Exposure to Radon in Prisons May Be Functioning as a Form of Mass Capital Punishment

by Anthony Moffa

I can’t breathe.

–Eric Garner, George Floyd, and at least seventy others

The thought of radioactive gas in the night air in the place you lay your head is the stuff ...

by Paul Wright

This is the last issue of Prison Legal News for 2021 and it is ending pretty much where it started in terms of widespread COVID outbreaks in prisons and jails across the country. The good news is there are now vaccines available which appear to mitigate if ...

by Chuck Sharman

Under a pair of consent judgments filed in federal court on October 29 and November 1, 2021, troubled former Delaware Department of Corrections (DOC) health care contractor Connections Community Support Programs (CCSP) agreed to pay the federal and state governments a total of $15,379,091.60 to settle claims ...

by Ed Lyon

Regardless of what people without first-hand knowledge of prisons or detention centers believe, prisoners are generally not the blood-thirsty, brutal animals depicted in the media. In fact, especially in the face of SWAT-styled rapid response teams used within institutions, prisoners are mostly hopeless, helpless, often powerless individuals. ...

A panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit agreed with the dismissal of an appeal brought by former ICE detainees held by CoreCivic at their Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico. The ruling was released March 5, 2021 in a case first filed in 2019.

Former ICE detainees ...

by Keith Sanders

On August 31, 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division released a report detailing its investigation concerning the conditions inside San Luis Obispo County Jail.

The findings of the report, conducted pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), 42, U.S.C. § 1997, ...

In a landmark case, a federal jury decided against the GEO Group for paying $1 dollar a day wages to immigrant detainees at its privately-operated prison in Washington.

The facility in question is the Northwest ICE Processing Center (formerly the Northwest Detention Center) in Tacoma located on a toxic waste ...

by Eli Hager, The Marshall Project

Six years ago, Ashland University, a small Christian college in the north-central region of Ohio known as the “Buckeye Bible Belt,” was in trouble. The school was $70 million in debt, was given a “junk” rating by the investors’ service Moody’s, and was later cited by state officials for transcript manipulation, records show.

But under Donald Trump’s Department of Education, led by Betsy DeVos, Ashland’s fortunes have turned around. After being selected to participate in a federal financial aid initiative for incarcerated people, the university’s correctional education program was able to spread to more than 100 prisons and jails in 13 states, from Louisiana to Minnesota. Since 2017, it has enrolled nearly as many new students behind bars as make up its entire undergraduate student body, bringing in almost $30 million over that time period, according to school records as well as data provided by an Education Department spokesman.

No other college has been allowed to use federal funding to expand so widely and rapidly in correctional facilities over the past four years, nine prison education experts said in interviews. Despite Ashland’s relative obscurity, the school now appears to have a bigger footprint in ...

by Dale Chappell

Imagine being able to “hide” your money in an account where the government supposedly has no access to it and cannot force you to pay any court-ordered financial obligations, such as child support or restitution to victims of your crimes. That’s what critics are saying federal prisoners ...

by David M. Reutter

A California federal district court approved a $53 million settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging women held by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) were subjected to “highly invasive body cavity searches” from March 5, 2008 to January 1, 2015. [See: PLN, Dec ...

A federal district court judge looks at the history and impact of keeping prisoners from the polls

by Jayson Hawkins

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, legislatures across the nation responded to claims of election fraud by proposing a flurry of election laws that seem to be aimed at ...

A staffer says false data in a 2018 audit of the Maui jail hid deviations from staffing requirements under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

by Kevin Dayton, Honolulu Civil Beat

State officials submitted data for a federal audit of the Maui jail in 2018 that dramatically understated the number ...

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) sued the Lincoln County, Wisconsin, Jail (LCJ) alleging its mail policies violate HRDC’s First Amendment rights by banning all publications. The lawsuit also alleges Fourteenth Amendment violations for failing to provide due process when censoring HRDC’s publications and for its vague policy.

HRDC first ...

by David M. Reutter

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a grant of summary judgment to a jail nurse, holding that it was clearly established at the time of the events relevant to the lawsuit under review that an arrestee being booked into jail had a constitutional right to ...

The Bureau of Prisons has piloted a program that can give authorities “huge secret intelligence into the public sender of postal mail.”

by Lauren Gill, originally published by The Intercept, September 26, 2021

In a Pennsylvania federal prison, Joe used to trace his girlfriend’s handwriting with his finger as the faint ...

by David M. Reutter

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that “the entry of a permanent injunction is necessary to prevent a preliminary injunction from expiring by operation of law after 90 days under the PLRA’s (Prison Litigation Reform Act) ‘unless’ clause.” That holding resulted in the Court vacating ...

by Douglas Ankney 

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that an illegal mandatory sentence of life without parole (“LWOP”) imposed upon a juvenile undermined the validity of a later conviction for assault by a life prisoner predicated on the LWOP.

In 1970, James Henry Cobbs was 17 years old when ...

by Douglas Ankney

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with Plaintiff Craig Shipp that a district court erred when it failed to rely on federal law in determining the admissibility of the testimony of Shipp’s expert, but in this case the error was harmless.

Shipp was ...

by Casey J. Bastian

William Figueria was imprisoned at Butner, a federal facility in North Carolina. Figueria was 63-years-old, and was serving a 30-month sentence for Distribution of Cocaine Base. On April 20, 2020, Figueria died as a result of his significant underlying medical conditions which included chronic hepatitis C, ...

by Casey Bastian

On November 8, 2016, California voters went to the polls to consider whether the Control, Regulate, and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act, known as Proposition 64 (Prop64), should be approved. Prop64 was easily passed with voters clearly supporting the legalization of recreational marijuana. Medicinal use in ...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida has filed a second public records lawsuit against the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) to obtain the formulas used to calculate a prisoner’s release date. The first resulted in information supplied, as well as several case studies, but no formulas. The DOC ...

by Keith Sanders

Dr. Garrett Felber, a history professor at the University of Mississippi (UM), has distinguished himself over the years as a vocal critic of America’s racist criminological and penological institutions. At conferences and public speaking engagements, he has decried mass incarceration, called for the abolition of prisons, and ...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a strip search of a prison visitor without first giving them the option of the leaving the prison was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The court, however, granted the defendants qualified immunity because that right was not clearly established at the time ...

by Keith Sanders

Illicit drugs pose a serious problem for both prisoners and officials inside America’s prisons and jails. To combat smuggling, many state and federal prisons use field test kits to evaluate substances introduced into the facilities. These kits allow prison officials to detect the presence of meth, amphetamines, ...

by Jayson Hawkins

The Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) surprised many critics with a June 2021 announcement of its intent to eliminate solitary confinement as it currently exists in the state prison system.

State Public Safety and Security Secretary Thomas Turco said in a statement that after a comprehensive review, ...

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that “an individual detained pursuant to civil sex offender confinement statute is not a ‘prisoner’ under the PLRA.” The court directed the clerk to reimburse the appellant all funds it has withdrawn from his account to pay the filing fee.

The court’s June ...

On November 1, 2021, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) agreed to a settlement under which the state agreed to pay $405,794.06 to the mother of a state prisoner murdered by his cellmate after guards who placed them together failed to notice that one’s gang affiliation posed a ...

On December 22, 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a decision of a lower court finding the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) acted in bad faith in responding to a request for records under the state’s Right-to-Know (RTK) Law, 65 P.S. §§ 67.101-67.3104, making the award of $118,458.37 in attorney ...

by Keith Sanders

In December, 2020, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) issued a Special Inspection Report detailing the Brazoria County jail’s failure to attend to the nutritional needs of a pregnant prisoner. The report cited the jail for not ensuring that pregnant prisoners are given meals appropriate to ...

by Jayson Hawkins

The New Jersey Department of Corrections had a policy of housing prisoners according to their gender assignment at birth, regardless of whether they are transgender or of any non-binary sexual orientation. As a result, when Sonia Doe (not her real name) was sentenced to prison, she was ...

A class action lawsuit alleges that the Salvation Army’s adult drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers and adult rehabilitation programs violate California law by failing to treat participants in those programs as employees.

The civil complaint was filed in a California Superior Court on May 7, 2021. Plaintiffs Justin Spillman, Devin ...

by Chuck Sharman

A settlement was reached on May 11, 2021, in a censorship complaint filed in August 2020 against Sherburne County, Minnesota, and its Sheriff, Joel Brott, by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the Florida nonprofit that publishes Prison Legal News (PLN) and Criminal Legal News (CLN).

Under ...

by Jayson Hawkins

On the night of January 20, 2021, as the nation was buckling beneath the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a cascade of violence was unfolding inside a women’s prison in New Jersey.

Prisons are not immune to the social stresses playing out across the rest of ...

by Matt Clarke

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that Arkansas jailers were entitled to qualified immunity in a lawsuit brought by prisoners in 2017 who alleged their shower area was covered in black mold and they were never given any cleaning supplies. The court also ...

by Ed Lyon

Prison populations exploded in every state across the country during the 1980s and ‘90s. It was during that massive expansion that the modern private prison industry was born as a “way to ease the burden on taxpayers by reducing public spending on government-run facilities,” as touted by ...

by David M. Reutter

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a prisoner’s civil rights complaint because it was filled with “pages of irrelevant and unspecific allegations.” The Court said that in drafting a complaint, a “plaintiff must not append so many limbs and outward flourishes to ...

On January 26, 2021, 55-year-old Michael McDaniel entered the Corrections Reception Center in Orient, Pickaway County, Ohio, to serve a sixteen-month sentence for aggravated assault in Franklin County, Ohio. Jada McDaniel, his sister, said that he was a Black veteran of the U.S. Navy who struggled with drug addiction. “He ...

by David M. Reutter

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the grant of summary judgment in a lawsuit against a guard at New Jersey’s Cumberland County Jail (CCJ). The Court held the guard was not entitled to qualified immunity because it was clearly established at the time of the ...

Tiffany Reeves, a mother of three, was arrested in October 2018 on two outstanding warrants and detained at the Sussex Correctional Institution, an all-male facility, to await hearings before two judges. One of the warrants stemmed from Reeves’ attempt to purchase heroin a year earlier in New Castle County, Delaware ...

Oregon endured a devastating wildfire season in 2020. The fires raged across the state incinerating over one million acres of land and more than 4,000 homes. Prisoners enslaved in the Oregon Department of Corrections stepped up to assist their fellow citizens, risking their lives, health and safety for a meager ...

Alabama: A 20-year-old guard at the Lauderdale County Detention Center in Florence, Alabama, was arrested on October 29, 2021, on charges that he attempted to smuggle methamphetamine into the jail. According to a report by Huntsville TV station WHNT, the guard, Matthew Moran, faces one count of attempting to commit ...