by Matt Clarke
The untimely death of Kalief Browder at age 22 sparked a nationwide movement to enact bail reform and end the use of segregation for young detainees. Both President Obama and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio cited Browder’s suicide – after he served two years ...
by Matt Clarke
It is unknown whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, 566 U.S. 318 (2012), which upheld the practice of strip searching jail prisoners absent individualized suspicion of illegal activity and regardless of the severity of their ...
by Matt Clarke
In January 2019, the Dallas Morning News reported that Louisiana-based private prison company LaSalle Corrections, which operates eight jails in Texas, employs a former Texas Ranger whose son oversees that law enforcement agency. The Texas Rangers are responsible for investigating deaths at seven of the eight ...
by Matt Clarke
Iowa’s electronic database of registered voters, I-VOTERS, contains the names of about 69,000 convicted felons who are barred from casting ballots. But in June 2016, Iowa’s Secretary of State found that 2,591 of those names belonged to people who were not in fact felons. ...
by Matt Clarke
A memorandum from the House Subcommittee on National Security, released on January 2, 2019, concluded that misconduct by senior leadership in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) “appears to be largely tolerated or ignored altogether.”
The committee reviewed thousands of pages of case files and “was ...
by Matt Clarke
The second time was the charm. On November 6, 2018, Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state’s constitution that abolished all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude, after rejecting a similar ballot measure in 2016. [See: PLN, Dec. 2018, p.48; Nov. 2017, ...
by Matt Clarke
As previously reported in PLN, the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) closed the Tamms Correctional Center as part of a cost-cutting consolidation of state prisons pushed by then-Governor Pat Quinn in 2013. [See: PLN, June 2013, p.1].
Since then the supermax facility has remained vacant, ...
by Matt Clarke
Using a type of contract known as an Intergovernmental Service Agreement (ISA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has partnered with local governments to place immigrant detainees in unused jail beds or detention centers built specifically for that purpose, creating a network of facilities that are often ...
by Matt Clarke
In a rare move, in December 2018 the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) transferred a pre-operative male-to-female transgender prisoner from a men’s prison to a women’s facility in order to conform with the prisoner’s gender identity. A similar, equally rare move was made by Massachusetts prison ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 30, 2018, in a substitute opinion, the Supreme Court of Idaho held that a trial court erred when it required a defendant to show he was prejudiced when the prosecution introduced evidence obtained from the seizure of notes from the defendant’s jail cell that ...
