by Matt Clarke

On August 22, 2024, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky sentenced Jesse Kipf to 81 months in federal prison for hacking into the Hawai’i Death Registry the year before. It was a strange crime; in his guilty plea, Kipf, 39, admitted to using the ...

by Paul Wright

This issue of PLN marks our 35th anniversary of publishing. Our first 8 issues were hand typed in two different maximum-security prison cells in Washington and sent to an outside volunteer to put together, photocopy and mail to 75 potential subscribers. Our start up budget was $300 ...

A month before Florida lawmakers were set to end their most recent session on May 2, 2025, there was no effort to revive House Bill (HB) 1111, or its companion Senate Bill (SB) 1310—twin measures that would amend the state’s “pay to stay” law to allow judges to consider a ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

At the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on August 22, 2024, a Louisiana prisoner defeated a claim of qualified immunity (QI) by Defendant officials with the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) in his suit to hold them liable for ...

On March 11, 2025, the federal Department of Education (ED) announced the purge of nearly half of its employees, leaving students reliant on federally insured student loans facing processing delays and potentially predatory loan servicers now unshackled from oversight. But no students were more at risk than those in prison ...

In a report published on December 19, 2024, Business Insider found just 1% of prisoners succeeded in claims against prison officials for violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.

To arrive at that figure, researchers combed through 1,488 prisoner complaints filed from 2018 to 2022, including all ...

On January 8, 2025, Racine County Jail detainee Davonte Carraway, 29, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the brutal and fatal beating nine days earlier of state prisoner Joseph Lee, 35. Lee was found “stuffed into a garbage can” in a dayroom at the lockup, where he was being ...

On March 10, 2025, the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio sentenced former Cincinnati defense attorney Richard Louis Crosby III to 37 months in federal prison for Social Security fraud. The 37-year-old pleaded guilty in July 2024 to using the identifying information of his girlfriend, his father and ...

After getting the greenlight from the state Supreme Court, South Carolina’s Department of Corrections (DOC) mustered a firing squad to fatally shoot condemned prisoner Brad Sigmon, 67, on March 7, 2025. Another prisoner, Mikal Mahdi, 41, was then scheduled to be shot to death on April 11, 2025.

As PLN ...

by Douglas Ankney

A volunteer minister took a dustup with Georgia jailers over baptism to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which agreed on September 16, 2024, that he had been subjected to impermissible viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The relevant policies adopted ...

An executive order signed by Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) on March 27, 2025, stripped collective bargaining rights from federal unions, including those representing guards working for the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

The guards had already lost most or all of their incentive pay bonuses, which added up to ...

Los Angeles County jails counted 87 deaths of prisoners and detainees in 813 days since the beginning of 2023, according to a report by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice on March 25, 2025. The high mortality rate was blamed on neglect and poor conditions, which can be traced to ...

Exactly one week before his 67th birthday, Florida prisoner Crosley Green returned to custody of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) on September 4, 2024—two and a half years after a state court granted him provisional release while the state continued to fight a 2018 ruling overturning his conviction for ...

A former jail guard in South Carolina’s Berkeley County was sentenced on March 18, 2025, to 10 years in state prison, after he admitted to sexually assaulting nine detainees and coworkers at the Hill-Finklea Detention Center in 2022. Avery Richard Smith, 24, pleaded guilty to 11 charges: four counts of ...

On March 21, 2025, Idaho lost a bid to prevent disclosing its source of execution drugs to condemned prisoner Gerald Ross Pizzuto, Jr. By then, though, a warden deposed for the case had already admitted to buying lethal drugs for the state Department of Corrections (DOC) on the roadside near ...

Black Marylanders make up 30% of the state’s population but 71% of those in its prisons, the nation’s highest racial incarceration gap. To address that imbalance, state Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) helped launch the Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative (MEJC) in October 2023. The group presented its first report ...

On April 9, 2025, Defendant Connecticut prison officials lost their second attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed over the death of prisoner J’Allen Jones, 31, following an altercation with guards at Garner Correctional Institution on March 25, 2018.

Jones, who had schizophrenia, was having a psychotic episode when he reportedly ...

In a lawsuit filed by a former Florida prisoner who was released to die from prostate cancer that private prison healthcare giant Centurion allegedly ignored, officials with the company agreed to an undisclosed settlement and claims were dismissed on March 27, 2025. That left claims by Elmer Williams against other ...

by Douglas Ankney

Private prison and jail medical provider Wellpath, LLC has announced a plan to exit bankruptcy proceedings, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.56.] The plan offers some relief to prisoners or their survivors who have successfully sued Wellpath for causing their injuries or ...

Just before leaving office in January 2025, outgoing Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) removed 37 federal prisoners from death row, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.16.] But incoming Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) immediately directed his new Attorney General (AG), Pam Bondi, to look for ways to ...

On February 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) appointed former prisoner Alice Marie Johnson, 69, to serve as his pardon “czar,” making recommendations of federal prisoners that he may consider for clemency. Though not an official cabinet position in the President’s administration, Johnson’s job will pay a government salary ...

Faced with ongoing short-staffing after firing 2,000 prison guards for their wildcat strike, New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) Commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello announced on April 1, 2025, that the agency would grant limited early releases to a small portion of the state prison population, hoping to ...

On February 25, 2025, less than half of the physician positions budgeted for the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) were staffed. Ten doctors had resigned, been fired or put on leave in the previous year. The decimation of the physician workforce was followed by changes at the top, throwing into ...

On March 10, 2025, the last of four former Rikers Island Jail staffers was sentenced to federal prison for her role in a massive smuggling scheme at the New York City lockup. The group, including three guards and a program counselor, were nabbed along with a former contractor and a ...

A report released on January 10, 2025, by the Office of the Corrections Ombuds (OCO) of the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) counted 26 “unexpected fatalities” during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2024. A report released by DOC the prior month also raised questions about systemic problems ...

The last of 20 arrests was made on March 5, 2025, of Nevada state prisoners accused in a brawl that left three fellow prisoners dead at Ely State Prison. The state Department of Corrections (DOC) said at the time that nine prisoners were also transported for medical treatment after what ...

by Douglas Ankney

On October 11, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed dismissal of Connecticut prisoner’s complaint over an assault he suffered in a Virginia lockup where he was temporarily transferred five years earlier. The Court found that Joe Baltas raised a triable fact issue ...

The number of detainees waiting for competency treatment at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex jumped from 100 in 2024 to 127 by February 2025. The average length of stay has also risen, from 70 to 80 days, because the state’s four psychiatric hospitals are full.

While they wait, ...

According to an investigative report published on January 30, 2025, guards at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) accounted for nearly half of all use of taser weapons on detainees and prisoners in Pennsylvania. That revelation followed a lawsuit filed by a former detainee allegedly Tasered while handcuffed at the lockup. ...

by Eric Seligman and Brian Nam-Sonenstein

One of the ways that mass incarceration traps people in poverty is by raising the stakes of unemployment for all workers, creating immense obstacles to organizing for better terms of employment. Rather than alleviate poverty through jobs, housing, education, and healthcare, the U.S. uses ...

Struggling to keep a campaign promise to deport “millions” of migrants, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) announced shortly after his January 2025 inauguration the construction of new detention space for 30,000 people at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.38.] But ...

On September 20, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found “no room for doubt” that a mentally-ill Pennsylvania prisoner has a basic constitutional right not to be held in solitary confinement indefinitely—despite being sentenced to death. Defendant officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

Two recent studies highlight decreased cancer survival rates for those who’ve been incarcerated and their partners, too. The studies effectively connect abysmal prison healthcare to the lack of access to cancer screenings that accompanies poor health insurance after release from prison. Researcher Jingxuan Zhao, M.P.H., senior ...

Washington’s Pacific County agreed in state Court on November 22, 2024, to a $2.95 million settlement resolving claims by the survivors of Crystal R. Greenler, 38, who died of untreated pneumonia in the county lockup nearly two years earlier. Before the settlement, former jailer Patricia Rojas pleaded guilty to falling ...

At Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, a new “Inmate Safety Agreement” uncovered through a public records request on February 9, 2025, revealed that the state Department of Corrections (DOC) has offered incentives like a quarterly fish fry to prisoners for avoiding self-harm. The agreement also threatened vague “interventions” for noncompliance, ...

A report published by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) on September 6, 2024, found an inverse relationship between medical copays imposed on prisoners and their access to healthcare. That is, those incarcerated in lockups charging higher copays were less likely to seek treatment for medical issues, while those with ...

A suit filed in federal court for the District of New Jersey on February 19, 2025, accused officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) of failing to protect prisoner Phillip Kellerman from getting hold of the fatal dose of fentanyl that killed him at Northern State Prison (NSP) in ...

by Douglas Ankney

On February 7, 2025, California’s Sacramento County made a $600,000 offer of judgment that was accepted by the Plaintiffs in a suit filed over a detainee’s murder at the County lockup in 2019. The Estate of Bryan Debbs had earlier accepted another $600,000 settlement offer from the ...

When Missouri Gov. Michael Kehoe (R) signed HB 495 on March 26, 2025, authorizing a state takeover of policing in St. Louis, the bill included repeal of the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act (MIRA). Also known as “pay-to-stay,” it allowed the state to sue for funds in a prisoner’s trust account ...

Two New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) guards were charged with murder on April 16, 2025, in the death of prisoner Messiah Nantwi at Mid-State Correctional Facility. The mentally ill 22-year-old was sobbing in a shower where he was hiding from National Guard troops mustered during a ...

On July 8, 2024, New York prisoner Kerry Kotler finally achieved a small measure of justice from the state Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) officials whom he accused of planting incriminating evidence in his cell over 20 years earlier. Kotler is the rare prisoner exonerated of one conviction ...

In a ruling on August 9, 2024, the Kansas Supreme Court held that former state prisoner Robert W. Doelz could not recover damages from the state for his wrongful conviction because he had proved only that he was “legally innocent,” which the Court distinguished from “actual innocence” that it said ...

by Matt Clarke

On May 7, 2024, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $24 million settlement for two California men who were wrongly convicted as teenagers of a 1997 murder, based on an unreliable jailhouse snitch’s testimony and falsified evidence.

On June 28, 1997, John Klene and ...

by Douglas Ankney

For subjecting him to sexual harassment, the state of Missouri paid a jury award of more than $1.2 million in damages, plus legal fees and costs to former Kansas City Reentry Center Deputy Warden Bryant Holmes, after a state appellate court upheld the verdict on August 20, ...

Journalist Radley Balko published an interview on March 15, 2025, with five former state prisoners in Louisiana now employed as peer advocates with the Public Defender’s office in Orleans Parish. Known as the “redeem team,” the five men help facilitate communication and understanding between attorneys in the office and their ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit in federal court for the District of Columbia on December 20, 2024, challenging the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for treating sentence credits earned by prisoners towards early release under the First Step Act (FSA) as “optional.” The ...

Robert L. Roberson III was sentenced to death in Texas in 2003 for killing his two-year-old daughter, Nikki, whose death the previous year was attributed to “shaken baby syndrome.” Since then research has found symptoms attributed to the syndrome do not necessarily indicate homicide and can be found where there ...

The South County Correctional Entity, a jail shared by six cities in Washington’s King County and located in the Seattle suburb of Des Moines, recorded its sixth death in 11 months on February 1, 2025. Known locally as SCORE, the lockup was slammed for inadequate healthcare by a former nurse ...

Legal costs and fees awarded on January 6, 2025, nearly tripled a $100,000 jury verdict for New York state prisoner Crushaun Hundley in his retaliation claim against a pair of Elmira Correctional Facility guards. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Court upheld the verdict on August 21, ...

On April 10, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) announced his pick to assume control of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP): William K. “Billy” Marshall III, Commissioner of the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR).

The BOP has been leaderless since Trump assumed office in January 2025—the ...

The death of a woman during a conjugal visit with her husband incarcerated at California’s Mule Creek State Prison was ruled a homicide by the Coroner’s Bureau of the Amador County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) on March 17, 2025. David Brinson, 54, who is serving four life sentences at the lockup ...

One of two New York University (NYU) tenured faculty members barred from parts of its campus in December 2024 is a sociologist who has documented a link between the proliferation of American car culture and mass incarceration.

Andrew Ross and fellow professor Sonya Posmentier were declared persona non grata by ...

Prison healthcare giant Wellpath took a step closer toward exiting bankruptcy proceedings on April 15, 2025, when it announced a settlement reached with a group a notch below those senior creditors first in line for repayment. That group of junior creditors includes prisoners and their survivors who have successfully sued ...

In a ruling on March 26, 2025, the federal court for the Western District of Texas agreed that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) was likely violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by holding most state prisoners in cells that are not air-conditioned. However, the ...

When Lucas John Bellamy, 41, was booked into jail in Minnesota’s Hennepin County on July 18, 2022, he informed staff that he had swallowed a bag of drugs shortly before his arrest. He was taken to a hospital, where staff determined he was stable. He was then sent back to ...

In a memo dated February 25, 2025, acting federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director William Lothrop canceled the agency’s Transgender Offender Manual and ordered its removal from federal prison libraries and the BOP intranet. The move is the latest attempt to comply with an Executive Order issued by incoming Pres. ...

On March 3, 2025, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky denied a motion to dismiss Eighth Amendment violation and negligence claims lodged against jail medical contractor West Kentucky Correctional Healthcare LLC (WKCH) by a former prisoner whose baby was stillborn at the Madison County Detention Center.

Valentina ...

By late January 2025, a critical shortage of providers had stranded 418 detainees waiting for competency restoration in Missouri jails an average of 14 months each. The number wait-listed for the services had jumped from 300 a year earlier, when state Department of Mental Health (DMH) Director Valerie Huhn warned ...

A jury deadlocked in federal court for the Northern District of California on April 14, 2025, leading Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to declare a mistrial for Darrell Wayne Smith, 55, a former federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guard accused of sexually abusing prisoners at the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution in ...

Alabama: A Jefferson County Jail guard was briefly abducted and assaulted by detainee Reontay Harley, 33, on January 13, 2025. WBMA in Birmingham said that after Harley took the unnamed guard hostage inside a cell, responding jail Extraction Unit guards rescued their fellow guard and restrained the detainee. Both were ...