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Articles by Kevin Bliss

Report: New Jersey Women’s Prison Promoted Culture of Abuse

After years of allegations of sexual assault against prisoners, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ and the USAO initiated an investigation April 26, 2018 under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). The Act was designed to protect prisoners from facilities exhibiting a pattern or practice that resulted in violations of the prisoners’ civil rights. The report investigated 70 separate instances of alleged sexual abuse at EMCFW over several years, with many guards and employees being charged, suspended or fired. Between 2016 and 2019, seven EMCFW guards and “one civilian employee” had been convicted or pleaded guilty ...

Offensive Facebook Posts Cost Wisconsin Warden His Job

Schneiter posted two memes on Facebook last July, which were reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One compared a Muslim woman and child, both in black burkas, to bags of trash. The other equated the flying of the gay pride rainbow flag with the flying of the Confederate flag. After the newspaper story was published, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes tweeted that Schneiter should not have compared Muslims to garbage and that he was the one who had “to be taken out.”

Schneiter, represented by attorney Nate Cade, said the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not establish just cause to fire him. Its investigation into the incident was not thorough, objective or fair, he said, and the postings did not represent his personal views. He claimed he was simply stimulating discussion and debate on the topics. He pointed to his posting of the gay pride flag at the Kenosha Correctional Center in response to Governor Tony Ever’s declaration of June as Pride Month as evidence in support of ...

Mental Health and Prison Systems in Major Need of Reform

Bao said that although driven by noble ideas, governments failed to replace mental health institutions with an immediate effective alternative, resulting in conditions that contributed to higher incarceration rates. People with mental illness are 4.5 times more likely to be arrested than others and their proportional presence in prisons has exceeded the rate of the general population by a factor of somewhere between three and six. In addition, prisons and jails do not have the mental health facilities or personnel necessary to properly treat these individuals. Bao called this a pseudo-criminalization of illness.

The report stated that the system provoked great ethical concerns. The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights Director Scott Allen described it as counter-therapeutic. He said, “This is the wrong environment to try and treat people with mental illness. Very likely isolating people from their outside community and confining them to ...

Consultants Advising Rich on Prison Life

Weinstein, 67, joins a ...

Prison Art is Rehabilitation

The charity and social enterprise has ...

Kansas Leads Country in Female Incarceration Rates

A report put out by the Prison Policy Initiative and the American Civil Liberties Campaign for Smart Justice in ...

Court Orders South Carolina Prisons to Move Forward with Hepatitis C Treatment

“This action today is going to save 1,184 lives,” ...

Captain at Jail Where Epstein Died Offered New Position of Authority; Warden Remains on Desk Duty

Darden, 48, was a jail captain ...

Commitment to New Jersey’s “Special Treatment Unit” a Potential Death Sentence

Sex offenders who had completed their criminal sentences in the state of New Jersey were being civilly committed to a facility that had a higher death rate due to COVID-19 than any prison in the United States as of early June.

The Sexually Violent Predator Act ...

Families Accuse Arkansas Prison of Poor Communication on COVID-19 Prisoners