A fifteen-minute collect call from the Multnomah County jail in Portland, Oregon costs $2.35, billed to the party who accepts the call. Between May 2006 and April 2009 those calls generated $3.5 million in revenue for the jail’s phone service provider, Texas-based Securus Technologies, Inc., while the county’s 38% kickback ...
A joint audit/investigation by the New York State Comptroller and Inspector General uncovered a 17-year fraudulent scheme by the former director of the New York Department of Correctional Services (NYDOCS) Food Production Center. Between 1992 and August 2008 the Center’s director bilked the state out of $497,452.61, though he and ...
A rash of detainee deaths at the King County Correctional Facility (KCCF) in Seattle, Washington prompted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to open an investigation into conditions at the jail on October 30, 2006. As the investigation continued so did the deaths, but that did not stop the DOJ ...
On December 2, 2009, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that a prison librarian was entitled to qualified immunity for denying a prisoner’s request to comb-bind his legal papers.
Oregon prisoner Frank Phillips intended to file a petition for writ of certiorari, challenging his conviction in the U.S. Supreme ...
A seemingly good idea before the housing market collapsed, the 525-bed, $58 million Wapato Jail has sat empty in Portland, Oregon since construction was completed in 2004. County taxpayers are paying approximately $5 million annually on debt service for the facility plus $400,000 to maintain the empty building each year. ...
An Oregon Assistant Attorney General (AAG) who defends against prisoners’ appeals in criminal cases was recently arrested for punching and strangling her wife; she entered treatment and pleaded guilty two weeks later.
On February 12, 2010, AAG Susan R. Gerber, 40, returned home to find that her wife of five ...
Four men who paid Oregon’s prison food services administrator $1.2 million in bribes to obtain state contracts have been sentenced to 3 months in prison for their role in the worst corruption case in Oregon’s history.
As previously reported in PLN, shortly after a January 10, 2007 raid by IRS ...
An ex-Oregon prison guard who resigned in 2007 was hired the following year as a “security technician” at the Oregon State Hospital (OSH). He was fired one month later after being accused of engaging in oral sex with a male co-worker in an OSH vehicle, at a cemetery, while on ...
Oregon state representative Greg Smith is up for reelection, and thus looking for a way to win over voters. So why not drop in on an Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) facility and engage in some tough-on-crime prisoner-bashing? That’s likely to get some votes, especially from members of the prison ...
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a prison guard was not entitled to qualified immunity for depriving a prisoner of 16 meals over a 23-day period.
In 2001, Ronald P. Foster was confined at California’s High Desert State Prison in Susanville. A rash of assaults on staff ...
