| Prison Legal News, a monthly print publication that covers criminal justice issues, is a project of the Human Rights Defense Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. |
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U.S. Supreme Court grants stay of execution to Georgia inmate The U.S. Supreme Court, in a stunning turn of events, granted a stay of execution Tuesday night to condemned Georgia killer Keith Tharpe, three and a half hours after he was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection. In a 6-3 decision, the court's justices were apparently concerned about claims that one of Tharpe's jurors was racist and sentenced Tharpe to death because he is African-American. Reliably conservative Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to grant the temporary stay along with Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Three justices - Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch - dissented. The high court will now decide whether to hear Tharpe's appeal. If it doesn't, the court said the stay of execution shall terminate automatically. Read More |
Sex abuse, contraband, cover-ups? Inside a growing criminal probe at New Jersey women's prison A growing criminal inquiry into the sexual assault and exploitation of inmates at New Jersey's only women's prison has prompted prosecutors to call on the state's top law enforcement officials to intervene to stop the abuse, NJ Advance Media has learned. After investigators uncovered case upon case of staff members allegedly abusing prisoners and exchanging contraband for sex at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, the Hunterdon County Prosecutor's Office took the unusual step of asking New Jersey's attorney general and corrections commissioner for a meeting to discuss "remedial action." The move suggests problems at the prison may be far graver than publicly acknowledged by corrections officials, who have described the indictments of six staff members over the last 18 months as isolated incidents that were being addressed through better training. An NJ Advance Media review of court documents and public records, along with interviews with inmates and law enforcement sources, points to a widening crisis at the Union Township prison. Read More |
Let Down and Locked Up: Why Oklahoma's Female Incarceration Rate Is So High Robyn Allen saw her daughter for the first time in two years from across the yard of Oklahoma's largest women's prison, the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. Because the two were serving time for the same 2013 methamphetamine case, they weren't supposed to communicate. But as Allen's daughter, Cherise Greer, was being loaded into a van on her way to another prison this summer, the guard turned away. Greer, in an orange prison uniform, called out: "I love you." "She told me she loved me and said, 'Mom, please don't cry,' " said Allen, 52, wiping away tears as she recalled the moment. When their paths crossed in June, Allen and her daughter were among more than 3,000 women serving time in Oklahoma, which for 25 years has led the nation in locking up women. The state imprisons 151 out of every 100,000 women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics - more than double the national rate. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with Oklahoma journalism startup The Frontier, spent more than a year unearthing the causes. The reporting included obtaining a decade's worth of state prison data never before analyzed by the state itself. Read More |
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Which prison inmates get the most visitors? A look at felons in Florida Younger prisoners receive more visitors than older ones. Meanwhile, white and Latino inmates get more visits from family and friends than do black inmates, a new study finds. The issue: Part of the national debate about prison reform centers on inmate rehabilitation and recidivism - whether today's prison programs succeed in correcting offenders' behavior and preventing them from committing more crime. One factor that appears to influence people's behavior while they are behind bars as well as recidivism rates is whether they receive visits from family members and others during incarceration. Several published studies suggest prison visits help inmates maintain social ties, which, in turn, may reduce the likelihood they will commit crimes after their release. A 2016 review of studies finds that in-person visits reduce the likelihood of recidivism by 25 percent and that conjugal and furlough visits, which let inmates spend extended periods of time with family, have an even bigger impact. A study worth reading: "Who Gets Visited in Prison? Individual- and Community-Level Disparities in Inmate Visitation Experiences," published in Crime & Delinquency, 2017. Read More |
Alabama prisons face costly remedy on mental health care A lawmaker who has led prison reform efforts in Alabama estimates it will take an extra $30 million a year to improve mental health treatment in prisons to fix what a federal judge found is an unconstitutionally poor system of care. Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, presided over a meeting of the Joint Legislative Prison Committee today. The committee got an update on the federal court case. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in June that mental health care in Alabama prisons is "horrendously inadequate," so poor that it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Thompson ordered the state and the lawyers representing inmates into mediation to find a remedy. Read More |
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From the PLN in Print Archives DOJ Publishes Ten-step Program for Halfway House Reforms Halfway houses, known as Residential Reentry Centers (RRCs), are the last stop for federal prisoners before they are released from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). According to a recent U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) memorandum on the subject, the BOP "maintains agreements with 103 different contractors to operate 181 [RRC] facilities nationwide, serving more than 30,000 residents a year." However, the quality of those facilities and effectiveness of the services they provide vary widely, with many residents complaining of substandard living conditions, indifferent staff, insufficient reentry services and lack of personal security. All RRCs are privately-operated, either by for-profit companies or non-profit organizations. High levels of recidivism for federal prisoners seem to validate the failure of the RRC system to function effectively. Prison Legal Newshas repeatedly covered this issue, including numerous examples of not only shoddy business practices but profiteering and cronyism in the awarding of lucrative halfway house contracts, with profit apparently taking precedence over quality of service. [See: PLN, Feb. 2017, p.26; Jan. 2015, p.18]. The November 30, 2016 DOJ memo, authored by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates, included a ten-point plan for reforming federal halfway houses plus a uniform "Statement of Work." The first, and perhaps most important directive, was to "Establish clear, uniform standards that apply to all RRC providers." Amazingly, the memo noted, "the [Bureau of Prisons] has never required all RRCs to provide the same baseline of uniform services, resulting in a patchwork of requirements.... The resulting lack of standardization makes it difficult for the [BOP] to monitor and gather data on its contracted facilities, which in turn impedes the development of best practices and results in inconsistent resident services." Read More |
States Take a Fresh Look at Snitching Nobody likes a snitch, but never have so many people been doing so much about it. Legislatures around the country, from Texas to Montana to New York, are considering and passing bills to better regulate the use of compensated criminal witnesses. As the New York Times Editorial Board complained just a couple of months ago, "[m]any prosecutors are far too willing to present testimony from people they would never trust under ordinary circumstances." Apparently state lawmakers agree. Almost all of the legislation requires better tracking and disclosure. It has become an article of common sense that if the government is going to pay its criminal witnesses for evidence and testimony, it should have to keep track of them, their histories and those rewards-and disclose that information to the defense. Read More |
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Michigan: Man shot in Detroit a year after release from prison in wrongful murder conviction Davontae Sanford, who spent years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a quadruple murder as a teenager, was shot and wounded Saturday night, according to the Detroit Police Department. A DPD crime report, which does not identify Sanford by name, said a 24-year-old black male suffered a gunshot wound to his right leg about 9 p.m. while at the Martin Luther King apartments on Chene Street, east of downtown. The police department later confirmed that the victim in the report was Sanford, who was released from prison in June 2016 after being exonerated. Read More |
Pennsylvania: The American prison system: justice or exploitation? In Washington, Pennsylvania, a county jail captain was charged this week with stealing more than $2,000 from inmates. Charges like this are nothing new - especially in Pennsylvania. According to Prison Legal News, at least 14 Pennsylvania prison and jail guards were arrested between 2012 and 2014. Some were arrested for acts of corruption, and others for sexually assaulting inmates. In Chester County Prison, former guard Erik Messner smuggled in contraband for profit. At Rockview State Penitentiary, a guard was sentenced to less than two years in prison for forcing an inmate to perform sex acts on him. In Bedford County Prison, former guard Ryan Clapper put an inmate's shackles in the freezer before putting them on her because she complained about her shackles being too cold the previous time - and he bragged about it afterward. When people discuss prison reform, they usually talk about large, institutional changes to the system that would make it more effective. But there are smaller steps that we can take - to begin with, holding prison guards accountable for actions that clearly violate inmates' basic human rights. Read More |
Please note that the content of our newsletter mainly consists of news reports from third-party sources. We are not responsible for the accuracy or content of third parties, nor do their statements or positions necessarily reflect those of HRDC/PLN. Our newsletter content is for informational purposes only. |
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