by Matt Clarke
The news from Pennsylvania on April 4, 2021, had a sadly familiar ring to it: A prisoner died a preventable death in a county lockup, costing a bundle to settle, so county officials were turning to a private healthcare provider. They granted a multi-million-dollar annual contract—a million ...
This issue of PLN marks our 32nd anniversary. Having published 384 issues since May 1990, we have been reporting on the growth of the American police state for 32 years as its prison and jail population has more than doubled from one million to almost 2.3 million reported in 2020. ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2022, page 14
In a decision reached on October 8, 2021, the Vermont Supreme Court held that a determination by state prison officials to remove a prisoner from programming was reviewable when the catalyst was punitive. The claim at issue was based upon the failure to provide the prisoner a hearing before imposing ...
by Ed Lyon
On December 20, 2021, a settlementwas approved by a federal court in a lawsuit alleging the illegal arrest and detention of some 1,500 children at the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. As a result, members of the proposed classes of plaintiffs were eligible ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2022, page 18
The Citrus County Detention Facility(CCDF) in Lecanto, Florida, serves a modest-sized county with a population of 149,383, slightly over the average in all 2,843 jail jurisdictions in the U.S. The mortality rate in all U.S. jails in 2018—the last year for which federal Bureau of Justice statistics were published—averaged 154 ...
by Ed Lyon
On December 16, 2021, a federal court in California approved a $5.5 million settlement between Santa Cruz County and the estate of a former prisoner at the county jail whose attempt on his own life there left him an invalid.
Sometime after 11 a.m. on February 15, ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, deaths have more than doubled at the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) in downtown Pittsburgh, even as the jail population was cut drastically in an effort to curb the spread of the SARS-COV2 virus. Yet ...
by David M. Reutter
On February 7, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved a Consent Decree in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Alameda County Jail in Santa Rita that accused officials there of subjecting “individuals with mental health diagnoses and/or other psychiatric disabilities” ...
by Alleen Brown
The flooding in Dixie County, Florida, began in July, brought on by Tropical Storm Elsa. Then the rains kept falling. By August, the ground was saturated, and the semirural county was underwater.
At the Cross City Correctional Institution, the prison administration repeatedly canceled visitation hours throughout July. ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Once known for famous prisoners from Hollywood, the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin, California, is now in the spotlight for a different reason: As of March 2022, at least five Bureau of Prisons (BOP) employees have been charged with sexually abusing women held at the ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2022, page 29
Eighth Circuit Rules Pretrial Detainees and Prisoners Have Right to Visit Family Members
In a precedential ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has held that “prisoners and pretrial detainees have a right to be free from arbitrary or permanent limitations on visits with family members.”
The ...
by David M. Reutter
In a lawsuit alleging prison officials used coercion to force an atheist parolee into participating in Christian programming, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit came down on the parolee’s side on August 6, 2021, reversing a lower court’s grant of summary judgment to ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 18, 2021, a federal court in Pennsylvania approved an $8.5 million settlement reached the prior month between the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and the family of an asthmatic state prisoner who died after being pepper-sprayed with oleoresin capsicum (OC) by guards at State Correctional ...
by David M. Reutter
After finding the award of attorney’s fees under California’s Code of Civil Procedure is not impacted by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, a federal district awarded $259,237.50 to attorneys for two prisoners who obtained civil verdicts against guards employed by state ...
by Harold Hempstead
A November 2021 investigation by Knoxville TV station WBIR found prisons and jails across the Volunteer State were underreporting in-custody deaths to the state Bureau of Investigation (TBI), in apparent violation of Tennessee law. The investigation counted 602 people who died in custody from 2017 to 2020, ...
By Sam Rutherford
On February 25, 2022, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN), filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska against Scott Frakes, Director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (DCS), under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On March 6, 2022, a judge in Citrus County, Florida, handed down a prison term to a former state prison guard for child sex abuse, just days after three other former Florida guards were sentenced to federal prison on February 28, 2022, following their convictions for ...
by Douglas Ankney
Over 42 years after he was sentenced to Life with Possibility of Parole (LWPP), a pro se Hawaii prisoner took a step closer to the promise contained in his sentence on October 22, 2021, when the state Supreme Court reinstated his claim that he was wrongfully denied ...
by David M. Reutter
Here’s a simple message to prisonersfrom the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit: Exhaust your remedies, no matter how redundant they may seem.
That was the key takeaway from the Court’s ruling on August 31, 2021, in which it held that the grievance process ...
by Matt Clarke
On December 7, 2021, the parents of a 25-year-old transwoman who committed suicide while imprisoned in the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) dismissed their federal civil rights lawsuit against DOC officials after accepting a $2.2 million settlement the preceding October 27. See: Maree v. Igou, 2021 ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 30, 2021, a federal district court in Nevada denied a motion to compel arbitration in a lawsuit alleging that forcing prison release debit cards upon prisoners violates state and federal laws. Chief Judge Miranda M. Du ruled the plaintiff did not assent to the ...
by Ed Lyon
After a riot in Ecuador’s El Turi prison left 20 prisoners dead on April 4, 2022, Interior Minister Patricio Castillo responded with a vow to “drain the cesspit” that his nation’s prisons have become. But how exactly?
Castillo promised to strip prison benefits from the unnamed ringleaders, ...
by David M. Reutter
AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED BY PLN, OFficials with the Nevada Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2020 lost a suit filed pro se in federal district court by a state prisoner they disciplined for smuggling methamphetamine through the prison mail, with the court agreeing his Fourteenth Amendment due-process ...
by Richard Hahn
THE VALUE OF POST-SECONDARY EDUCAtion to people who complete courses in prison is well established. The Second Chance Pell (SCP) Pilot, which offered federal grants to help prisoners pay for college and professional certification classes beginning in 2015, was meant to leverage the benefits of higher education ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 1, 2021, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and the private operator of one of its prisons, the GEO Group, agreed to pay $316,673.53 to settle a lawsuit brought by a prisoner stabbed and severely injured by another prisoner at a GEO-operated state prison that ...
by Keith Sanders
On January 18, 2019, Melissa Middleton Rice committed suicide while in custody at the Jackson County Detention Center (JCDC) in Sylva, North Carolina. As she sat in the jail’s booking room, Rice hanged herself with a telephone cord. She was found unresponsive and without a pulse just ...
By Sam Rutherford
On March 11, 2022, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), PLN’s publisher, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the Strafford County House of Correction (HOC) violated its rights under the First and Fourteenth ...
by Ashleigh Dye and Jayson Hawkins
A New Jersey prison guard was arrested on October 1, 2021, on charges he ran a “fight club” in the kitchen he supervised at Bayside State Prison, regularly beating and torturing prisoners who worked under him there.
“A badge is not a license to ...
by Ashleigh Dye
In September 2021, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid more than $15 million to private prison operator GEO Group for deportation flights to repatriate thousands of Haitian migrants. The contract covered 44 charter flights from Texas to Haiti over a two-week time period, followed by another ...
by David M. Reutter
In an opinion issued on September 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled the federal district court in Colorado erred in dismissing a state prisoner’s claim filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 §12101 et seq., ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 30, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit took the Nevada Department of Corrections (DOC) to task over a four-year delay in providing a state prisoner the only drugs known to safely treat his severe mental illness. Swatting away DOC’s contention it ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2022, page 53
The federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has no parole, but there are ways for a federal prisoner to shorten a sentence length. One way is to successfully complete a 13-week Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP), earning up to 12 months of credit toward release.
Enter RDAP Law Consultants, LLC, a ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In New York City, 25 jail guards have run up an absentee rate over the last two years which is “breathtaking in its magnitude,” according to local news reports, and “embarrassing,” according to Sarena Townsend, a former high-ranking internal affairs investigator with the city’s Department of ...
by Jacob Barrett
On October 28, 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reached a settlement with the Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) to remedy conditions in state prisons that fail to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 § 12101 et seq.
The settlement ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 15, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a federal district court in California erred when it instructed the jury in a prisoner’s civil rights trial to defer to prison medical staff’s “security justification” for stopping his morphine medication abruptly—without ...
by David M. Reutter
An Illinois federal district court issued a preliminary injunction in favor of a state prisoner on October 12, 2021, requiring prison officials to provide him fresh or frozen kosher meal entrées because he suffers an allergic reaction to those provided, which are “shelf-stable.”
The prisoner, Mark ...
by Harold Hempstead
On July 17, 2021, the Supreme Court of Connecticut held that when the state Department of Corrections (DOC) classified him as a sex offender despite not having a conviction on a sex offense, a state prisoner was denied his rights to procedural and substantive due process under ...
by Keith Sanders
Several journalists spoke out about what they witnessed during the execution by lethal injection of Oklahoma prisoner John Marion Grant on October 28, 2021, saying the 60-year-old convulsed over a dozen times and then began vomiting after the first drug, a sedative, was administered.
Sean Murphy and ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2022, page 62
Alabama: A state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard in Birmingham was arrested on March 9, 2022, for allegedly beating a prisoner to death, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. As PLN previously reported, prison officials at first insisted no foul play was suspected in the death of Victor Russo, ...
by Doug Ankney
In an opinion issued on October 7, 2021, the Supreme Court of Washington ruled that holding wheelchair-bound prisoner Robert Rufus Williams in a cell that lacked a sink or toilet violated the Washington State Constitution.
The now-79-year old Williams was convicted of multiple offenses, including a brutal ...
