by Benjamin Tschirhart
Calling conditions in Los Angeles County jails “abhorrent,” attorneys representing a group of incarcerated plaintiffs appeared before a federal judge on April 19, 2023, asking him to hold the county in contempt of a recently granted injunction. That was after three detainee deaths in just nine days ...
by David M. Reutter
In a January 2022 report by the Fines and Fees Justice Center (FFJC), a national hub for the movement to reform criminal justice fines and fees, researchers documented the costs of private probation and found that “monetary sanctions…create substantial challenges for individuals on private probation.” The ...
By Paul Wright
This issue of PLN marks our 33rd anniversary of publishing. Since we published our first issue in May 1990 we have seen massive changes in the American gulag, starting with its sheer growth from a million prisoners to over 2 million a decade later and a ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
Drugs are ubiquitous behind prison walls, but screening of items sent to prisoners and random drug testing incentivizes the use of substances difficult to detect and easy to conceal. Synthetic cannabinoids, known under numerous monikers such as K2 and Spice, fill that niche.
Originally synthesized by ...
by Ed Lyon
A state prison warden was arrested on August 30, 2022, on suspicion of driving under the influence in Cullman, Alabama. Jeffrey Baldwin was then placed on mandatory leave from his post at Elmore Correctional Facility (CF) by the state Department of Corrections (DOC). Thwarting any effort to ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 13, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed dismissal of a lawsuit filed over the death of a Texas detainee during an altercation with jail guards.
Kelli Leanne Page, 46, was awaiting trial at the Coryell County Jail for “several months” ...
by Jacob Barrett
A detainee found dead in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail (FCJ) on September 13, 2022, was “eaten alive” by insects, according to an attorney hired by the dead man’s family. Michael Harper said his clients were “horrified” by squalid conditions revealed in photos of the cell where 35-year-old ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 22, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated claims previously dismissed in a lawsuit filed over a detainee’s fatal beating at a prison privately operated by LaSalle Management Co. for the city of Monroe, Louisiana.
Monroe ceased leasing beds from LaSalle ...
by Jacob Barrett
On October 12, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated dismissal of an Oregon prisoner’s civil rights claims for failure to exhaust administrative remedies available in the state Department of Corrections (DOC), as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As of December 1, 2022, the CaliforniaDepartment of Insurance (DOI) had decided to let two bail agents keep their licenses, even though they hired a bounty hunter who broke into the home of one of their clients and fatally shot the man – who had no active ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On January 4, 2023, Jody Greene (R) resigned as Sheriff of North Carolina’s Columbus County – for the second time in just over two months. First elected in 2018, he had earlier resigned in October 2022 to avoid being removed from office, after he was caught ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) faces allegations of breach of contract in Texas, where the private prison firm allegedly forced prisoners to sign for parole-required treatment and program time they were not in fact provided. The scam allegedly began during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued ...
by David M. Reutter
On January 13, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to review its dismissal of an appeal from a Maryland prison supervisor to a $700,000 jury verdict for a detainee whom his subordinate ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 22, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a district court erred when it tossed a Muslim prisoner’s lawsuit over denial of Kosher meals during a hurricane evacuation from his Texas prison. It was the Court’s second review in the ...
by Jacob Barrett
On July 15, 2022, the federal court for the District of Nevada awarded $560,587.50 in fees to attorneys representing a state prisoner who earlier settled his medical neglect claim against the state Department of Corrections (DOC) for $7,500. In addition, DOC agreed to amend its policy effectively ...
by Jacob Barrett
Former prisoner Alex Tretbar won PEN America’s first-place award for poetry in September 2022 for his poem “Variations on an Undisclosed Location.” Tretbar, 33, penned the poem during his five-year incarceration with the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
While incarcerated, Tretbar worked ...
by Harold Hempstead
On April 20, 2022, the federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee issued a highly unusal order enjoining the Davidson County medical examiner from performing an autopsy or collecting bodily fluids from a prisoner following his execution by lethal injection.
Oscar Franklin Smith filed his complaint ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On January 10, 2023, WMTW in Portland reported findings from a months-long investigation of deaths in Maine’s prisons and jails. By comparing information from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with data collected by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ), investigators found 39 deaths – 10 ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 31, 2022, the U.S. Court ofAppeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a district court’s grant of qualified immunity (QI) to a Texas prison guard who used his baton to beat and break the arm of a prisoner protruding from the bottom of a dogpile of ...
by Chuck Sharman
On January 3, 2023, the Atlanta City Council unanimously adopted Ordinance 22-O-1891, clearing the way for the city to pay $1.3 million to settle claims by a Black transgender woman that she was locked up in the city jail for five months on trumped-up charges. The settlement ...
by Mark Wilson
On May 10, 2022, the federal court for the District of Nebraska granted dismissal to the estate of a prisoner murdered by his cellmate, while the two were double-bunked despite being classified for restrictive housing. Under the settlement negotiated in exchange, Nebraska prison officials agreed to pay ...
By Shannon Heffernan, WBEZ
At least 18 corrections employees abused or used excessive force against incarcerated people in Illinois, according to internal corrections investigations. They all remained on the job.
Correctional officer James Fike already had been suspended twice when the Illinois Department of Corrections began investigating allegations that he ...
by Ed Lyon
On July 23, 2021, Magistrate Scott Sheets presiding in the Ohio Court of Claims approved a settlement, under which the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) agreed to pay $20,000 to a former state prisoner who claimed he was injured while incarcerated when he slipped and ...
by Mark Wilson
On July 8, 2022, the federal court forthe Eastern District of Michigan awarded $2.4 million in compensatory and punitive damages to three prisoners sexually abused in 2018 by a former physician at the county jail where they were held. Two years later, prosecutors secured a sexual abuse ...
by Matt Clarke
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC) of the University of Chicago Law School released a comprehensive report on June 15, 2022, detailing the way American prisoners are coerced into providing labor for little or no compensation. The practice is a ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Etymology, the study of word origins, provides insight into commonly used words. For instance, ‘cell’ and ‘hell’ share an ancient root meaning ‘hide’: A resident of either is unseen, hidden away from society and the realm of the living.
How apt then that artist Jesse Krimes entitled ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 16, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that grievance procedure rules which the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC) published online – but which were not given to prisoners – cannot trigger a failure to exhaust administrative remedies that would justify ...
by Jacob Barrett
According to an October 2022 report by the New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the state’s prisons and jails have a drug overdose rate “double the rate for the overall United States population.”
Conditions in New York City’s Rikers Island have deteriorated to the ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
At the same time the federal government is once again opening Pell Grants to prisoners, some have been left scrambling in Washington by closure of the State Reformatory (WSR) – which hosted the state’s primary college program behind bars.
The Second Chance Pell grant program will ...
by Ed Lyon
On February 28, 2022, Judge Patrick E. Sheeran of the Ohio Court of Claims approved a settlement under which the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) agreed to pay a prisoner $32,500 to resolve his claims that prison medical staff ignored post-surgery instruction and removed his ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 1, 2022, the federal courtfor the Western District of Oklahoma granted dismissal to plaintiffs in a suit against Oklahoma County, after they agreed to a $1.1 million settlement in the death of a detainee killed by guards at the county jail in April 2017. According ...
by David M. Reutter
Confronted with the appeal of a defendant who died on November 10, 2022, the Supreme Court of Louisiana reversed its own precedent and refused to abandon his prosecution. With that, the Court decided that the doctrine of abatement ab initio is “obsolete and inconsistent with our ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 28, 2022, the Supreme Court of California declined to hear an appeal to a lower court’s decision that shrugged off differences in program credits available to state prisoners held in prisons and those held in local jails. That left standing a decision by the First ...
by Jacob Barrett
According to a report published by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) on December 15, 2022, for-profit telecom companies are using loopholes in the law to price-gouge prisoners and their families on the cost of phone calls and video visits.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has slowly set ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 11, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated a Texas prisoner’s suit against officials with the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) who had banned him and other members of the Nation of Gods and Earths (NOGE) from holding religious gatherings. ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On November 9, 2022, an Iowa teenager convicted of murdering a man she claimed repeatedly raped her was recaptured, five days after she escaped from the Fresh Start Women’s Center (FSWC) in Polk County, Iowa. Peiper Lewis, 18, was recaptured after walking out and then cutting ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
On March 16, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit turned away an appeal by a former Missouri prison guard and affirmed a jury verdict against him for sexually abusing four state prisoners.
The verdict reached on April 28, 2022, awarded $5 million ...
by Mark Wilson
On March 29, 2022, the federal courtfor the Western District of Washington approved a $3 million settlement between King County and a mentally ill man who suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) when savagely beaten by a cellmate that jail officials allegedly knew was dangerous and psychotic, ...
by Jayson Hawkins
On April 17, 2023, Arizona prisoner Jasper Rushing, 43, was again sentenced to death for the grizzly murder of his cellmate. He was first condemned for the killing in 2015, but the state supreme court tossed that sentence two years later because prosecutors failed to inform the ...
by Mark Wilson
On September 29, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to toss the murder conviction of Frank Gable, now 62, in the 1989 killing of Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) Director Michael Francke outside his office. Although the claims ...
by Chuck Sharman
On February 14, 2023, Montana joined a dozen other states to end prison gerrymandering, the practice of having census takers count prisoners where they are incarcerated, rather than in their hometowns. It is also the third state to do so without enacting a new law.
Gerrymandering ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On November 17, 20222, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stopped the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from civilly committing a prisoner being released from the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Butner, North Carolina. Proceeding under 18 U.S.C. § 4246, the government argued ...
by Mark Wilson
On March 9, 2022, Montana prison officials paid $2,500 to settle a federal suit alleging that they failed to protect a state prisoner from a known threat of brutal beating by other prisoners.
Andrew Yellowbear, Jr., is an enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. He is ...
by David M. Reutter
On November 30, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed a $30,001 jury award and a fee award over $248,000 to a Minnesota jail detainee who alleged she was falsely imprisoned by Anoka County’s discriminatory policy of referring all foreign-born arrestees to ...
by Mark Wilson
On October 28, 2022, the Alaska Supreme Court held that a prisoner is required to challenge a discretionary parole decision in a post-conviction relief (PCR) action, rather than a civil suit. Though a loss for Donald McDonald, the case is instructive – and not just in proper ...
Loaded on
May 1, 2023
published in Prison Legal News
May, 2023, page 63
Alabama: On March 26, 2023, a former state prison guard at Easterling Correctional Facility was arrested for taking bribes to smuggle contraband into the lockup. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that Quindarius Thagard, 27, was fired and charged with use of office for personal gain and promotion of contraband. He ...
