by Jacob Barrett
Former prisoner Alex Tretbar won PEN America’s first-place award for poetry in September 2022 for his poem “Variations on an Undisclosed Location.” Tretbar, 33, penned the poem during his five-year incarceration with the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
While incarcerated, Tretbar worked …
by Jacob Barrett
According to an October 2022 report by the New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the state’s prisons and jails have a drug overdose rate “double the rate for the overall United States population.”
Conditions in New York City’s Rikers Island have deteriorated to the …
by Jacob Barrett
On September 1, 2022, the federal courtfor the Western District of Oklahoma granted dismissal to plaintiffs in a suit against Oklahoma County, after they agreed to a $1.1 million settlement in the death of a detainee killed by guards at the county jail in April 2017. According …
by Jacob Barrett
On September 28, 2022, the Supreme Court of California declined to hear an appeal to a lower court’s decision that shrugged off differences in program credits available to state prisoners held in prisons and those held in local jails. That left standing a decision by the First …
by Jacob Barrett
According to a report published by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) on December 15, 2022, for-profit telecom companies are using loopholes in the law to price-gouge prisoners and their families on the cost of phone calls and video visits.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has slowly set …
by Jacob Barrett
On June 27, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Illinois prison officials who delayed a prisoner’s appendicitis treatment until he needed emergency surgery. Incredibly, though acknowledging the treatment he received was subpar, the Court said it did not rise …
by Jacob Barrett
On August 25, 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of a challenge to the state’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Mexico prisons. Though not entirely agreeing with the lower court’s reasoning, the Court affirmed the result because none of the named prisoner plaintiffs …
by Jacob Barrett
In 2018, the State of Washington reached a settlement to reform its forensic health system. [See: PLN, Aug. 2017, p.22; May 2019, p.54.] As part of the settlement, the State agreed to follow the district court’s order “to achieve legislative changes to reduce the number of …
by Jacob Barrett
On September 26, 2022, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sitting en banc vacated a district court’s order denying a preliminary injunction to the federal government and private prison giant GEO Group, Inc. that would prevent California from enforcing a ban on all …
by Jacob Barret
In October 2022, a jury in the federal Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania awarded $400,000 in compensatory damages to former Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) guard Jeffery Kengerski in his federal employment rights case against jail officials.
Kengerski worked as a guard at the jail beginning …
