by Keith Sanders
On June 27, 2022, the last of a trio of private prison employees — plus two immigration attorneys — who were sentenced in a bribery scandal at two Texas prisons holding federal detainees surrendered to U.S. Marshals to begin serving his sentence.
Damian Ortiz, 33, a former ...
by David Reutter and Keith Sanders
On July 29, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of Mississippi took the dramatic step of placing Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center (RDC) under federal receivership.
A series of crises dates back to a 2012 prisoner riot at the 28-year-old, 594-bed jail ...
by Keith Sanders
In January 2022, the Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began requiring the state’s 5,000 prison guards to don body-worn cameras. Supplied by Axon, the “body cams,” which complement over 1,000 security cameras already installed in Ohio’s 28 state prisons, will cost almost $7 million the first ...
by Keith Sanders
Mass incarceration disenfranchises millions in America, especially the economically disadvantaged who make up the majority of those incarcerated. Though the rationale for barring felons from voting is multifaceted, one argument is that a bloc of voting felons would somehow skew election outcomes. However, a study published in ...
by Keith Sanders
On August 5, 2022, calling the medical neglect of a mentally ill detainee who refused treatment “objectively reasonable,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court’s denial of qualified immunity (QI) to defendants in a suit brought by the family of a ...
by Kevin W. Bliss, Matt Clarke, Ashleigh N. Dye and Keith Sanders
As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes from the headlines, its full effect on prisoners and detainees is coming into clearer view. One of the first glimpses was provided in a December 2021 report by the federal Department of Justice ...
by Keith Sanders
As a federal lawsuit proceeds against Kentucky’s Franklin County filed by a former jail detainee forced into sex by a former guard, a state court judge who found the man criminally liable for the detainee’s sexual assault gave him an unusual choice at his sentencing on January ...
by Keith Sanders
On April 21, 2022, the Massachusetts Parole Board voted unanimously to grant parole to state prisoner William Allen, nine days after taking another unanimous vote to parole another Bay State prisoner, Thomas Koonce, on April 12, 2022. Both men were serving sentences for first-degree murder, and their ...
by Keith Sanders
On July 15, 2022, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for California’s Los Angeles County reported that the county’s juvenile detention facilities remain out of compliance with the requirements of a settlement agreement reached with the state Attorney General in January 2021, after an investigation by ...
by Keith Sanders and Benjamin Tschirhart
When a caregiver fails to seek medical attention for a person during an emergency, inflicting instead additional pain and suffering and looking on while that person dies, a reasonable person might conclude that the caretaker has committed criminal neglect. In fact, on October 22, ...
