by Chuck Sharman

At the center of mass incarceration in the United States is a deeply troubling fact: More than two of every five people locked up have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. With nearly two million people caged in U.S. prisons and jails, that means the …

by Paul Wright

The month before Prison Legal News published its first issue in May 1990, the Washington legislature became the first to enact civil commitment and sex offender registration in response to a series of horrific sex crimes by repeat offenders. We have been reporting on the …

by Chuck Sharman

On June 5, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated a $24 million punitive damages award against NaphCare for a Washington jail death, remanding the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington to make a new …

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is moving to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ prisoners from sexual violence. An internal memo, dated to December 2, 2025, stated that “effective immediately” prisons and jails will no longer face penalties for violating LGBTQ+-­centered regulations in the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). …

by Chuck Sharman

On June 13, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted class certification to a complaint filed against the Marion County Sheriff, alleging that there is a de facto ban on certain books at the County Adult Detention Center (ADC) in …

by Chuck Sharman

Relatives of a Missouri jail detainee who became nonverbal and fatally ill—while fellow detainees pleaded in vain with jailers to get him medical help—accepted a $450,000 settlement of their federal civil rights suit, and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri granted …

by Chuck Sharman

In the “tough-­on-­crime” years that closed out the last century, parole was eliminated in many states, as well as the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). But as the U.S. Supreme Court noted most recently in Swarthout v. Cooke, 562 U.S. 216 (2011), there is no …

by Chuck Sharman

A decade after PLN secured a settlement halting censorship of soft-­cover books at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, its nonprofit publisher headed back to court on December 4, 2025, challenging new jail rules that violate the earlier agreement and the …

With the number of executions nearly doubling from 2024 to 2025, this year was especially deadly for military veterans on death row, according to a new report published by the Death Penalty Information Center. Throughout 2025, ten veterans were executed, amounting to roughly one in four of all people …

by Douglas Ankney

On September 29, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a district court’s denial of qualified immunity (QI) to Louisiana prison officials on the ground that, at the time of the alleged constitutional violation, the law was not clearly established that …

by Chuck Sharman

On November 10, 2025, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York returned a $112 million verdict in favor of Plaintiffs in a class-­action suit accusing the Sheriff of Suffolk County of illegally detaining them in the County jail …

by Chuck Sharman

An executive order (EO) issued by then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D), allowing agents of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into the city’s Rikers Island jail complex, was declared illegal by a state judge on September 8, 2025. The ruling by the state …

by Chuck Sharman

On September 12, 2025, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio returned a verdict awarding $404,000 in damages to state prisoner Tommy Meadows on his claim that he was brutalized at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) near Lucasville in …

National Public Radio reported that Morgan Geyser, 23, one of the notorious “Slender Man” stabbers, was apprehended near Chicago on November 23, 2025, after escaping her Wisconsin group home. Geyser had cut off her GPS ankle monitor and was reported missing the day before. Madison police were not notified …

by Douglas Ankney

Campaign Zero, a “research and data-­driven organization working to end police violence and carceral harm” released in June 2025 a report titled Paying for One’s Own Incarceration: National Landscape of ‘Pay-­to-­Stay’ Fees and called for the repeal and ban of such fees.

To gain …

On November 15, 2025, a man who was once serving a life sentence for murder was elected as the chief record keeper for New Orlean’s criminal court. Calvin Duncan, 62, spent 28 years in prison before winning his freedom in 2011 with the help of Innocence Project New Orleans …

by Chuck Sharman

On November 25, 2025, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN), filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, accusing Walla Walla County and Jail Commander Steve Barker of violating its First …

by Douglas Ankney

On February 22, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland granted dismissal to a suit filed by state prisoner Keith Darnell Kelly, after he accepted a $30,000 settlement of his civil rights claims for a beating he suffered from guards while he …

by Matt Clarke

On October 17, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld a district court’s summary dismissal of a federal civil rights suit brought by six women who were allegedly sexually assaulted while incarcerated at an Alabama jail because the lawsuit failed …

by Chuck Sharman

In a decision reached on April 7, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit clarified the boundaries of qualified immunity (QI) for a Michigan jailer accused of retaliatory assault on a compliant prisoner and deliberate indifference to his resulting injuries. The Court …

by Chuck Sharman

For letting a detainee’s infected leg go untreated so long that it had to be amputated, a federal jury assigned liability to NaphCare, Inc., the contracted healthcare provider at Washington’s Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, returning a massive $25 million verdict on Javier Tapia’s civil …

by Chuck Sharman

A wild day unfolded in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on November 13, 2025, as the attorney for the last of 16 defendants awaiting sentencing in a massive Aryan Brotherhood (AB) conspiracy noted that he spent nearly 18 months unknowingly …

On November 26, 2025, New York Daily News reported that the families of two men who died in New York City custody within two days have filed notices of intent to sue the city, alleging gross neglect and medical indifference. Christopher Nieves, 46, died August 28, 2025, while detained …

by Chuck Sharman

A $2.75 million settlement will help the surviving children of a detainee left to decompensate from her mental illness for seven and a half months before she died in Washington’s Clark County Jail in Vancouver. That was the result of an agreement reached in July …

In 2022, voters in Oklahoma County, which contains most of Oklahoma City, approved a $260 million bond issue to construct a new jail. That price tag was expected to cover planning, land acquisition, site preparation, and early construction. At that point, there was no finalized site plan or design. …

by Chuck Sharman

Ramsey Kettle, now 34, is a member of the White Earth Nation with a diagnosed serious mental illness (SMI). Yet when he arrived at Minnesota’s Otter Tail County Jail in February 2024, he was immediately thrown in disciplinary segregation, without a mental health assessment or …

by Douglas Ankney

On December 6, 2024, the Supreme Court of Alabama held that because the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to raise the issue of venue in the circuit court, the Court of Criminal Appeals’ (CCA) reversal based on venue was error.

In 2018, Joshua …

by Chuck Sharman

On July 29, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada granted dismissal to a suit filed by state prisoner Thomas Burdsal, 62, after he agreed to accept a $4,652 payment from the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to settle claims that he …

Despite spending millions to give guards body cameras, Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections (DOC) will not release footage from the devices to the public. As reported by Oklahoma Watch, the DOC claims that footage recorded within a facility would threaten security by showing the layout and potentially sensitive areas. …

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) prisons are buckling under a 15-­year high incarceration rate, now exceeding 50,000, and projected to climb past 55,000 by 2030 due to tougher sentencing. Simultaneously, guard staffing is at a 15-­year low, signaling a severe retention …

by Chuck Sharman

With a change announced by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on October 20, 2025, federal prisoners should finally begin to see more concrete results from the First Step Act (FSA), the 2018 law passed to reduce prison overcrowding by rewarding prisoners for participation in …

On December 2, 2025, the Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC) signed a Memoranda of Agreement (MOA), also known as 287(g) agreements, with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), allowing the federal agency to train guards and give them the power to act as immigration enforcers. Although the guards’ …

by Chuck Sharman

The Chicago City Council voted on January 15, 2025, to pay $7.5 million to Clarissa Glenn and her husband, Ben Baker, who spent 10 years in state prison on drug convictions obtained with planted evidence. Former Chicago Police Department (CPD) Sgt. Ronald Watts was the …

by Chuck Sharman

Meeting at the courthouse in Wilkes-­Barre, Pennsylvania, the Luzerne County Council approved three settlements in November 2024, totaling $645,330 in payouts on behalf of three former detainees at the Luzerne County Prison—two of whom committed suicides that jailers allegedly failed to prevent. That was on …

On December 3, 2025, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna announced that guards in all county jail facilities began wearing body-­worn cameras in October of this year. KABC reported that the move, aimed at strengthening accountability and enhancing transparency, comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed by California …

by Douglas Ankney

On July 9, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that 18 U.S.C. section 3624(b)(1), which awards federal prisoners of up to 54 days per year of good conduct credits, is to be prorated for partial years of confinement.

Christopher …

by Chuck Sharman

In a report compiled on November 25, 2025, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) broke down the impact of prison “gerrymandering” in 14 of the 33 states that have so far failed to halt the federal Census Bureau’s practice of counting prisoners as residents of …

by Chuck Sharman

On September 23, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California entered final judgment that sustained a $3.3 million verdict for Jay Campos, whose son, Joshua, died of a fentanyl overdose three days after booking into the Orange County jail system.

…

State inspectors with the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) told officials in July 2025 that the Beaufort County Jail, located near Hilton Head Island, had accrued multiple violations. According to a report recently obtained by The Island Packet via a public records request, the violations included: pre-­trial and …

by Anthony W. Accurso

Nevada agreed to pay state prisoner Charles Morris $939,000 on May 16, 2025, resolving his claims that state Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to provide him back timely surgery, resulting in a fall which required emergency surgery and left him bound to a wheelchair. …

by Michael Thompson

Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian who grew his hair for decades without cutting it as part of his “Nazarite Vow.” Accordingly, his hair had grown long enough to reach nearly to his knees by the time he was incarcerated in the Louisiana Department of …

Most jobs within Wisconsin prisons are paid in cents as minimum wage laws don’t apply in lockups. But the state also has work release programs that allow certain prisoners to earn a rate that’s the same as non-­incarcerated employees. Unfortunately, as Wisconsin Watch recently reported, Wisconsin prisoners say there …

by Chuck Sharman

On October 29, 2025, the City of New York authorized three payouts totaling $4 million to Terrence Rodgers, 32, a former detainee in the City’s Rikers Island jail complex, completing a trio of settlement agreements he reached the month before in suits filed over rapes …

by Douglas Ankney

On November 22, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona sua sponte granted summary judgment to transgender prisoner Oscar Contreras Aguilar on the issue of exhaustion of administrative remedies where Federal Bureau of Prison (BOP) officials repeatedly denied the necessary forms to …

by Michael Thompson

James Clubb was incarcerated in the Marinette County Jail on September 13, 2018, when he bit down on something hard and broke a tooth. At the time, for-­profit provisions company Aramark held “the exclusive right to provide food service” to “the County’s inmates, staff and …

A recently released report from the humanitarian group Amnesty International found that conditions at two migrant detention centers in Florida amounted to “cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment,” with some practices rising to the level of torture.

In September 2025, Amnesty researchers toured the federal Krome North Services Processing …

by Matt Clarke

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) recently announced a pilot program to study the use of various types of cooling systems and new insulation at three prisons to determine the best methods for wider application within its 31-­prison system. Currently, only around 8,000 …

by Keri Blakinger, Propublica

This story was originally published by ProPublica. 

After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more …

A group of prison laborers and unions in Minnesota are demanding that Anagram International, LLC, a Minnesota-­based balloon company that subcontracts with Disney, pay incarcerated workers $11.13 an hour, which is the state’s minimum wage (The current wage for these workers is only 90 cents per hour). At a …

by Steve Brooks and Olivia Hefferman, Truthout

This story was originally published by Truthout.

As droughts, extreme heat, and other climate disasters increasingly plague California, people throughout the state have been subject to water restrictions. For many Californians, this means emergency regulations like limitations …

by Chuck Sharman

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia awarded $600,000 in compensatory damages on December 4, 2025, to a former pretrial detainee at the County jail who was punished with placement in a restraint chair and then a suicide-­watch cell …

by Michael Thompson

Jails within Washington state are finding it increasingly difficult to arrange medical providers. In one example, when Kitsap County recently put out a request for a medical provider, only their current provider responded, Everhealth LLC, a subsidiary of Alabama-­based NaphCare. As a result, Kitsap County …

by Nathan Gray, Prison Journalism Project

This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project.

Many jobs in Wisconsin’s Oshkosh Correctional Institution consist of routine manual labor that helps the prison run: cooking, cleaning, laundering—that kind of thing. Most tasks could be completed by anyone, …

California: A suit filed in state Superior Court for San Francisco County on December 1, 2025, accuses the New York Post and Los Angeles Times of defaming Nima Momeni, 41, while he was detained in the County’s San Bruno jail before his December 2024 murder trial. According to …