For decades, prison officials across the U.S. have lined their pockets with multi-million dollar kickbacks from telephone companies that are awarded lucrative prisoner phone service contracts. In doing so, they unwittingly created an “epidemic” that they are now desperately scrambling – and largely failing – to control. Namely, the excessive ...
“I murdered that man cold-bloodedly. I planned it, and I’m gonna do it again,” said Virginia state prisoner Robert Gleason, Jr., 40, after murdering his cellmate, Harvey Gray Watson, Jr. “Someone needs to stop it. The only way to stop me is to put me on death row.”
Watson was ...
A troubling investigative report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri (ACLU-EM) has exposed a culture of abuse, corruption and cover-ups at the City Justice Center and the Medium Security Institution in St. Louis (CJC/MSI).
The most damning evidence came from six current and former guards whose identities ...
Throughout the 1990s, “Supermax” prisons and control units – commonly called Security Housing Units (SHUs) or Intensive Management Units (IMUs) – sprang up across the nation. Between 1995 and 2000 the general prison population increased by 28 percent, but according to a study by the Commission on Safety and Abuse ...
On May 13, 2010, Oregon jail guard Darin L. Fox was charged with having sexual contact with female prisoners. He was arrested and booked into the Clackamas County Jail, where he had worked since 1998. He was then released on his own recognizance.
While investigating complaints of sexual misconduct involving ...
The executive director of a non-profit transition center for federal prisoners was fired after allegations of embezzlement surfaced in June 2010.
The Oregon Halfway House (OHH) is a 75-bed transition center for federal prisoners located in Portland, Oregon. The program “provides job placement assistance, counseling, and a safe and drug-free ...
The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) and several of its contractors violated state law, according to two audit reports issued by the Comptroller of the Treasury’s Division of State Audit.
According to an April 2009 financial and compliance audit, the TDOC failed to generate employee separation notices within 24 hours ...
Washington Commission Finds AT&T is Prison Collect Call Provider
by Mark Wilson
On April 21, 2010, the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission (Commission) handed the dedicated loved ones of PLN’s tenacious Editor an important victory in their long-running challenge of prison collect call rates.
In 2000, Zuraya Wright, Sandy ...
In December 2009, a federal jury in Portland, Oregon awarded a hearing-impaired jail prisoner $500 for a beating inflicted by guards during the booking process. The defendants also paid attorney’s fees of $27,500.
On September 11, 2006, Michael Evans was arrested and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center (MCDC). ...
Prisoners are not exempt from the nation’s unemployment crisis. Since 2008, over 7,000 federal prisoners have been laid off, and up to 800 more are expected to lose their jobs in the coming months according to Federal Prison Industries (FPI).
FPI, also known as UNICOR, is a government corporation created ...
