After it was signed into law in 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 147 § 15601 et seq., remained unused for a decade while standards were developed and implemented to curtail rape and sexual assaults at prisons and jails nationwide. At that time, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, submitted comments to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) criticizing the proposed standards and calling them flawed and insufficient.

That criticism proved prescient when a sexual abuse scandal erupted at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, in early 2022. As PLN reported then, there were so many federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) staffers accused of sexually assaulting prisoners—including coerced and non-consensual intercourse, oral sex, fondling and voyeurism—that the lockup earned a new nickname: the “rape club.” [See: PLN, May 2022, p.28.]

For 103 prisoners who sued BOP for the abuse that they suffered, the nightmare finally came to a resolution on December 18, 2024, when the federal court for the Northern District of California approved a nearly $116 million settlement—the largest payout in BOP history.

Ten Staffers Charged, Seven Convicted So Far

Although allegations of sexual misconduct by BOP staffers ...

Over the years Prison Legal News has reported extensively on the rape of prisoners around the country. In 35 years of publishing, about every 4- or 5-years prison systems have a major scandal at their local women’s prison where it comes to light that dozens of guards have raped or are raping scores or hundreds of women prisoners. For the past several years we have been reporting on the ongoing rapes, criminal prosecutions and civil litigation surrounding the massive rape of prisoners at the federal women’s prison in Dublin, California. This issue of PLN is a few days late because just as we were wrapping it up a few more guards were indicted and we updated the story with the details.

The Dublin rapes are unique in some respects. It has led to the biggest damages payout in the history of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). PLN has filed a FOIA request for a breakdown on the individual settlements and we will report it at a later date. Dozens of guards and staff, including the warden and chaplain have been charged and convicted of the rapes and dozens more investigations are still underway with more indictments coming. The biggest and ...

In December 2023, Massachusetts became the fifth state to provide free phone calls in its prisons and the first in all local jails. Video calling and e-messaging were also made available at no cost [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p. 15]. Those progressive reforms were the culmination of years of advocacy to reduce the excessive costs imposed on prisoners and their families simply to stay in touch, including efforts by the No Cost Calls Coalition.

The free phone calls and other communication options removed an “immense financial burden off some of the most disadvantaged households in the state,” declared Aaron Steinberg with Prisoners’ Legal Services. While the volume of calls from state Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities and jails more than doubled over the next year, the No Cost Calls legislation that resulted in free communications services also had unintended consequences.

Initially, there was a problem with supply and demand: too few phones for the increased number of prisoners who wanted to take advantage of the free calls, which led to fights. The distribution of tablets with a phone app in state prisons and some jails largely alleviated that issue but a larger one remained—the loss of lucrative phone revenue. ...

On June 18, 2024, City Commissioners in San Jose, California, voted to approve a settlement paying $12 million to Lionel Rubalcalva, 45, who spent 17 years wrongfully incarcerated for a 2002 gang shooting that he didn’t commit. 

Rubalcalva was arrested on April 8, 2002, for a drive-by shooting three days earlier that left 19-year-old Raymond Rodriguez paralyzed from the waist down. A Norteño street gang member, Rodriguez told detectives that he had most likely been targeted by members of the rival Sureño gang. Both he and his mother said they didn’t suspect Rubalcalva, who was not a rival and had once belonged to another Norteño group. Cell tower data also confirmed Rubalcalva’s alibi—that he was driving to a movie date 45 miles away in Hollister at the time of the shooting.

Nevertheless, police pressured ­Rodriguez and three others to testify that Rubalcalva was the shooter, after which the officials also falsely claimed that the identification was made without coercion. When Rodriguez later began to waiver, they paid him off, moving him and his mother to a nicer neighborhood—details that the office of Santa Clara County District Attorney George Kennedy never shared with Rubalcalva’s defense attorneys. 

Rubalcalva was convicted in ...

A guard pleaded guilty in June 4, 2025, in connection with the death of a man held at an Alabama jail who died in freezing conditions in January 2023. The guard, Braxton Kee, 23, pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law, and could face up to a year in prison and a fine up to $100,000. 

According to court documents, Tony Mitchell, 33, who was mentally ill, was arrested on January 12, 2023, after a relative requested a wellness check for him. When officers arrived at his house, they said he was talking about demons and portals to hell. Law enforcement said Mitchell then fired a weapon at an officer. 

For the two weeks he was booked at Walker County Jail, guards held Mitchell in a freezing cell that had no bathroom, bed, or running water. Court documents described Mitchell as “almost always naked, wet, cold, and covered in feces while lying on the cement floor without a mat or blanket.” 

According to an Associated Press report, Kee voiced concerns about Mitchell’s condition, but he did not take matters into his own hands when his concerns were dismissed. Mitchell died of hypothermia and sepsis due ...

On February 3, 2025, a former Massachusetts prisoner dismissed claims arising from a stillbirth she suffered while incarcerated at Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center (MRWCC). In return, Lidia Lech agreed to dismiss all claims over the tragedy that she had lodged against Hampden County Sheriff Nick Cocchi, whose office operated the lockup, as well as Dr. Dorothy Von Goeler and other staffers with Baystate Health, which was contractually obligated to provide healthcare to MRWCC prisoners. 

Lech was pregnant when she was imprisoned in October 2013. Because a uterine rupture during a previous pregnancy had resulted in a miscarriage, her pregnancy was considered high risk, and she was scheduled to deliver her baby by caesarian section in mid-January 2014. But in mid-December 2013, she began to complain that her baby was “withering away inside of her,” according to the complaint she later filed. In response, staff called her “overbearing,” she said. 

On January 2, 2014, Lech complained of vaginal bleeding to guard Natalie Cruz. When she then saw a nurse, Lech confided that she believed she was going into labor. Lech was then transported to a Baystate hospital, where staffers examined her and found that her baby was dead—from a ...

The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has long collected and published statistics on local jails nationwide, including the number of such facilities and how many people are booked into them each year. Who are these people and why are they jailed? On November 17, 2024, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a data-driven criminal justice reform organization, released a report that addressed those questions.

To delve beyond the raw numbers of jail admissions, PPI collaborated with the Jail Data Initiative (JDI) for more detailed demographic information. They found that an estimated 7.6 million people were booked into jails in 2023; however, only around 5.6 million were unique admissions. The rest were people jailed multiple times that year, which puts the total number of bookings into better perspective.

In regard to racial data, PPI reported that “Black people are overrepresented in every part of the criminal legal system, including jails, and this new data reveals that not only are Black people jailed at alarmingly high rates, but they are jailed again and again.” According to data compiled by JDI directly from online jail records, 32% of unique admissions and 29% of repeat admissions were of Black people—far above their 14% share ...

Over five years ago, in May 2020, Washington prisoners Michael Linear and Lonnie Burton filed a complaint in state court against prison telecom JPay LLC, which held the exclusive contract with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide prisoners their “sole means of access to any electronic content, email, games, music, or internet access.” 

JPay, the prisoners said, had “abused its monopoly by devising a scheme that baits inmates into purchasing excessively priced products and services, withholds the terms and conditions on those products and services from inmate review, and subjects inmates to a protracted sham trouble-shooting process that neither results in a repair or refund.”

As the prisoners noted, the firm’s kiosks provided access to the terms of service only after they clicked a button accepting them—at which point the kiosk “timed out” within two minutes, long before they had a chance to locate and read the relevant terms. Worse, one of those terms they were forced to accept before they could review it was an agreement to submit to arbitration to resolve any disputes—including challenging excessive fees, like a $8.95 for a $40.00 deposit into a prisoner’s account. 

Sure enough, JPay responded with a motion to ...

On May 27, 2025, President Donald Trump (R) issued an unconditional pardon for Scott Jenkins, 53, a former Northern Virginia sheriff who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for 12 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery. The pardon reportedly came hours before Jenkins was due to report at the prison. As PLN reported, Jenkins received a jury conviction in December 2024 on charges related to taking bribes totaling more than $75,000 [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.61]. 

The ex-sheriff accepted the money in the form of campaign contributions from at least eight people, including two undercover FBI agents. In exchange, he appointed several local businessmen as “auxiliary deputy sheriffs” within his department. These positions allowed Jenkins to issue the men badges, identification cards, guns, and body armor, as well as grant them the ability to avoid traffic tickets and carry concealed firearms without a permit. Two of the appointees—Frederick Gumbinner and James Metcalf—had previously pleaded guilty and were sentenced in March 2025 to three years’ probation along with fines of $100,000 and $75,000, respectively.

Throughout the trial, Jenkins maintained his innocence despite a trove of photos, audio recordings, and videos that prosecutors claimed showed him accepting the bribes. ...

A recently published study of cognitive impairment (CI) among older prisoners held by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) showed that over 35%—more than 1 in 3—suffered from some form of CI.

The study used a random and representative sample of 143 of the state’s 20,202 prisoners aged 55 and over at the time; their mean age was 61.3. Each participant took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a screening tool which involved a 15-minute interview with a masters-level psychologist. The MoCA has “high sensitivity for the detection of MCI [mild cognitive impairment] and dementia, especially in persons with low formal education,” the study report noted. Scores under 23 indicated CI while those under 18 indicated dementia, under MoCA scoring guidelines. 

The results also showed that 9.1% of TDCJ participants “met the threshold for dementia.” Blacks, Hispanics and those suffering from serious depression “had a higher prevalence of a positive screen for MCI or dementia.” Alarmingly, only 15.4% of those who screened positive for dementia had a prior diagnosis of dementia in their medical records, indicating a severe under diagnosis of dementia among Texas prisoners.

This was the first look at CI in a randomized study of older state ...

On July 23, 2024, the saga of the kiss heard ‘round the New Jersey judiciary came to an end when the state Supreme Court held that the failure of former prison guard Brian Ambroise to report his kiss with a prisoner—identified as “J.O.”—was sufficient to support his termination from employment with the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

In a videotaped interview on October 7, 2016, J.O. informed staffers with the Special Investigation Division (SID) at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility (EMCF) that she and Ambroise had a sexual relationship. J.O. stated that Ambroise kissed her and performed oral sex on her while the two of them were inside a storage closet. J.O. provided investigators with Q-tips that she had purportedly used to swab her mouth and vaginal area after the alleged incident. J.O. also informed the SID that Ambroise brought her contraband and passed notes between her and another prisoner.

Lt. Kristen Larsen and Det. Sgt. Aaron Lacey of the Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Office, along with SID Senior Investigator Michael Kubik and Principal Investigator Jerome Scott, then conducted a videotaped interview of Ambroise. Prior to the interview, Ambroise waived his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), ...

On January 30, 2025, the Supreme Court of Oregon held that prisoners seeking to state a claim for economic damages in the form of future lost income need not plead an “enforceable right” to future employment and that the lack of a legal right to employment is not an automatic preclusion to such a claim.

Prisoner Arnold R. Huskey sued the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) and others for breach of contract and civil rights violations. Among other things, Huskey sought damages based on lost future wages and employment opportunities. Years prior, Huskey sued DOC and obtained a settlement agreement that purportedly involved DOC orally agreeing not to retaliate against Huskey.

The settlement was the contract underlying the breach of contract action. The breach was based on DOC allegedly violating its oral promise by creating, without Huskey’s permission, training videos that included footage of him and portrayed him in a negative manner. As a result, Huskey suffered $11,640 in economic damages due to DOC officials denying him job assignments, training, and other income-generating opportunities.

The trial court accepted the defendant’s argument to dismiss the action, finding that economic damages could not be pleaded by Huskey because Article I, section 41(3) ...

At around 12:30 a.m. on May 16, 2025, 10 detainees escaped from a New Orleans, Louisiana jail through a small rectangular hole in a cell wall. Images showed a metal toilet and sink torn from the wall; etched above the hole was a smiley face with its tongue out and taunting messages that read “We Innocent” and “To (sic) easy LOL.” The brazen escape from the Orleans Parish Justice Center went undetected until a routine morning headcount more than seven hours after the men had sprinted out of the facility and into a nearby neighborhood. 

By that evening, three of the escapees—Kendall Myles, 20, Robert Moody, 21, and Dkenan Dennis, 24—had been captured. In a press conference, Orleans Parish Sherriff Susan Hutson claimed that they were able to escape due to “defective locks,” and that it would have “almost impossible” for them to flee the facility without outside help. 

Three jail employees were immediately placed on leave and, in the following weeks, at least 16 people were arrested for allegedly aiding the escapees. Those arrested included Sterling Williams, 33—a jail maintenance worker who, although perhaps unaware of the plot, admitted to shutting off the water that allowed the toilet ...

A former West Virginia guard who failed to intervene while fellow guards beat to death pretrial detainee Quantez Burks, 37, was sentenced on June 9, 2025, for her role in the 2022 assault. 

Ashley Toney, 25, got six and a half years in prison and an additional three years of supervised release from the federal court for the Southern District of West Virginia. As PLN reported, five other guards who participated in the attack have also been charged. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.39.] One former lieutenant, Chad Lester, 35, was sentenced in May 2025 to 17 years in prison after being convicted of three counts of obstruction of justice. 

According to the federal Department of Justice, Toney and other guards at Southern Regional Jail in the town of Beaver brought Burks into an interview room, handcuffed him, and closed the door while multiple fellow guards beat Burks. He died on March 1, 2022. 

Toney pleaded guilty on August 8, 2024 to deprivation of rights under color of law resulting in physical injury. “The defendant’s inaction led to the death of a 37-year-old man, and afterwards she attempted to shield herself and fellow officers from being held accountable ...

On June 9, 2025, the federal court for the District of Columbia dismissed a class action lawsuit that challenged the way the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) treated sentence credits earned by prisoners toward early release under the First Step Act (FSA), P.L. 115-391. Plaintiff prisoners claimed that the credits are mandatory, but BOP prevailed in its view that they are “optional.” 

Signed into law in 2018 during the first Trump administration, the FSA was designed as a sweeping, bipartisan bill to “promote rehabilitation, lower recidivism, and reduce excessive sentences in the federal prison system,” according to The Sentencing Project. Among other provisions, the law created a system of earned time credits that allowed prisoners to cut time off of their sentences by participating in certain programs. As PLN reported, the FSA also gave the BOP a little over two years to implement this system as well as allow some low- and medium-risk offenders to be placed in halfway houses or other forms of pre-release custody. [See: PLN, May 2025, p. 52.] The BOP, however, failed to adhere to this timeline—and, instead of viewing the credits as compulsory, interpreted them as optional. 

In response, in partnership with Jenner ...

Nashville-area attorney Daniel Horwitz will no longer be barred from publicly criticizing a private prison after the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee amended its rules in May 2025. 

The development comes three years after a judge issued a gag order against Horwitz for commenting publicly on a wrongful death lawsuit he pursued against the private prison company CoreCivic. Among other social media posts, Horwitz had written on X that “massively deficient and constitutionally non-compliant staffing” in CoreCivic facilities “is just business as fucking usual.” 

CoreCivic successfully made the case to a federal magistrate judge that the statements were prejudicial. The gag order required Horwitz, a civil rights attorney who had filed numerous lawsuits against CoreCivic, to delete past posts criticizing CoreCivic and to refrain from making public statements about the company. 

As PLN reported, Horwitz, represented by Institute for Justice, sued in federal court to challenge the gag order. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.56.] But while the case was still pending, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee voluntarily changed its rules in May 2025—scrapping the policy Horwitz challenged and ending his gag order. 

“I’m thrilled that my First ...

On April 23, 2024, the mother of a deceased Missouri prisoner prevailed on appeal against the state Department of Corrections (DOC), which a lower court had found knowingly violated the Missouri Sunshine Law when it denied her records about her son and his suicide, awarding her $59,508.99 in damages and legal fees.

Jahi Hynes, 27, was eight years into a 13-year term for burglary when he fatally hanged himself at Southeast Correctional Center (SECC) in Charleston on April 4, 2021. But it was a cascade of failures by staffers with DOC and its contracted medical provider, Corizon Health—now YesCare—that were ultimately blamed in the wrongful death suit filed by the dead prisoner’s mother. 

Before she could file that complaint, however, Willa Hynes first had to battle DOC for more information than the phone call she received the day her son died, when a staffer told her that he had “hurt himself” and died, and that “the DOC could release no further information regarding the circumstances of his death.”

After months of fruitless email exchanges, Hynes retained counsel and filed a request pursuant to the state’s Sunshine Law for all records relating to her son, including surveillance camera footage covering ...

On June 26, 2024, New York City’s constructive denial of records from its Department of Correction (DOC) was vacated by a state court. Calling that a violation of the state Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), the Supreme Court of New York for New York County ordered the DOC to produce the requested materials. Because petitioner was an attorney, it also held that the DOC was liable for attorney’s fees.

On July 12, 2023, petitioner Cyrus Joubin, from his eponymous law office, requested DOC’s rules, procedures and policies in effect on October 10, 2017, regarding guards’ responsibilities “to protect inmates from assaults by other inmates” and “to supervise and monitor DOC housing units to prevent violence by inmates against other inmates.” The request further sought policies for conducting investigations into such assaults and violence, as well as investigations into trip-and-fall accidents. It was further refined to include both the Brooklyn Detention Center (BDC) and the Rikers Island jail complex. Identities of guards and other employees on duty that day and their duty rosters were also requested.

When the DOC Records Access Officer (RAO) denied the requests, Joubin then turned to the Records Access Appeals Office (RAAO). But he received no decision ...

On December 23, 2024, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, affirmed the grant of qualified immunity (QI) to defendant officials with the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) in the claim of a now-dead Georgia prisoner who suffered epileptic seizures and injury after his medication was withheld at Walker State Prison.

The panel’s decision followed a rehearing of Plaintiff’s earlier appeal in the case by the full Eleventh Circuit sitting en banc on July 10, 2024. Though the ruling marked the beginning of the end for the Estate of the prisoner, David Henegar, the Court’s decision is nonetheless important for other prisoners in the Eleventh Circuit in that it announced a new framework for demonstrating the subjective component of a deliberate indifference claim.

Henegar, then 39, was diagnosed with epilepsy and then denied prescribed anti-seizure medication over four consecutive days in August 2016, leaving him to suffer two seizures and permanent brain damage. He filed suit against DOC officials, but the federal court for the Northern District of Georgia granted Defendants QI and dismissed his claim, a decision affirmed by a panel of the Eleventh Circuit in 2023—only to be withdrawn later that same year ...

In 2020, the Arizona chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and two state prisoners filed a federal class-action suit, challenging the state’s use of privately-operated prisons on a variety of constitutional grounds. The district court dismissed the case for failure to state a claim in January 2022. Plaintiffs appealed, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision on May 21, 2024, rejecting each of the Plaintiffs’ claims.

After first determining that the NAACP had organizational standing to sue, the appellate court summarized the arguments raised in the complaint: “That private prisons are inferior to state-run prisons because they are motivated by profit, leading them to cut costs and resulting in diminished safety and security as well as reduced programing and services.” The profit motive also provided a financial incentive “to keep prisoners incarcerated longer … by manipulating disciplinary proceedings.” 

Around 20% of Arizona state prisoners are held in privatized facilities, but the appellate Court found that the Plaintiffs had not “plausibly alleged” that incarceration in private prisons violates their due process rights. Serving time in for-profit facilities did not constitute an “atypical and significant hardship” ...

On November 13, 2024, Nevada prisoner Anthony Thomas Chernetsky finally secured what he had fought over 18 years to get from the state Department of Corrections (DOC): Permission to use natural anointing oils and build a sweatlodge to practice his Wiccan faith.

In May 2006, Chernetsky sued the state and several DOC officials under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, alleging that DOC’s AR [Administrative Regulation] 810 violated his rights to practice his faith—which required natural anointing oils, and which AR 810’s categorical ban on those oils substantially burdened.

In its long and convoluted history, the case went twice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Chernetsky prevailed, at least in part, both times. On remand to the federal court for the District of Nevada, Defendants’ motion for summary judgment was granted, while a cross-motion for summary judgment filed by Chernetsky was denied. He appealed again.

Returning to the appellate Court a third time, Defendants claimed that DOC had removed its ban on anointing oils, thereby mooting Chernetsky’s claim. But the Ninth Circuit found this argument “without merit.” The revised AR 810 made only synthetic oils available, while still denying the ...

For decades, prisoners at Mule Creek State Prison outside of Sacramento, California have raised the alarm about the drinking water. Based on interviews with over 100 prisoners, ex-prisoners, family members, and prison staff, reporting from The Appeal and Type Investigations found that there have been serious issues with Mule Creek’s tap water for at least 20 years. According to these sources, the water tastes “like chemicals or metal,” smells “foul” and “fishlike,” and appears “dirty brown” or “foggy.” Many prisoners have reported illnesses while locked up at Mule Creek, including forms of cancer and kidney and liver problems that are linked to exposure to environmental pollutants. Contractors have gotten sick while on the job. And guards typically bring bottled water to work. 

The source of Mule Creek’s contaminated water dates back to its construction in 1985, when 1,700 housing units were built alongside on-site facilities for coffee roasting, meat packing, welding, and dry cleaning, among others. These industries produce toxic chemicals, and prisoners say the runoff was dumped down the drain for years without being treated. And as Mule Creek grew, the problem only got worse. A series of reports and environmental lawsuits led to a 2023 consent decree in ...

On June 5, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) tapped Tennessee businessman Joshua J. Smith, 50, to serve as Deputy Director of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Smith, whom Trump pardoned in his first term, is the first former prisoner hired to hold any position at the prison agency. He will serve under BOP Director William Marshall, the former chief of the West Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC), who was appointed in April 2025, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.54.]

Smith’s criminal case stemmed from his 1996 arrest in Nashville on charges that eventually included 22 people accused of conspiring to import marijuana & cocaine from Texas. Smith pleaded guilty in April 1998. That August, after five of his co-conspirators also pleaded guilty, the government moved to depart from sentencing guidelines for Smith, citing his “substantial assistance.” He was then fined $12,500 and sentenced to five years in boot camp at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Manchester, Kentucky. See: United States v. Smith, USDC (M.D. Tenn.), Case No. 3:96-cr-00152.

When co-conspirator Curtis Barnes lost an appeal to his 114-month sentence on March 16, 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit noted that Smith ...

On August 8, 2024, the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois entered judgment for the estate of a former state prisoner after a jury awarded $22.5 million in damages for 22 years he spent wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. 

The verdict arrived too late for the prisoner, William Amor, who died in January 2024 before the case went to trial. During those proceedings, the Court heard that Amor was convicted of events that occurred on September 10, 1995, at his home in Naperville. At the time he was 39 and living in a condominium with his 18-year-old wife, Tina, and her disabled mother, Marianne Miceli, who owned the condo. That evening, Amor and Tina went to a drive-in movie. Less than 20 minutes after they left, Miceli called 911 to report a fire and said that she had no means of escape. She subsequently died from smoke inhalation.

The resulting investigation quickly pointed towards money as a motive for arson, after close family friend Marilyn Glisson told detectives that she overheard Amor and Tina talking about a life insurance policy that needed to remain in place. She further stated that Amor was manipulative, used others ...

Sheriff Ryan Sperling of Washington’s Mason County signed an agreement on September 19, 2024, settling allegations by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) that the county jail was not complying with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 § 12101 et seq., in providing treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) to those incarcerated there.

Title II of the ADA provides that “no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity.” However, the term “individual with a disability” specifically excludes anyone “currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs, when the covered entity acts on the basis of such use.” Except that “a public entity shall not deny health services, or services provided in connection with drug rehabilitation, to an individual on the basis of that individual’s current illegal use of drugs, if the individual is otherwise entitled to such services.” 

The Settlement Agreement specified that “[m]ethadone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine are medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat OUD.” ...

On November 19, 2024, the State of Wisconsin paid $42,000 to settle a trio of lawsuits filed by a state prisoner making claims of excessive force and deliberate indifference to his medical needs.

Waupun Correctional Institution prisoner Kurtis D. Jones engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with an unspecified staffer in the Psychological Services Unit (PSU), but the relationship “ended badly,” he wrote in a letter to PLN.

According to his complaints, he got possession of a toothpaste tube cap in March 2022 and used it to cut at his arm on his artery. When guards found him, they doused him with O.C. spray to force him to let a nurse treat his wound, after which they refused to let him shower it off before strapping him onto a restraint table, he said. He was then left tied down for the next 40 hours. As Jones explained regarding the PSU staffer’s involvement in his ordeal, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

When finally removed from the table, Jones was placed under direct observation for threats of self-harm. However, in February 2023, he was allegedly allowed access to razors and—no surprise—used them to cut himself, slicing into two arteries ...

On September 23, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed a grant of summary judgment to a Rhode Island Department of Corrections (DOC) guard who pepper-sprayed a restrained prisoner and then delayed decontamination for nearly a half-hour. The Court’s ruling revived both federal and state-law claims based on the alleged excessive use of force against the prisoner, Joseph Segrain.

His federal civil rights complaint recalled events that ocurred on June 28, 2018, at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Instituition (ACI). Segrain, who was housed in ACI’s Disciplinary Confinement Unit, was escorted to an area know as the “flats” for shower and recreation time. There a guard issued Segrain shower supplies that included a brush, mirror, and razor.

About five minutes after Segrain arrived at the flats, guard Ronald Meleo informed him that he would have only 15 minutes out-of-cell time. A debate ensued as to whether Segrain was entitled to more time and whether he could file a grievance. Based on Segrain’s alleged failure to leave the flats, Meleo called for assistance.

Five other guards, including Walter Duffy and James Glendinning, responded to the call. At Duffy’s direction, Glendinning handcuffed Segrain, who complied without incident. When handcuffed, ...

Under a limited writ of mandamus issued by the Supreme Court of Ohio on October 17, 2024, the Columbiana County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) must obtain records from the private contractor operating the county jail and disclose them pursuant to a public records request. Sheriff Brian McLaughlin had argued that the records were in the custody of Correctional Solutions Group (CSG), which as a private firm is not subject to such a request. But the high Court called foul on that feint and ordered him to get the records and disclose them to the requester, now-state prisoner Terry Brown, or else certify within 21 days that no responsive records exist.

In August 2023, Brown submitted two public records requests to the CCSO, in care of Sheriff McLaughlin. His first request listed 10 items seeking “[e]mployees’ names and positions held while working at the Columbiana County Jail during the time period of January 1, 2017, through July 1, 2018.” Brown’s second request listed another 15 items pertaining to current “[p]olicy information on Inmate Intake/Booking and Retention of records,” to include the “booking of inmates showing signs of intoxication, impairment, injury, or psychological problems.” In both requests, Brown also sought “related records-retention policies.” ...

When 27-year-old Dashawn Jenkins died in New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex on April 1, 2025, it was the fifth detainee death of the year and at least the 38th since Mayor Eric Adams (D) took office in January 2022. The persistently rising death toll was a major reason that the federal court for the Southern District of New York cited in deciding to appoint a “remediation manager” to take over control and operation of the troubled lockup.

The actual number of deaths may be higher; a July 2023 report by City & State counted at least 120 deaths among those incarcerated at the jail between 2014 and 2022, though the City Department of Correction (DOC) reported just 68 during the same period.

Two more detainee deaths in 2024 were blamed on staff failures to follow policy, according to a report released on December 30, 2024, by the City’s Board of Corrections (BOC), which provides oversight to DOC.

One of those who died, Charizma Jones, 23, was admitted to the lockup in September 2023 and rapidly exhibited a “radical and unusual change in her behavior, which included hallucinating,” the report recalled. From September 16, 2023, through April 16, 2024, ...

Before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) took office, his “border czar” Tom Homan worked as a consultant for GEO Group, Inc., one of the largest operators of immigrant detention facilities in the country. 

The revelation, as the Washington Post reported, raises questions about the influence that private sector companies could wield as the administration rolls out its crackdown on immigration. According to the report, Homan received more than $5,000—although his pay could have been much higher—for work conducted in connection with GEO Care, a division of the company that monitors releases and offers rehabilitation services for prisoners. 

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to deport up to 20 million people from the country—nearly double the estimated population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Since his inauguration, Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with the rate of arrests and deportations conducted by federal immigration authorities. 

In an effort to ramp up deportations, the administration set an aggressive new goal in May 2025 of 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests per day. To keep up that pace of detentions, federal authorities have turned to already overcrowded federal prisons and local jails to imprison people targeted by immigration raids—and ...

In early May 2025, the Colorado Legislature approved a bill that would increase visitation rights for incarcerated people. Signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, the bill, HB25-1013, ends a policy in the state in which “inmate social visiting” can be canceled or withheld by the head of a facility as a form of punishment. While the bill still allows the DOC to shape the rules around visitations, it created a process to file a grievance if prisoners are denied visitation under the requirements of the bill. “Regular visits, phone calls, and moments of connection empower families to support their loved ones’ journey toward rehabilitation,” said state Senate President James Coleman (D), the bill’s sponsor. 

HB25-1013, being limited to banning restricting visitations as punishment, would likely not have an impact on the situation at an institution like the jail in Boulder County, where in-person visits have been curtailed since the COVID-19 pandemic, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, July 2025, p.44.]  

Additional source: Colorado Newsline

On September 3, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) for a pair of Maine jailers whom a prisoner accused of violating her civil rights by helping themselves to a good look at her naked body during a stay at a local hospital to deliver a baby.

Jaden Brown was pregnant when she began serving a 15-month sentence at the Cumberland County Jail (CCJ) in July 2018. On February 10, 2019, Brown went into labor and was transported at around 11 a.m. to the Maine Medical Center (MMC). There she gave birth to a baby girl at around 1 a.m. the next morning.

CCJ policy provided that jail guards are not allowed in “the delivery room when (a prisoner) is giving birth.” That policy was consistent with Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 30-A, § 1582(4), which provides that “[w]hen a prisoner … is admitted to a medical facility … for labor or childbirth, a corrections officer may not be present in the room during labor or childbirth unless specifically requested by medical personnel.” 

No such request was made while Brown was at MMC. But Brown had invited another guard who was ...

A Massachusetts high school student, Marcelo Gomes da Silva, was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while driving to volleyball practice in June 2025. The teenager, who was released on bond after six days amid community outcry, described harrowing conditions at the detention facility. 

Gomes da Silva’s lawyer, Robin Nice, said the 18-year-old was held in a room with more than 20 other men, many of whom were twice his age. Nice said Gomes da Silva was not given privacy to use the bathroom and was not permitted to shower in the six days he was held in detention. The teenager called the experience “humiliating” and said he did not immediately understand why he had been arrested. 

Immigration authorities pulled Gomes da Silva over because he was driving his father’s car, and they intended to arrest his father. Instead, Gomes da Silva, who immigrated to the United States from Brazil at age seven, was ensnared in an operation never intended to target him. “While ICE officers never intended to apprehend Gomes da Silva, he was found to be in the United States illegally and subject to removal proceedings, so officers made the arrest,” said U.S. Department of ...

On June 1, 2025, the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed a list of sanctuary cities it had highlighted on its website, after the National Sheriffs’ Association complained that its publication could jeopardize local law enforcement agencies’ relationship with federal agencies. 

The president of the association, Kieran Donahue, described DHS’s publication as “a list of alleged noncompliant sheriffs in a manner that lacks transparency and accountability.” DHS had previously published a list of sanctuary cities on its website after Trump claimed the lack of cooperation between state and federal law enforcement on immigration policy amounted to a “lawless insurrection.”

Democratic officials in cities including Chicago, Boston, Denver, and New York appeared in March 2025 before congress, where they argued that so-called “sanctuary policies”—which typically bar local law enforcement from assisting with federal immigration enforcement—make communities safer. They noted that law enforcement agencies in their jurisdictions do not interfere with federal enforcement. 

Trump has since ramped up his efforts to crack down on blue cities whose immigration policies depart from his own. After a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles spurred protests there in June 2025, Trump ordered U.S. Marines and national guardsmen to ...

John Daulton, 61, survived less than a day after he was booked into Kentucky’s Kenton County Detention Center on May 13, 2023. Arrested for a probation violation, he didn’t cooperate during the intake process and was placed in a segregation cell. After becoming agitated he was put on suicide watch, though he denied being suicidal.

The next day another prisoner, Johnathan Maskiell, 32, who also was on suicide watch, was put in the same cell with Daulton. Maskiell “brutally assaulted” his elderly cellmate, then stomped on his head several times. Daulton suffered brain damage; he lapsed into a coma and died a week later at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

Maskiell was subsequently charged with murder and with being a persistent felony offender; he pleaded guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced to 25 years.

Daulton’s daughter, Tonya Jones, on behalf of his estate, filed suit in federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in December 2023 against Kenton County and deputy jailers Jared Capps and Kristin Wheher, who made the decision to cell the men together. The complaint further alleged the facility’s policy required jail staff to check on Daulton’s cell every 10 minutes, but they failed ...

In Tennessee, a state law—T.C.A. § 40-27-101—allows prisoners to apply for clemency in the form of commutation of their sentence or a pardon. When the Board of Parole receives an application, it is supposed to make a recommendation to the governor as to whether clemency should be granted or denied. The final decision belongs solely to the governor under Article III, Sec. 6 of Tennessee’s constitution. In practice, however, this hasn’t always been the case.

Tennessee prisoner William Lanier, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, applied for clemency in June 2022. He sought commutation to reduce his sentence to 15 to 25 years with lifetime parole supervision. The Board denied his application more than a year later, after deciding that his case did “not merit a hearing.” Importantly, no recommendation was made to the governor.

Lanier then filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in Davidson County Chancery Court, arguing that his clemency application met the applicable criteria for commutation and that the Board “summarily denied” it without making a nonbinding recommendation to the governor, in violation of state law. The Board moved to dismiss Lanier’s petition, but the motion was denied, and the court ordered ...

A former Arkansas police chief who was convicted of rape and murder was recaptured on June 6, 2025, two weeks after escaping prison. The state Department of Corrections said Grant Hardin escaped dressed as a prison guard in “makeshift” clothing. According to an affidavit, he “impersonated a corrections officer in dress and manner, causing a corrections officer operating a secure gate to open the gate.” Authorities released a photo that appeared to show Hardin dressed in black and pushing a cart with wooden pallets on it.

Hardin’s escape triggered a multi-agency manhunt, with state police, border patrol agents and the FBI getting involved. The incident drew widespread attention, in part because Hardin had gained notoriety as the subject of a 2023 HBO Max documentary titled Devil in the Ozarks. The former Police Chief of Gateway City began his career in law enforcement as a cop in 1990; he worked for numerous police departments in Arkansas, jumping from one position to another before landing a job as a guard in Fayetteville, where he admitted to murdering Gateway city water employee James Appleton in 2017. 

After submitting a guilty plea, officials obtained and analyzed genetic samples from Hardin, which linked him to ...

When New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R) signed HB 592 into law on March 25, 2025, she also goosed the state’s incarceration rate by giving back pretrial detention power to state judges and reducing the leniency and flexibility that had been provided to those arrested for suspected crimes by an overhaul of the state’s bail laws in 2018.

Ayotte framed the bill reforming bail reform as a necessary public safety measure, eliminating “a revolving door that is putting our law enforcement in danger, that is putting average citizens… in danger.” But was that really true?

State lawmakers adopted the 2018 reforms to reduce the number of people held in jail to await trial simply because they were too poor to afford bail. Such wealth-based incarceration has the pernicious effect of piling on punishments for poverty, since loss of freedom often results in lost employment and then lost housing—even lost custody of children.

But opponents of the 2018 measure claimed it led to the release of those who then re-offended. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called foul on that, noting that the law allowed police and prosecutors to make a case for jailing pretrial detainees—something that ...

Like many local lockups, Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County Jail (MCJ) imposes restrictions on the number and types of books and periodicals that prisoners and detainees can receive. As of July 2024, MCJ’s mail policy required periodicals to be “mailed directly from the authorized publishers or approved vendors.” Books had to be mailed from an approved publisher, too, though there was only one on the approved list: Penguin Random House.

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, distributes dozens of books—most of which it does not publish itself—to correctional facilities nationwide, including federal and state prisons in Wisconsin. Between May 2022 and April 2024, HRDC sent books, magazines, brochures and letters to numerous people incarcerated at MCJ. In total, 58 of those mailings were rejected and returned. No notice of the censorship was provided by jail officials, nor any opportunity to appeal the rejections.

HRDC filed suit in federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin and moved for a preliminary injunction (PI). Raising claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the nonprofit argued that the jail’s mail policy frustrated its mission “by unconstitutionally prohibiting delivery of its publications to prisoners.” Jail officials then revised ...

Former New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) guard Joshua Bartlett pleaded guilty on May 30, 2025, to helping cover up the March 1 killing of prisoner Messiah Nantwi at Mid-State Correctional Facility by fellow guards who beat the man to death. 

Prosecutors said guards beat Nantwi while he was handcuffed and continued to beat him while he was recovering from the assault in the prison infirmary. “As a result of the numerous beatings by defendants and their fellow correctional officers, incarcerated individual Messiah Nantwi died due to massive head trauma and numerous other injuries to his body,” the indictment said. The officers “demonstrated depraved indifference” to his life, according to the indictment.

As reported by the New York Times, other prisoners said Nantwi had been beaten so severely he was unrecognizable. “Mr. Nantwi’s death is a tragedy and we extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), who directed the head of DOCCS to fire guards allegedly involved with the beating.

Bartlett, who was the first of 10 guards charged in connection with the fatal beating to plead guilty, admitted to two felonies: hindering prosecution and falsifying ...

In a ruling on November 11, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected the amended compassionate release policy published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) and declared that a Pennsylvania prisoner was not eligible for early release based on Congress’s nonretroactive statutory amendments that decrease penalties for crimes.

In 2003, then 22-year-old Daniel Rutherford committed two armed robberies in Philadelphia, leading to his conviction for numerous felonies, including two counts of using a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1). At the time of his sentencing, the penalty for the first violation of § 924(c) was a mandatory term of seven years in prison, and each subsequent violation carried an enhanced mandatory term of 25 years to run consecutively. As a result, Rutherford received a 32-year sentence for the two §924(c) violations alone. The district court imposed a term of 125 months on the remaining convictions to run consecutively, bumping his total sentence to roughly 42.5 years.

But in 2018, Congress amended § 924(c) when it passed the First Step Act (FSA), Public L. No. 115-391, 132 Stat. 5194 (2018). Prior to that amendment, defendants like Rutherford faced the 25-year ...

A prisoner at the center of the 2007 decision by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) to raise the bar for executing people who are mentally ill died in June 2025. Scott Panetti, 67, who was sentenced to death in Texas for killing the parents of his second wife in 1992, suffered schizophrenia and had experienced psychotic episodes throughout his life, starting at age 20.

During his murder trial in 1995, Panetti wore a cowboy outfit, rambled about subjects like bull riding and told the courtroom his father resembled Colonel Sanders. Observers described the scene as disturbing and bizarre; a standby counsel called the episode a “judicial farce.” In the landmark decision reached his case, Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930 (2007), SCOTUS raised the bar for the death penalty to prohibit executions of people who lack a “rational understanding” of their sentence. Whether or not Panetti met the criteria was the subject of a court fight that lasted years.

Texas prosecutors, who argued in support of executing Panetti, claimed that he faked his symptoms. On the same day that he was scheduled to be put to death in 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ...

For more than four years, beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Boulder County Jail in Boulder, Colorado has remained closed to in-person visitations. Although prisons have returned to allowing visitors, many jails have yet to re-instate in-person access. At Boulder County Jail, 85% of the jail’s population is awaiting a sentence and the average time being locked up there is 22 days, although that number is skewed by some who are only caged for one night. 

Video visitation is available at the jail, but detainees and their friends and families have found it to be a poor replacement for in-person visits. For one, the calls can be expensive. What’s more, the quality is often low, with users reporting calls frequently being dropped. As Wanda Bertram, of the Prison Policy Initiative, told The Boulder Weekly, lacking a consistent means to interact with individuals on the outside can take its toll on mental health. “You can’t get a very clear picture if you’re on a video call of the shape that your loved one is in,” Bertram said. “That makes it very different from seeing this person face-to-face.” 

A study on jail visitation policies conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative ...

On January 30, 2025, a jury in South Carolina’s Richland County Court of Common Pleas, Fifth Judicial Circuit, awarded $250,000 to a state prisoner who accused the state Department of Corrections (DOC) of gross negligence in failing to rein in a guard who assaulted him. 

Prisoner Daniel Tyler Huneycutt’s allegations involved an incident that occurred at the Tyger River Correctional Institute (TRCI) on May 14, 2019. Huneycutt, who was transferred to TRCI the week before, went to the kiosk to send a job assignment request to his case manager. But there was a formal count then underway. Cpl. Vasily Chernyak, Jr. came into the dorm and ordered him return to his cell, informing Huneycutt that he must remain there during count.

Huneycutt apologized, stating that he was unaware of the requirement. But as he was returning to his cell, “Chernyak blocked his way,” the prisoner’s complaint recalled. The guard then “put his chemical munition canister one to two inches from [Huneycutt’s] face,” spraying its contents “directly [into Huneycutt’s] left eye.” Another guard, Sgt. McMorris, ordered Chernyak to stop, but the guard sprayed Huneycutt at least two additional times.

While Huneycutt was obtaining medical treatment, Chernyak taunted him about how “good” ...

Demetric D. Scott, 52, is facing criminal charges in Milwaukee, Wisconsin after forging letters threatening Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) under the name of an undocumented immigrant. Scott, in sending a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, attempted to frame Ramon Morales Reyes, a Mexican-born dishwasher set to testify against Scott in an armed robbery and aggravated battery case in July 2025. 

Before the forgery was revealed, Reyes, 54, was arrested on May 21, 2025, after dropping off his child at school. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced Reyes’s arrest in a statement, saying that he intended to assassinate Trump and “promised to self-deport” after the act. The statement included an image of a letter handwritten in English along with Reyes’s photo. Reyes’s attorneys, however, soon pointed out that their client could not have written the letter as he cannot fluently read or write in English. 

In a criminal complaint charging Scott with felony witness intimidation, identity theft, and two counts of bail jumping, detectives claim that they listened to calls he made from jail in which he confessed to the plot. “And the judge will agree ‘cause if he gets picked up by ICE, there won’t be a ...

On February 24, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed judgment that the “postcard-only” policy for periodicals and books at Arkansas’ Baxter County Jail and Detention Center constituted a de facto blanket ban on publications in violation of the First Amendment rights of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News. The Court further affirmed an award of $259,350 in attorney fees and costs to HRDC.

HRDC sued Baxter County in 2017 to enjoin the jail’s policy prohibiting all detainee mail except for legal mail and postcards. After a three-day trial in April 2019, the federal court for the Western District of Arkansas found the policy was reasonably related to legitimate penological interests and did not violate HRDC’s First Amendment rights. HRDC appealed.

The Eighth Circuit reversed and remanded the case, citing the second of four factors that must be considered when balancing prison and jail censorship with the First Amendment rights of those incarcerated and those who would communicate with them. As outlined in Turner v. Safely, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), courts must consider whether a restriction has a valid, rational connection to a legitimate penological purpose, whether ...

A central Florida sheriff was arrested and charged in June 2025 in connection with a money laundering and illegal gambling operation that allegedly generated more than $20 million in profits. According to the office of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R), the case revolves around an alleged money laundering operation involving an unauthorized gambling house known as both Fusion Social Club and The Eclipse, which former Sheriff Marcos Lopez helped operate. By executive order, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) appointed Florida Highway Patrol’s central regional chief, Christopher Blackmon, to replace Lopez. 

Long before his arrest in connection with alleged money laundering and illegal gambling, Lopez was dogged by controversy. The sheriff, who touted his law-and-order approach to policing, had been previously accused of receiving a nude photo of a coworker, overseeing officers who used excessive force in policing nonviolent crime, such as shoplifting, and lying about inappropriate social media posts showing a photograph of the corpse of a minor.

Officials accused Lopez of using his position of authority to hide his actions; typically, the county sheriff could have used his power to shut down an illegal gambling operation. The investigation into Lopez’s alleged indiscretions was a joint effort of the Florida ...

On September 18, 2024, four men, all current or former prisoners incarcerated within the custody of the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC), sued the agency and Director Bryan P. Stirling in the Court of Common Pleas for the Seventh Judicial Circuit in Spartanburg, alleging eight causes of action related to the DOC’s failure to pay the “prevailing wage” for work they performed for private industries while they were employed under the DOC’s Industries program.

That program is certified under the federal Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). According to the National Correctional Industries Association, PIECP “exempts certified federal, state, local, and tribal departments of corrections from normal restrictions on the sale of offender-made goods in interstate commerce.” By lifting restrictions, it permits them “to sell offender-made goods to the Federal Government in amounts exceeding the $10,000 maximum normally imposed on such transactions.”

The four prisoners, Damon Jones, Jason Turmon, Ronnie McCoy, and Kevin Casey, alleged in their complaint that they were unlawfully paid just $7.25 an hour, which has been South Carolina’s minimum wage for three decades, instead of the federally required “prevailing wage.” As the complaint recalled, PIECP programs are supposed to place prisoners “in realistic work environments, ...

Three former jail guards from Passaic County, New Jersey could face years in prison after they pleaded guilty on May 21, 2025, to assaulting a detainee and lying about it. The guards, Jose Gonzalez, Donald Vinales, and Lorenzo Bowden, admitted to taking a detainee—whose identity has not been released—to an area of the facility, known within the jail as a “blind spot” given its lack of cameras, where they hit him repeatedly while he was handcuffed. 

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said that after beating the detainee, the guards privately agreed to deny the assault had occurred when facing a grand jury subpoena. The agency says the attack happened in January 2021, a day after the detainee squirted a liquid mixture containing urine on a guard stationed at the jail.

According to a DOJ press release, the guards did not submit documentation of their use of force, which would be required following such an incident. “The vast majority of law enforcement officers understand the trust placed in them by our community when they wear the badge,” said former U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger in a statement. “But when law enforcement officers abuse the trust the community places in them—when they violate the ...

On January 2, 2025, a settlement was signed by the Plaintiff in a lawsuit over the suicide of a juvenile pretrial detainee held at the lockup in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County. Under the terms of the agreement, the County agreed to pay $550,000 to the administrator of the Estate of the dead teen, “D.W.” In addition to the cash payout, Sheriff Garry L. McFadden promised to make substantive policy changes to protect detainees.

Though he was just 17, D.W. had endured a traumatic life before arriving at the County Detention Center (CDC). By age three, he had been sexually abused. By age six, he had been assaulted with a gun. When he was 11, D.W. was the victim of more abuse and assault. He also suffered a serious head injury as a child, and his father was imprisoned by the time D.W. was arrested. As a result of these events, D.W. had noted anger issues; he was a restless, impulsive risk-taker, and a substance abuser, too. 

On November 5, 2020, D.W. was booked into the Rockingham CDC and transferred to the Alexander Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Alexander County. There, employees of the state Department Public Safety (DPS) placed ...

On January 14, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that a former Illinois prisoner’s deliberate indifference claim against a healthcare provider contracted by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) could proceed to trial, though dismissal of an identical claim against four other staffers was upheld. The lower court had determined that prisoner Clarence Lewis impermissibly split his claims against Wexford Health Sources’ Dr. Dina Paul between his suit and another filed with other plaintiffs also challenging treatment for their Hepatitis-C. But the appellate Court said that Dr. Paul waited too long to raise the objection, thereby waiving the defense. The Court further held that failure to recruit counsel for Lewis’ claims against the other Wexford staffers was not shown to be error.

Lewis sued the five providers, alleging that they were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs while he was imprisoned at Hill Correctional Center from 2013 to 2018. Lewis accused Dr. Kul B. Sood, Nurse Lara Vollmer and Dr. Catalino Bautista of misdiagnosing him and mistreating him for diabetes and COPD when what he really suffered was a bowel disorder. Lewis further alleged that Bautista delayed the colonoscopy procedure which discovered it and ...

On June 6, 2025, Julian Mendez, 46, a prisoner on death row at the Kern Valley State Prison in Riverside County, California, was killed by inmate Mario Renteria, 36, using a makeshift weapon, KGET in Bakersfield reported. During the attack, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), guards ordered the men to “get down,” but the two prisoners ignored this command; the guards then used “chemical agents” in an attempt to break up the fight. Around this time, around 30 other prisoners rushed in and began striking Renteria. Guards, having lost control of the situation, launched “blast grenades” to disperse the crowd. 

Following the incident, the CDCR implemented a modified program to investigate a rise in violence and overdoses at certain facilities including Kern Valley. Medical and legal services remained in place during the program, but access to phones, tablet communications, and in-person visitations were suspended. As of this writing, on June 26, the state lifted the restrictions in nine prisons but kept them in place in Kern Valley and 11 others.  

Additional source: KTLA

According to a New York Times report on December 18, 2024, Ju-Young Manufacturing America, Inc., a company that makes car parts for Hyundai, announced it was ending its arrangement with the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) to use prisoner labor.

Like many states in the Deep South, Alabama has a lengthy history of using prisoners as cheap workers—both within the DOC and for private businesses to contract for their labor. The state established a convict leasing system during the antebellum era, when laws known as Black Codes funneled freed slaves into prisons to be used for agricultural and mining labor. “These workers endured brutal conditions,” the Birmingham Free Press reported, “and many died while performing hazardous jobs.”

Convict leasing in Alabama ended in 1928, but prisoners are still contracted to for-profit businesses. Such arrangements have resulted in protests in DOC facilities—including a 2022 statewide strike with demands for fair pay and improved working conditions. There has also been widespread criticism of exploitive prison labor by those on the outside, which prompted Ju-Young to discontinue its contract with the state’s prison system.

Although Alabama’s constitution was amended in 2022 to remove a provision that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude as a ...

Researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School have released data on jails which have the practice of releasing prisoners, usually approved for bond, between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., revealing that this practice significantly increases the chances that a person will be harmed or placed in circumstances which will return them to jail.

The researchers started with some statistics about why this is important, and why it affects so many people. Some “514,000 people, greater than the population of major cities like Atlanta and Miami—are being held in our nation’s local jails,” and “[o]ver 10 million people are admitted to local jails every year.” And “[a]lthough the average stay in detention is about 26 days, or roughly 3 ½ weeks, most people are released on the day of arraignment or within one week.”

The study found that, “[f]or a significant minority, release occurs in the middle of the night.” This is because, of the 141 jails in the 200 largest cities in the U.S. by population, “131 release during the late night and only 10 do not.” Worryingly, almost no jails track and report what happens to people after they are released back into the community.

“Pima County, ...

On January 29, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that Michigan’s “tolling provision” does not affect the administrative remedy exhaustion requirement in the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. Instead, the provision only pauses Michigan’s statute of limitations.

Michigan prisoner Lamont Heard, who is serving a life sentence, alleged in a civil rights lawsuit that prison officials retaliated against his litigation activities by transferring him to different housing in “the Burns unit.” The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan dismissed the complaint for failure to exhaust administrative remedies, and Heard appealed.

The Sixth Circuit found that the case hinged on the procedural timeline. Heard stated that he was transferred to the Burns unit on January 10, 2017, and that he filed a grievance the next day. Months later, the grievance was returned with instructions to file it with the local grievance coordinator, which Heard did. He never received a response.

Heard had filed a separate civil rights complaint on December 4, 2017, concerning a different prison transfer. On March 2, 2018, Heard moved to amend that complaint to add the Burns unit claim. The district court then dismissed the claim ...

In an amended agreement filed in the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 28, 2025, state Department of Corrections (DOC) Director Chadwick Dotson and his predecessor, Harold Clarke, promised to pay a total of $1,599,694 to settle a class-action suit filed by 53 state prisoners who were detained past their release dates.

The mass over-detentions resulted from an advisory opinion issued by state Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) regarding exclusions for certain violent crimes from sentence credits adopted by state lawmakers in 2020. Just as those credits were set to take effect in July 2022, Miyares determined that the exclusions should extend to related “inchoate” offenses—putting those convicted of attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder on the same footing as those actually convicted of murder. As a result, Clarke estimated, some 8,000 prisoners faced delayed release from prison—including 560 already told they were going home that month, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2023, p.50.]

In July 2023, the state Supreme Court shot down Miyares’ overly expansive interpretation of the law’s exclusions when it granted a writ of habeas corpus to over-detained prisoner Steven Prease. By then, the DOC had subjected at least ...

On February 4, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted three “male-to-female transgender women” imprisoned by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) a temporary restraining order (TRO). The order prevented BOP from transferring the prisoners to a men’s prison and from discontinuing administration of their prescribed hormone therapy medication. The district court subsequently allowed nine other trans BOP prisoners to join the suit, extending the TRO to protect them until August 2025.

On January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald Trump (R) signed an Executive Order that required government officials to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” The order further required the BOP to revise its policies to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” As PLN reported, a trans BOP prisoner identified as “Maria Moe” then succeeded in winning a TRO from the federal court for the District of Massachusetts on January 26, 2025, preventing her transfer to a men’s lockup. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.43.]

The three prisoners who filed their complaint in the D.C. ...

Most prison systems and jails are understaffed, with serious consequences for both the keepers and the kept. In facilities with too few guards, staff members typically have to work longer hours or multiple shifts in higher-stress, more dangerous environments. But at least they get to return home at the end of their shifts. Prisoners who live in such conditions bear the brunt of staffing shortages, which include lockdowns and having to forgo recreation, religious, educational, and other programs—even visitation and medical appointments.

The non-profit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) examined this issue in a December 9, 2024 report, Why Jails and Prisons Can’t Recruit Their Way Out of the Understaffing Crisis. That found detention officials universally agree that lack of adequate staff is a significant problem. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of workers in state prisons nationwide fell 11% while the workforce in local jails dropped by 7%. In total, there was a loss of 64,455 detention employees during that three-year period—which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, though understaffing plagued the criminal justice system long before then.

Prisons and jails have concentrated on recruitment efforts such as wage increases, which have mostly been unsuccessful or insufficient. Detention staff already ...

On February 12, 2025, attorneys for a former detainee jailed by Minnesota’s Anoka County stipulated to dismissal of his claims for injuries suffered when he was denied withdrawal treatment while incarcerated. In exchange, the County agreed to pay $2.585 million to the injured jail survivor, Deytona Green, on its behalf, as well as for its former medical care contractor, MEnD Correctional Care PLLC. 

While Green suffered severe injuries, he is one of the few pretrial detainees to survive and sue jail officials for the failure to provide drug withdrawal treatment. Green, then 25, was booked into the Anoka County Jail (ACJ) on drug charges on February 5, 2022. He informed jailers that he had a valid prescription for Suboxone to treat his opioid addiction. He also admitted to shooting up heroin earlier that day. 

But ACJ officials confiscated the prescribed medication that was on Green’s person at the time of his arrest and placed it in a locked box in property storage. Green’s mother and his probation officer both called ACJ, offering to bring more of his prescribed medication to the jail to ensure he suffered no disruption in treatment. But they were denied.

Meanwhile Green never received any ...

Floyd Lee Coleman, 106, passed away on May 19, 2025, at a hospital near the William Donaldson Correctional Facility, where he was a prisoner in Bessemer, Alabama. Coleman, who had spent more than forty-five years locked up, was the state’s oldest prisoner—and likely among the oldest in the country. 

In 1978, Coleman was arrested for the rape and murder of Quintina Steele, a 7-year-old girl. Although Coleman was originally sentenced to death by electric chair, that sentence was overturned after the Supreme Court of the U.S. decided Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625 (1980), which held that the death sentence cannot be imposed if the jury was not permitted to consider a lesser offence for a verdict. Coleman pleaded guilty before he could be retried, and he received a life sentence without parole in 1984. 

The U.S. prison population has been “graying” for at least the last three decades, with the percentage of prisoners who are 55 or older growing from 3% to 15% during that time. One in six prisoners—nearly 200,000 people—is serving a life sentence, and 56,245 prisoners are serving life without parole. While prisons are unhealthy at any age, incarceration is particularly dangerous for older ...

On May 6, 2025, the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a non-profit law firm, filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC) over the practice of intercepting mail between prisoners and their attorneys. The practice, which is called the “Legal Mail Policy Variance,” was intended to intercept drugs and other contraband from being brought into facilities. It requires prison staff to make a photocopy of legal mail in front of the prisoner and—after handing them the copy or delivering it to their tablets—shred the original. This policy was introduced to four of the 28 DRC prisons across Ohio in 2024: the Southern Ohio, Marion, Lebanon, and Ross correctional institutions. 

The Ohio Justice and Policy Center contends that it often receives mail from prisoners which includes allegations against specific guards, and that opening and reading this mail could result in retaliation. “[This policy] opens the door for private correspondence to be viewed with total disregard for our client’s civil rights and First Amendment rights,” said Gabe Davis, the firm’s chief executive officer. “We are suing the department because this has to stop now.” According to state data, of the known sources for how drugs enter prisons in ...

A new report by The Sentencing Project (TSP) shows that the percentage of prisoners serving terms of life without parole—or “death by incarceration”—nationwide has increased, even as overall prison populations decreased. It is TSP’s sixth national census of people serving life sentences, which includes ‘life with the possibility of parole’; ‘life without the possibility of parole’; and ‘virtual life sentences,’ defined as those of 50 years or longer.

Researchers found that, since 2003, the percentage of prisoners serving a “death by incarceration” sentence increased 68%. This population was down 4% since 2020, but that’s relative to a shrinking of the total prison population by 13%. About one in six prisoners is serving such a sentence, totaling almost 200,000 prisoners across the United States.

Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. has only about 4% of the total population, yet it “holds an estimated 40% of the world’s life-sentenced population,” TSP found, “including 83% of persons serving LWOP.”

Nearly half of those serving life sentences are Black, far greater than that group’s 14% share of the U.S. population. Among women in prison, one in eleven is serving life, with those aged 55 or older accounting for two-thirds of the ...

Striking a rare blow for fairness, the Supreme Court of Kentucky issued a ruling on February 25, 2025, reversing the imposition of $10,972 in jail fees upon Dillian Ford at his criminal sentencing in Carlisle County Circuit Court. Because there was no evidence in the record that the fees were based upon more than an unofficial agreement between Carlisle County and neighboring McCraken County, where Ford was held, the high Court found error in the lack of an officially adopted policy, as required by state law.

Ford was sentenced on November 17, 2022, to a total of 15 years on his underlying charges and fined $10,972 in jail fees for the 422 days he was held in custody prior to sentencing. During the plea colloquy, Ford stipulated that Carlisle County paid McCracken County $26 per day to imprison him.

On appeal, Ford did not question the agreement between the counties. However, he argued that imposition of the fee was error because there was no evidence that either county had a jail reimbursement policy approved by the county’s governing body.

In Capstraw v. Commonwealth, 641 S.W.3d 148 (Ky. 2022), the Court had held that a trial court may not impose ...

On October 4, 2024, the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) settled the second of two lawsuits brought by prisoners involved in educational programs who claimed that they were subjected to retaliation after classroom debates over political and social issues piqued reactionary prison officials.

Centralia Correctional Center prisoner Anthony McNeal was assigned as a peer educator in the Citizens Civics Education program, which was authorized by state lawmakers with the Re-Entering Citizens Civics Education Act, 730 ILCS 200/1; the primary goal of the law is to teach soon-to-be released prisoners about their voting eligibility and how voting is vital to successful re-entry. 

On March 1, 2023, McNeal was performing his assignment, carrying out a lesson plan that discussed poll taxes, literacy tests, and other racist laws from the Jim Crow era. In response to another prisoner’s inquiry, McNeal informed the class how many southern states had used literacy tests and poll taxes to suppress the Black vote.

Nathan Tucker, a prison official assigned to monitor the class, cut McNeal off and instructed him not to discuss racism in class. Tucker further insisted that McNeal present literary tests as having a legitimate nondiscriminatory purpose of ensuring that voters “knew what they ...

On October 24, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois entered judgment awarding $69,384.73 to a state prisoner in his civil rights action alleging a Department of Corrections (DOC) food service director subjected him to excessive force over a grievance filed against him. The judgment included damages awarded by a trial jury and an additional award for attorney fees and costs.

Prisoner Jeremiah Fallon, then 35, filed a grievance on September 19, 2019, alleging that food service supervisors at Pontiac Correctional Center (PCC) fed prisoners cereal that they knew was contaminated by mice droppings. The next day, Food Service Director Dean Wessels confronted Fallon in the prison’s kitchen, where he “got in (his) face, and screamed and cursed at him,” Fallon’s civil rights complaint recalled. After Fallon admitted filing the grievance, Wessels told Fallon that he was fired and demanded he leave the kitchen immediately.

Fallon walked into the adjoining hallway. But the gate was locked, so he remained there. Wessels saw him, screamed at him, and demanded to know why he had not left. Surveillance video captured what happened next as Wessels violently slammed Fallon into the locked gates, “causing extreme pain and injury to ...

Alabama: Elmore County Jail guard Lita Williams, 57, was arrested and charged with first-degree promoting prison contraband on May 21, 2025, the Wetumpka Herald reported. Her arrest followed discovery of a cellphone in a jail cell during a routine search two weeks prior. Data from the phone showed that Williams was in communication with detainee Kendall Henderson, 46, who was being held on charges including cruelty to animals and arson. Sheriff Bill Franklin stated that Williams admitted to sneaking the phone because she had a “friendship” with Henderson. Williams bonded out shortly after her arrest. Henderson remained incarcerated. 

California: Dijon Barber, 32, a state prisoner serving four years for first-degree robbery and elder theft, was re-apprehended in Las Vegas on April 26, 2025, two weeks after he walked away from a Los Angeles community re-entry program on April 12, 2025. According to KTLA in Los Angeles, state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials did not disclose the exact location of the program nor how Barber managed to escape. His was the ninth escape from a re-entry program facility for CDCR prisoners this year. From 1977 to June 2025, the agency claimed a 99 percent apprehension rate for prisoners ...