by Matt Clarke
On July 10, 2020, the FourthCircuit Court of Appeals vacated a district court’s granting of summary judgment to Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) officials in a federal civil rights lawsuit over lack of due process in holding a prisoner in supermax solitary indefinitely.
Elbert Smith, a Rastafarian ...
by Matt Clarke
Once darlings of Wall Street, CoreCivic and GEO Group — the nation’s two biggest publicly traded private prison companies — have suffered a precipitous drop in stock prices, following a pressure campaign by foes of mass incarceration that has resulted in divestment of their stock by major ...
by Matt Clarke
In late 2020, the Board of Commissioners in Gallia County, Ohio, locked in $12.8 million in tax-exempt bonds to fund construction of a new jail. The move comes after two federal lawsuits were filed the previous summer over incidents at the current aging and overcrowded facility in ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 21, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the proper standard of review to be applied to facially discriminatory prison regulations challenged as violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause is intermediate scrutiny, the standard previously applied to similar claims ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 5, 2020, the Idaho Supreme Court held that state prisoners have no right to paid or unpaid employment despite a state law stating that the board of correction “shall provide for the care, maintenance and employment of all prisoners,” Idaho Code § 20-209.
Idaho state ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 21, 2020, a New York federal court issued an order denying the state summary judgment on some claims arising from a woman’s visit to a prison that resulted in her prosecution for bringing her seizure and pain medications into the prison.
Lisa Bobbit arrived at ...
by Matt Clarke
A Texas city has used jail prisoners to move bodies of COVID-19 victims into refrigerated trailers that served as temporary morgues, paying them $2 an hour to do the dangerous and emotionally taxing work.
In November 2020, a surge of COVID-19 cases overwhelmed the health care system ...
By Matt Clarke
According to a report by the United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics published in August 2020, the number of people in the U.S. under carceral supervision—prison, jail, probation, or parole—declined 2.1% from 2017 to 2018. This continued a more than decade-long decline in the ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 26, 2020, federal prisoners aided by civil rights groups and a major international law firm, filed a class action lawsuit challenging the handling of a COVID-19 outbreak by the Bureau of Prison (BOP) at the Federal Correctional Complex (FCC) at Butner, North Carolina.
With 27 ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 19, 2020, the parents of a prisoner who committed suicide a year earlier at a privately operated Tennessee prison filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Nashville-based CoreCivic, alleging the company’s employees ignored threats and attempts by the prisoner to kill himself as well as ...
