The crime rate in Texas prisons has remained about the same despite a decrease in prisoner population of about 9,000 over the past ten years.
Since 2009, 3,001 Texas prisoners and 584 Texas prison guards have been charged with crimes that occurred within the prison system. The most charges were ...
The Alaskan state legislature held a hearing in July 2014 after five Alaskan prisoners died between April and June of that year.
According to Joe Schmidt, director of the Alaska Department of Corrections, the 2010 national prisoner death rate was .217% and the death rate for Alaska was .23%, putting ...
A report released by the Osborne Association found American prisons facing a crisis of aging in which an increasing percentage of older prisoners who are at low risk for recidivism are driving up the cost of running prisons while parole officials continue to deny release due to the nature of ...
People are escaping from the Austin County Jail in Texas. Not the prisoners, but the jailers. Low salaries and a lack of overtime compensation have driven jail staff away and led Austin County Sheriff Jack Brandes to close a new annex to the jail with 50 of the jail's beds, ...
Inefficiencies in the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and the state’s Parole Board have resulted in hundreds of prisoners being kept in prison long beyond their parole release dates. The cost of incarcerating each prisoner during this so-called “in-house parole” is $99.31 per day, and with only 50% of New ...
An interesting collaboration between medical and law professionals, under the leadership of University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel R. Gross, led to the application of medical statistical analysis to exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners, in order to estimate the number of innocent defendants who receive the death penalty. The report, ...
The word “first” was applied to Craig M. Watkins multiple times after his election to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in 2006. He was the county’s first black D.A., the first D.A. who had been a public defender before being elected prosecutor and the first D.A. to establish a ...
In the 1990s, high crime rates in public housing – especially the infamous “projects” – led many cities to adopt a one-strike policy that banned anyone with a felony conviction from public housing. Now, with declining crime rates and the demolition of many massive housing projects, some cities are re-evaluating ...
In 2012, the Hamilton County Jail in southwest Ohio was the first jail in the state to purchase a SecurPass full-body digital scanner, using a $243,000 federal grant. Thereafter, prisoners at the facility were subjected to scans in addition to strip searches during intake. Jail officials reported the device revealed ...
With construction costs of $840 million and a capacity to provide care to almost 3,000 patients, California’s new medical prison near Stockton is the largest and most expensive in the nation. Unfortunately, that expense has not resulted in a smooth-running operation; instead, waste and mismanagement have occurred as prisoners’ basic ...
