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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 ...
