by Douglas Ankney

“If we refused to work we had to stand on top of a wooden box in the sun. It was called ‘doin’ the scarecrow’ and some guys passed out from the heat”—Florida prisoner Ronald Smith, quoted by formerly incarcerated journalist Ryan Moser in Slavery and ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover article discusses the current state of prison slavery in America. This has been an ongoing topic of coverage for Prison Legal News since we first started in 1990. The legal slave status of American prisoners is currently enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment to ...

The Claremont Institute, “nerve center of the American right,” honored Sheriff Chad Bianco of California’s Riverside County on November 9, 2023, with its annual Sheriff Award for being a “longtime patriot and tireless defender of America’s founding principles.”

For $450 a plate, subscribers attending the award dinner at the Hilton ...

A massive manhunt was underway in France on May 14, 2024, after a prison van was ambushed at a highway toll booth by four armed accomplices of prisoner Mohamed Amra, 30. He escaped in the ensuing shootout, which also killed two guards escorting him and seriously wounded three others. The ...

On October 3, 2023, the federal court for the Middle District of Georgia denied a motion to dismiss filed by defendant state prison officials in a prisoner’s challenge to isolation in conditions he called “deplorable.”

While incarcerated at Georgia State Prison (GSP) from November 1, 2018, to January 7, 2021, ...

Five days after the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) took over a state prison from private operator CoreCivic on October 1, 2023, a ceremony was held to rename the former Davis Correctional Facility. On the same day, October 6, 2023, a prisoner stabbed a guard at the medium-security facility now ...

Dressed in maroon shirts—not prison jumpsuits—three prisoners joined the “Dynamo” program at Missouri’s Northeast Correctional Center in November 2023. That brought total enrollment to 17 since the state Department of Correction (DOC) launched the initiative in April 2023, modeling it after Norwegian prison efforts to focus on re-entry, rather than ...

by Douglas Ankney

On December 14, 2023, the New York Court of Appeals refused to hold officials with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) liable for malpractice committed on a state prisoner by Dr. Jun Wang. Why? Because Wang is an employee of private pathology group ...

Transgender Rikers Island jail detainee Dylan “Ali” Miles sued the City of New York and its Department of Correction on August 24, 2023, alleging her civil rights were violated when she was housed with men for two months before an August 2022 transfer to stand trial in Arizona.

Filed in ...

On April 11, 2024, a Texas bankruptcy court rejected a proposed $54 million settlement that would have paid just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars owed to prisoners who won judgments or secured settlement agreements from Corizon Health. Citing concerns about timely access to court documents for ...

by Douglas Ankney

Two former guards with Inmate Services Corporation (ISC), a private contractor that provided prisoner transports across the U.S., have been sentenced to federal prison for raping detainees in their charge. Marquet Johnson, 45, was sentenced on April 16, 2024, to 30 years in federal prison followed ...

by Matt Clarke

On November 7, 2023, a Vermont court ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, in its request for records from Centurion of Vermont related to its contract to provide medical, dental and mental health care ...

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has faced challenges in implementing the First Step Act (FSA) since it was signed into law in December 2018 by then-President Donald J. Trump (R). Aimed at reducing prisoner population and associated costs, the law provided sentence credits earned with good behavior, enabling earlier ...

On November 30, 2023, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmir (D) signed HB 4983, a measure that makes voter registration automatic for state prisoners upon release. With that, the state became the first in the nation to make voter registration the default option for some 8,000 prisoners that it releases every year, ...

On December 1, 2023, phone calls became free for detainees and prisoners in Los Angeles County jails. The county’s Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 on November 22, 2023, to amend the existing phone service contract with ViaPath Technologies—formerly Global Tel*Link (GTL)—to shift the cost of calls from the county’s approximately ...

Faced with repeated jail admissions of people suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses (SMI), the city of Miami has developed one of the nation’s most comprehensive diversion programs, focusing on treatment and community integration rather than incarceration for those charged with misdemeanors or low-level felonies. The brainchild of ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 6, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana issued a Remedial Order (RO) to correct unconstitutional healthcare at Louisiana State Prison in Angola. In a companion opinion, the Court found the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) ...

After two years of decline driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of Americans held in federal and state prisons at the end of 2022 jumped 2% to a total of 1,230,143, according to a November 2023 report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Covering both state and ...

On April 17, 2024, the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center—which publishes PLN and Criminal Legal News—filed suit in federal court for the Middle District of Florida on behalf of Willie Williams, Jr., 79, seeking redress for over 44 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated for armed robbery and attempted murder ...

A lawsuit filed on November 26, 2023, lays out the bizarre story of a Virginia Sheriff’s deputy who “catfished” a California teen and murdered her family before abducting her and then turning his gun on himself as police closed in.

Austin Lee Edwards was a Virginia State Trooper near Richmond ...

Two detainees at Florida’s Okaloosa County Jail were sentenced to federal prison on April 5, 2024, for smuggling fentanyl into the lockup and providing it to a detainee, who overdosed and died on Christmas Eve 2022. Gary Chase, 30, and Joshua Gervais, 28, were sentenced to 30 and 14 years, ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

On December 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that an Illinois prisoner’s challenge to civil commitment as a sexually violent person after release cannot be raised under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, unless the underlying civil commitment is first terminated ...

Two Ohio prisoners have pleaded guilty to assaulting guards, while trials of two other guards accused of assaulting jail detainees in the state resulted in one conviction and one acquittal.

On October 25, 2023, Ohio prisoner Drequan K. Abdullah, 24, was found guilty of throwing urine on an unnamed guard ...

By Jeffrey St. Clair

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch on October 6, 2023. It is reprinted here with permission. Read the original at https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/06/the-mind-breakers-the-case-of-ramzi-bin-al-shibh/

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of ...

Formerly incarcerated residents of New York City appeared to land a punch in their fight to secure housing in the city’s notoriously tight real estate market on August 14, 2023, when the Fortune Society, a nonprofit founded in 1967 that provides numerous reentry services—including housing assistance—to former prisoners and other ...

by David M. Reutter

Before he retired in July 2023, Warden Thomas Bergami was sent by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Thomson, Illinois, with a mandate: Clean the place up. But Begami said he got little support for his reform efforts and was ...

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” goes the line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As Coleridge dramatized, water is essential to life, yet most people take it for granted. For those incarcerated, their access to drinking water is entirely dependent on prison officials. At the Nebraska ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

According to a federal civil rights action filed by Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project attorneys Matthew A. Feldman and Evangeline Wright on November 15, 2023, a Black Jamaican migrant held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Pike County Correctional Facility (PCCF) was subjected ...

An emergency ordinance passed by the Quorum Court of Arkansas’ Pulaski County on April 22, 2024, demanded answers from county Sheriff Eric Higgins to questions about a TV show filmed at the jail in Little Rock. The county also returned a $60,000 payment from the producers of Unlocked: A Jail ...

When sentenced to Texas’ death row in 1988 for a murder committed the year before, Syed Rabbani was a healthy 23-year-old. Now 57, he is psychotic and blind, left almost entirely unable to move or speak by a stroke. An appeal he filed was lost by Harris County prosecutors for ...

by Douglas Ankney

On February 28, 2024, Idaho halted the execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, 73, after the all-volunteer team assigned to kill him was unable to find a suitable vein to establish the intravenous connection necessary for his lethal injection.

Creech, convicted of five murders in three states, ...

On October 1, 2023, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) implemented a temporary policy raising the maximum age for guard candidates to 40. The previous upper age limit was 37. The new policy is aimed at solving a staffing crisis that has left nearly a third of guard positions vacant ...

On August 7, 2023, a new law took effect in Colorado directing judges to provide bonds and alternatives to incarceration for defendants who are pregnant or who recently gave birth. HB23-1187 was signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis (D) in May 2023 after it was adopted by state lawmakers ...

The number of American prisoners awaiting execution continued a decrease that began at the turn of the century, dropping to 2,331 in 2023, a 4.3% decline from 2022. Yet even though just five states executed prisoners during the year— Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama—the total number of killings jumped ...

On April 2, 2024, the California Superior Court for Sacramento County ordered the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to release results of internal investigations that had been sought by KQED in San Francisco on behalf of the California Reporting Project, a coalition of news organizations across the state. ...

On November 14, 2023, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) secured a budget recommendation from the state Permanent Building Fund advisory council for a new $25 million facility jointly operated by the state’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) and its Department of Corrections (DOC), providing a secure treatment facility for ...

More cases have surfaced in which families report organs missing from the bodies of loved ones who died in custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC). As PLN reported, the first was the family of Brandon Dotson, 43, who was murdered by a fellow prisoner at Ventress Correctional Facility ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 7, 2023, the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government in Kentucky agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a civil rights action alleging constitutional violations in the wrongful murder convictions and imprisonment of Jeffrey Dwayne Clark and Garr Keith Hardin.

Both now 54, they were ...

by Matt Clarke

In a settlement agreement effective October 23, 2023, California’sAlameda County agreed to pay $7 million to the estate and progeny of a detainee who died while incarcerated at the county’s jail in Santa Rita. The large settlement amount reflected the egregious neglect that allegedly contributed to ...

Once upon a time, parole and probation officers actually helped those under their supervision. In the rehabilitation-oriented 1970s, for example, they assisted in finding housing and employment, knowing that more support for a newly released prisoner made reoffending less likely. That approach changed during the get-tough-on-crime era which began in ...

On October 17, 2023, the estate of a detainee who committed suicide in Florida’s Escambia County Jail accepted $300,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit. Lukas MacKenzie Snelson, 24, was arrested on December 30, 2021, for second degree homicide of his grandmother, Fran Fournier, 75, grand theft of her ...

On December 1, 2023, Harris County, Texas, began sending up to 360 detainees from the county’s jails to a prison in Mississippi, under a contract with its private operator, CoreCivic. The County Commissioners Court approved the $11.3 million one-year agreement, which has renewal options, on November 14, 2023, just weeks ...

In the final hours before Oklahoma killed Phillip Hancock on November 30, 2023, he was attended by a chaplain, like almost all condemned prisoners. Unlike most though, Hancock was an atheist. So was his chaplain, Devin Moss. As the last minutes of Hancock’s life ticked away, the two shared encouragement ...

A lawsuit filed on November 18, 2023, accused the Shelby County Jail in Memphis of routinely and deliberately denying release to eligible detainees. That’s how Marcus Donald’s family alleged the 38-year-old was still in the jail despite a court-ordered release earlier on November 17, 2022, when he was then murdered ...

Washington’s Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) issued an advisory to healthcare providers on December 13, 2023, to test for tuberculosis in anyone incarcerated by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) during an outbreak of the disease in 2021. Over 800 people were released from prison before officials identified their exposure to TB, ...

In an essay published in Slate on December 14, 2023, former Florida prisoner Ryan Moser said that officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) were “essentially playing whack-a-mole” in their efforts to combat an epidemic of “jailbreaking” prison-issued electronic tablets.

The tablets are issued free to prisoners under DOC’s ...

In a monitoring report on October 6, 2023, the Compliance Director with operational control over Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) in New Orleans found continued problems at the jail, such as an increase in prisoner-on-prisoner violence, overdoses and unnecessary use of force by guards. As PLN reported, unsafe and unconstitutional conditions ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 16, 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) agreed to pay $5 million to the estate of Thomas Henry Giles, 31, a mentally ill prisoner who died after guards left him for hours locked inside a cell on fire at Augusta State Medical ...

Lack of expert testimony halved a $500,000 award made by a federal jury to Pennsylvania prisoner Michael Sherman Allen on November 1, 2023, for injuries sustained in a brutal 2019 beating at the hands of Robert Hollowood and fellow guards at State Correctional Institution (SCI) in Fayette.

Allen, who is ...

by David M. Reutter

When confronted with prisoner complaints, officials often produce glowing inspection reports and blame prisoners for destroying prison infrastructure. All too often, though, inept supervision is to blame for failure to maintain facilities. As many prisoners will tell you, when an inspection is looming, the prisonis ...

A lawsuit filed on January 18, 2024, accuses retail giant Macy’s of employing faulty facial recognition technology that falsely identified a Texas man as an armed robbery suspect, landing him in a Houston jail where he was raped by fellow detainees. Harvey Murphy, Jr., 61, was released from the Harris ...

by David M. Reutter

Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) leaders have come before the state legislature repeatedly to warn that it is a system operating in crisis. In a presentation on November 15, 2023, by global consulting firm KPMG, which was selected in 2022 by the state Department of ...

On October 10, 2023, a settlement was reached in a suit filed by Disability Rights Washington (DRW), a federally funded agency that advocates for the rights of people with disabilities, accusing the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) of violating the rights of transgender prisoners by denying medical and mental health ...

by Matt Clarke

On September 28, 2023, the federal court for the Western District of Michigan awarded a state prisoner $16,975.00 in attorney fees and $4,459.91 in costs in a civil rights lawsuit over his sexual abuse by a state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard. The Court had previously ...

In a lawsuit filed in federal court for the Northern District of Ohio on March 18, 2024, state prisoner Darryl Smith accuses Mansfield Correctional Institution (MCI) guards of ignoring warnings he was being threatened by his cellmate, cheering when he followed through on those threats and assaulted Smith.

Smith, 72, ...

Former New Hampshire prison guard Matthew Millar, 39, was arrested on February 8, 2024, and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Jason O. Rothe, 50, a detainee in the Secure Psychiatric Unit (SPU) at New Hampshire State Prison. Prosecutors allege Millar killed Rothe by kneeling on his back ...

In what will surprise few prisoners, a report by an appointed panel of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) released on September 26, 2023, found “shocking” human rights violations and “staggering” racial disparities in U.S. criminal justice agencies.

The report was authored by panel members Yvonne Mokgoro, former ...

Georgia’s Telfair State Prison went on lockdown on March 21, 2024, after a prisoner stabbed Warden Andrew McFarlane with a homemade knife. McFarlane, 54, a 25-year veteran of the state Department of Corrections (DOC), was not seriously injured in the attack, according to DOC spokesperson Joan Heath, who added he ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 27, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin denied state prison officials’ motion for new trial. That left standing a jury verdict finding that prisoner Adam Young was denied procedural due process in a disciplinary action, awarding him $700,000. ...

A settlement reached on November 1, 2023, between the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) and current or former state prisoners resulted in changes to prison mail policies. While incarcerated at Monroe Correctional Complex (MCC), Adam Bauer, David Cochran, Dylan Downey, Michael Morales and Jessien Perry joined Carmella Holt, one of ...

Alabama: Four months after a judge found no probable cause to prosecute former Mobile Metro Jail guard Kimberly A. Henderson, 32, for contraband smuggling, charges were reinstated in a new indictment that resulted in her rearrest on March 22, 2024, WPMI in Mobile said. As PLN reported, Henderson was fired ...