The McNeil Island Correction Center (MICC), located on McNeil Island near Steilacoom, Washington, has a long history of hiring misfits in its medical and psychological departments. In order to secure such a position it almost seems as though one must have drug or alcohol problems, a long history of incompetence ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 3
The cover story in this issue of PLN , "Washington's Island of Deviant Doctors," is the result of a lengthy investigation into the provision of medical care to prisoners and civil commitment "residents" at the McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) in Steilacoom, Washington. PLN reviewed thousands of pages of documents ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 7
On April 20, 2001, a Denver jury awarded former Colorado prisoner Arthur Nieto, 44, damages totalling $2.7 million in a medical neglect suit against Colorado prison officials and medical staff. In 1991, while imprisoned at the Delta County Correctional Facility, Nieto contracted a sinus infection. Despite repeated requests for medical ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 7
A federal district court in New York has ordered a new trial in a civil rights excessive use of force suit. Prisoner Milton Ruffin filed suit against Sullivan Correctional Facility guard Van Fuller for an incident that occurred on October 19, 1998. Ruffin was confined in the Special Housing Unit ...
The recent attacks of the World Trade Center towers (WTC) in New York City and the Pentagon have filled the news. Largely ignored by the corporate media has been the federal government's treatment of people convicted in previous Muslim terrorist attacks, such as the 1993 WTC bombing. It is safe ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 10
In early April 2001, the Virginia Attorney General's office announced it had agreed to settle a wrongful death suit for $1.2 million. In the December 1999 issue of PLN we reported the death of Wallace Dandridge, 16, a developmentally disabled child at the Oak Ridge Juvenile Correctional Center in Richmond, ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 11
In April and May 2001, school children were strip searched while touring a jail in Washington, D.C. A lawsuit seeking $4 million for each of six girls and one boy is forthcoming.
D.C. schools routinely schedule these tours for children with behavioral problems. The goal is to scare them into ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 11
Ten Washington, D.C., prison guards were charged with conspiracy to smuggle cash and twoway pagers to prisoners in federal indictments unsealed April 31, 2001. The guards, nine of whom work for Corrections Corporation of America, a private company operating the Correctional Treatment Facility in Southeast Washington, were caught in an ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 12
AU.S. district court found that Hawaii state prison physicians were deliberately indifferent to a prisoner's medical needs and were not entitled to qualified immunity. Raymond Kenney filed suit in state court alleging denial of medication to control his seizures while he was a Hawaii state prisoner. Kenney sued the State ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 12
The federal district court in South Dakota has dissolved a state prison conditions consent decree and approved a class action settlement, ending two decades of litigation.
State prisoners filed a §1983 suit challenging prison conditions, certified as a class action in 1982. The court found the conditions at the South ...
Blind Ohio Prisoner Spends Months In Strip Cell
by Ronald Young
An investigation by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) revealed that a blind prisoner at the Orient Correctional Institution in Pickaway County was subjected to three months of continuous isolation in a strip cell.
Willie Thomas, a ...
by Rose Braz, Esq.
A Kern County, California, supperior court judge has barred the state from proceeding with plans to build a $335 million, 5,160 bed maximum-security prison slated for Delano. The groundbreaking ruling came in an environmental lawsuit filed by Critical Resistance, the National Lawyers Guild Prison Law Project, ...
Mississippi Taxpayers Fund Welfare Payments To Private Prisons
by Ronald A. Young
Mississippi taxpayers will pay about $6 million a year to private and regional prisons for "ghost inmates" under a bill the legislature approved on March 26, 2001. The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) funding bill includes a provision ...
On April 15, 2001, the scene at the Dartmouth House of Correction in Massachusetts could have been lifted straight from the pages of a medieval novel. Prisoners stormed the woodshop, armed themselves with boards, then set the shop afire. While one group laid siege to the courtyard another group scaled ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 18
A federal district court in Oklahoma has denied summary judgment against a pretrial detainee's failure to protect and deliberate indifference to medical needs claims.
On September 5, 1995, John Winton was booked into the Tulsa County Jail on shooting charges that were later dismissed. Twelve days later he complained about ...
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) ordered MCI Telecommunications Corp. (MCI) to offset $522,458 in overcharges it made between June 14, 1996, and July 12, 1999, on MCI California Maximum Security Calls (i.e., California prisoner collect calls) by proportionately reducing the cost it charges for future such calls during its ...
In Charlottesville, Virginia, Mary Smith, a Black working class woman, got fired from her job at the University of Virginia Medical Center. So did eight other workers. They all had prior felony convictions. Ms. Smith's was for $200 of bad checks. Like four of those fired she had not hidden ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 21
Prison escapes are common in Colombia. Prisoners often buy the help of guards and administrators and are often able to outgun their jailers. In the case that follows they had concerted help from the outside. It is not the first time that rebels outside have used such tactics to free ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 22
Holding that the action was not time-barred and otherwise stated an actionable claim, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a prisoner’s pro se action which claimed that California state prisons practiced racial segregation in housing prisoners. The Court upheld the dismissal ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 22
A New York federal district court has awarded summary judgment to a prisoner who held agnostic beliefs and was forced to participate in a prison religious-based substance abuse program. New York prisoner Troy Alexander sued officials at Cayuga Correctional Facility under 42 U.S.C. §1983.
Because Alexander had previosly violated prison ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 23
Cell Search, Property Seizure Suit Set For Trial
A federal district court in Delaware held that summary judgment was not appropriate to decide if a prisoner's cell had been illegally searched and his papers improperly seized. Michael Jordan, a Delaware prisoner, filed suits against three Delaware prison guards who allegedly ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that a prisoner could not maintain an access to the courts claim based on an action that has been dismissed as frivolous, but the plaintiff can proceed on a legal assistance retaliation claim. In doing so, the ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 24
A federal district court in New York has ordered a new trial in a civil rights excessive use of force suit. Prisoner Milton Ruffin filed suit against Sullivan Correctional Facility guard Van Fuller for an incident that occurred on October 19, 1998. Ruffin was confined in the Special Housing Unit ...
by W. Wisely
In reaction to bad publicity, lawsuits, and legislative hearings following a record number of fatal shootings of unarmed male prisoners, staged fights, and the sexual abuse and medical neglect of women prisoners, California established the allegedly independent Office of Inspector General within the state's Youth and Adult ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 25
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a federal prisoner's due process rights were violated when he was placed in segregation without notice or a hearing and kept there for some 514 days. The Court also held that prison officials were not entitled to qualified immunity from ...
California is short on energy. The state has suffered repeated Stage Three power alerts and rolling power outages. Without authorization by the Legislature, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) may be trying to alleviate the crisis. And it seems at least one warden is locking his prisons down and shutting ...
Book Review: Power, Politics, & Crime
by William J. Chambliss, Westview Press, 1999
Review by Rick Card
"There is ... a huge chasm," says William Chambliss in his book, Power, Politics, & Crime , "between the reality of crime, the public's perception of it, and the information being disseminated to ...
by Mumia Abu Jamal
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed&"
U.S. Constitution, 6 th Amendment
It has been almost two decades since a Philadelphia ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 29
The Supreme Court of Alaska reversed a jury verdict and a $2.4 million damage award in favor of a former prisoner who was injured when he fell down a stairway.
In February 1994, Carry Johnson was returning to his cell at the Ketchikan Correctional Center. As he reached the landing ...
Loaded on
Nov. 15, 2001
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2001, page 30
Alabama: In April 2001, four unnamed guards at the Morgan County jail in Decatur were fired for leaving their posts on April Fools Day to play jokes on each other. The jokes included smearing shaving cream on each other, covering their cars with toilet paper and writing on each other's ...
