights for the largest state prison system in the United States, but California still has the single largest female prison in the country. According to attorney Alison Hardy of California’s Prison Law Office, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is bound ...
