by Jayson Hawkins
A violent disturbance was reported inside Georgia’s Ware State Prison in early August 2020. A prisoner reporting from inside the prison on an illegal cellphone cited health issues, three meals a day consisting only of cheese and peanut butter sandwiches, and a lack of electricity as reasons ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Former Vermont prison Superintendent Ed Adams has found himself the subject of repeated media scrutiny over the last few years, and his story is illustrative of the problems that surround prison reform, public records availability, and bridging the often jarring disconnect between societal norms and prison reality. ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Mass incarceration has long been recognized as a serious and abiding problem in the American social landscape. Historically, mass incarceration has been attributed to a combination of the war on drugs, politically driven harsh sentencing, and the growth of a prison industrial complex. Recently, however, as arrest ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A recent audit at an Allegheny county jail revealed a series of shortcomings by a food service contractor tasked with providing meals to prisoners. Florida-based contractor Trinity Services Group was paid $3.5 million to provide three meals a day to prisoners at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center ...
by Jayson Hawkins
California became the first state in the nation to roll back laws that allowed for the collection of fees and fines from people released from prison or jails. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Families Over Fees Act into law in late-September 2020. The law ends the collection ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As the extradition trial of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continued in London in September 2020, a series of witnesses were brought forth to describe the conditions Assange would face if extradited to the U.S.
Assange is under a 17-count indictment in the U.S. for violations of the ...
by Jayson Hawkins
An August 2020 wedding in Millinocket, Maine, turned into the state’s largest super spreader event for the coronavirus. Within the next two months, over 170 cases and eight deaths could be traced back to the reception at the Big Moose Inn. The Maine Center for Diseases Control ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A series of assaults by a group of prisoners on convicted sex offenders was carried out with the consent and assistance of 10 officers at an unnamed California correctional facility. After an investigation, the prison’s warden determined that the actions of six of the guards involved were egregious enough for them to be fired, yet only four were let go before attorneys for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) halted the proceedings.
The attorneys argued that the allegations against the officers were substantiated only by the testimony of prisoners and that evidence of that sort would not hold up before the State Personnel Board.
A parallel investigation by the state Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which is tasked with overseeing the conduct of corrections department employees, concluded on January 10, 2020 that the evidence in this particular case was adequate to pursue the termination of the six guards identified by the warden. Inspector General Roy Wesley, however, expressed concern that it might set a dangerous precedent when it came to firing officers based solely on the word of prisoners.
Dana Simas, a spokesperson for CDCR, disagreed with the assertion that the department was dismissive ...
by Jayson Hawkins
An internal investigation conducted by the inspector general’s office of the Department of the Interior found a surprising lack of procedures or policies governing the use of federal prisoners by the National Park Service (NPS).
According to the report: At one unnamed national park—the prisoners, whose criminal histories included firearms and drug related convictions—were found with contraband after they had been left working unsupervised in a park campground for about two hours. NPS employees were overseeing the work detail program without any formal training or guidance, which led to inmates gaining access to contraband such as tools and knives.
The investigation also uncovered that the rules relating to prisoner work details varied from one park to the next and required no approval beyond the local level. No structure for oversight has been in place from the Interior Department.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt responded to the report by putting a temporary hold on allowing prisoners to work in national parks effective April 2, 2020.
“I hereby order and direct NPS to immediately cease the use of prison labor,” stated Bernhardt. “Any agreements in place regarding the same are hereby rendered null and void.”
Bernhardt noted that NPS officials ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Communication between attorneys and their clients has long been protected by federal law. Technology, however, has changed the way people in the legal field communicate in the span of a generation — a pace that has left legal protections behind.
“It’s common attorney sense, a bedrock of American law: when your attorney communicates with you, that’s supposed to be privileged,” said Jumana Musa, director of the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).
Common sense or not, that principle has not stopped federal prosecutors from prying into electronic communications to pursue convictions. The practice dates to at least 2011 when an incarcerated former Pennsylvania state senator’s emails to his attorneys were used as evidence to lengthen his sentence.
An assistant U.S. attorney in New York’s Eastern District warned defense lawyers in June 2014 that such communications were fair game, writing that “emails between inmates and their attorneys ... are not privileged, and thus the office intends to review all emails.”
A bipartisan bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives on Sept. 21, 2020, seeks to end this practice by barring emails from prisoners to their lawyers from being monitored.
The Effective Assistance of Counsel in ...
