| 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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Dead Bodies and Billions in Tax Dollars Something was wrong with Thomas Bryant. He couldn't eat or sleep. His body was drenched in a cold sweat, and he trembled and shook like a radiator on its last legs. The simple life he once knew in Chichester - one where he worked at a steel mill and provided for his two kids - was a faded memory, a snapshot from a stranger's photo album. After breaking his back in a work accident, he became addicted to opioids and began a downward spiral that led him here, to a cell inside the 1,883-bed George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton, Delaware County. He'd been arrested on a bench warrant over unpaid child support, but all he could think about was the unrelenting pain from withdrawal. Bryant, 38, asked prison guards for medical attention for three days, scrawling his pleas on scraps of paper. He was ignored. "We have copies of letters he wrote, begging for Advil or Motrin because he was in so much pain," said Sue Taylor, his sister. "They did absolutely nothing to help him." When the agony became too much, Bryant hanged himself with prison-issued linens on Nov. 16, 2007. He was one of 12 inmates who died at the facility between 2002 and 2008, according to a lawsuit Bryant's family filed in 2009 against the GEO Group, an international conglomerate that manages George W. Hill and 21 other facilities across Pennsylvania, including two halfway houses and a day reporting center in Philadelphia. Read More |
While prison activists march for humane treatment, Florida shuts off visits this weekend Visitation to all Florida state prisons has been canceled this weekend after evidence surfaced that inmates are planning possible uprisings to coincide with Saturday's march for prisoners' human rights in Washington, D.C. Julie Jones, Secretary for the Florida Department of Corrections, announced the move as a precaution, given the agency's staff shortage and "credible intelligence'' that groups of inmates at several institutions were planning disturbances. "There's no reason to be alarmed. We are just being proactive,'' said Michelle Glady, a spokeswoman for the department. The agency is taking preemptive steps to secure facilities so that staff and inmates will be secure, she said. Social media has been advertising a "Millions for Prisoners' Human Rights" rally on Saturday in Washington, but it's not clear who is spearheading the movement. Postings advertise the effort as a way to raise awareness about the problem of mass incarceration and human rights violations in prisons across the country. Read More |
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From the PLN in Print Archives Man Smuggles Poison into Jail, Commits Suicide Following Arrest for Failure to Pay Ambulance Bill Less than two hours after he was arrested for not paying an outstanding debt, Rex Iverson, 45, was found unresponsive in a holding cell at a jail in Box Elder County, Utah. An ambulance was summoned and he was pronounced dead upon arrival at a local hospital. Iverson was jailed, ironically, because he had failed to pay a $2,376.92 ambulance bill he incurred on Christmas Eve 2013. The bill was owed to the Tremonton City ambulance service, which won a judgment against him in small claims court in September 2014. He subsequently ignored orders to appear in a Utah justice court, which led a county sheriff's deputy to serve a bench warrant on him on January 23, 2016 - the day he was jailed and subsequently died. According to Chrissy Sabala, who said Iverson was "like a brother" to her and her three sisters, he didn't pay the ambulance bill because he simply couldn't. She said he had lived in a kind of suspended animation since his parents died in a car crash several years earlier; he continued to stay in their house but had no source of income. "He just didn't have any money," said Sabala. "When those people died, his life stopped." "He didn't have a job that we know of," added Sharri Oyler, Tremonton's city treasurer, who noted the city pursues 7 to 10 bad-debt cases each month. "We go to great lengths to never arrest anybody on these warrants," Box Elder County Chief Deputy Sheriff Dale Ward stated. But sheriff's offices are required to serve bench warrants issued by the courts, and civil warrants are lumped in with those from criminal cases. "How can you get blood out of a turnip?" asked Josh Daniels with the Utah-based Libertas Institute. "The thing about going to jail, your time does not pay your debt.... A person should be obliged to pay, but putting him in jail doesn't solve the problem." Read More |
Michigan: Man cleared of rape after 35 years in prison gets $1.7 million Convicted of crimes they didn't commit, they've been released from state custody. A new state law is now making them eligible for up to $50,000 for each year they wrongfully were behind bars - they just have to convince a judge. Edward Carter spent 35 years in a Michigan prison for a crime he didn't commit. Despite spending most of life locked up, he's not bitter. "I don't think any of us can imagine what it's been like for him," his attorney, Sima Patel said. "It's a lifetime that was taken away." Carter's in his 60s and has a job at Zingermans in Ann Arbor. But until 2010, he was locked up, convicted of raping a pregnant woman in a bathroom stall on the campus of Wayne State University in 1974. A witness wrongfully identified and after fingerprint evidence was discovered, he was freed. "He never lost faith. He kept at it. If anything this is a testament to his will because he kept maintaining his innocence," Patel said. Read More |
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Arkansas jail chaplain arrested on rape, sexual indecency with a child charges An Arkansas man who worked as a volunteer jail chaplain was arrested Monday on charges including rape and sexual indecency with a child. On May 16, investigators with Arkansas State Police informed the Marion County sheriff's office they had received a tip about possible sexual misconduct by 46-year-old Scotty Scaggs of Summit, according to a news release. Scaggs, who became a volunteer jail chaplain in May 2016, was suspended from his Marion County jail job pending the investigation, the release from the sheriff's office said. Read More |
A Top Lawyer Has Asked The Supreme Court To Hear A Major Death Penalty Case One of the country's top lawyers is asking the Supreme Court to take up a case that could reshape - or even end - the death penalty in America. The aggressive filing comes as the Supreme Court is already set to hear a high-profile series of cases. An Arizona death row inmate, Abel Daniel Hidalgo, has been arguing for the past three years that the state's death penalty law is unconstitutional because it doesn't do enough to narrow who is eligible for the death penalty among those convicted of murder. Earlier this year, Neal Katyal, best known these days for serving as the lead lawyer for Hawaii's challenge to President Trump's travel ban, agreed to serve as Hidalgo's lawyer at the Supreme Court. Katyal, the former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, asked the justices in Monday's filing to hear Hidalgo's case, and to strike down Arizona's death penalty law. The filing comes more than two years after Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called for a wholesale review of the constitutionality of the death penalty. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has also expressed great concerns about the courts' handling of death penalty cases, as well as some states' death penalty laws. Read More |
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Louisiana to review 16,000 prison sentences as criminal justice reform takes effect Louisiana's Public Safety and Corrections officials are reviewing the sentences of 16,000 inmates who could have their prison time shortened as criminal law changes take effect Nov. 1. That's around 45 percent of the 35,500 people the state has locked up now. Gov. John Bel Edwards and the state Legislature overhauled the criminal justice system this past spring, aiming to reduce Louisiana's highest-in-the-world incarceration rate. Some law changes have already taken place, but changes that mostly retroactively affect low-level offenders in prison go into place in November -- driving the review. The 16,000 prison terms being reconsidered are for nonviolent offenses only and many will likely remain unchanged, said Jimmy LeBlanc, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections. For example, some inmates who are serving sentences for multiple offenses won't be affected. Also, the majority of people whose sentences are affected won't necessarily be getting out anytime soon, LeBlanc said. Still, there will be an initial surge in releases from prison right after Nov. 1. About 3,000 to 4,000 of the 16,000 sentences being reviewed could be changed to make inmates eligible for release before the end of the year. Read More |
"Ear Hustle": The Podcast Made Inside San Quentin "Ear Hustle," a podcast about life inside San Quentin State Prison produced by two inmates and a volunteer, might be the best new podcast I've heard this year. It's co-hosted by Earlonne Woods, who is serving thirty-one years to life for attempted second-degree robbery, and Nigel Poor, an artist who has volunteered at San Quentin since 2011. Antwan Williams, who is serving fifteen years for armed robbery with a gun enhancement, does the show's evocative, pitch-perfect sound design, often employing a keyboard in the prison's media lab. (For a Foley effect of a fight in one episode, he recorded beating himself up.) The Radiotopia network, which sponsored a new-podcast contest that "Ear Hustle" won, distributes it. Poor, Williams, and Woods are self-taught audio producers, and the show crackles with the joy of discovery. In prison slang, "ear hustling" is eavesdropping-"bein' nosy," Woods says-and the show covers day-to-day life at San Quentin in almost tender detail by interviewing prisoners. It provokes thoughts about mass incarceration, race, justice, regret, violence, and moral complexity through small-bore stories about cellmates, food, sibling rivalry, isolation, and even pets. Many interviews are gently funny; some are devastating in ways that sneak up on you. Poor and Woods record in the media lab and outside in the yard, often catching peripheral sounds of prisoners singing or joking around. "Ear Hustle" is in many ways about the creativity required to live a satisfying life-or even a sane life-in prison, and is itself a product of that creativity. In 2011, Poor started teaching a history-of-photography class at San Quentin. "Part of what I did was to use images as a tool for men to talk about their experience," she told me. She'd show inmates photographs by August Sander or Walker Evans and ask them to interpret what was happening and to apply it to their own lives. "Amazing stories were coming out," she said. "And I thought, Well, dang. You know? Audio." She knew that San Quentin had a media lab, and had once had a radio program. Several men were interested in learning how to produce audio, and the idea of learning audio production alongside them appealed to her. "It just seemed like a much nicer way, a more equal way, to start a project," she said. She started producing stories about life in prison with a small group. "It was all looking for opportunities. In a place where there don't seem to be a lot of opportunities, how can you mine it for what it does have?" Poor said. "And that's kind of a good way to engage in life anyway." Earlonne Woods was a member of the group-an inconspicuous member. "He was so quiet, but he was always around," Poor said. "I'm interested in the people who hang out in the corner and don't say a lot. I zeroed in on Earlonne." Together, they came up with the idea of "Ear Hustle." "I just knew he was a keen observer," she said. "When we started working together, it was hard for him to talk. He was pretty shy. But then he just took off." San Quentin's public-information officer, Lieutenant Sam Robinson (a surprisingly lovable figure on the show: he has to approve every episode, and we hear him say so), was startled when he first learned that Woods was going to co-host. "He thought, How is this ever going to work? That guy never talks," Poor said. But when quiet, observant people decide to talk, they can surprise you. Read More |
Let Prisoners Learn While They Serve Criminal justice officials across the country are struggling to break the recidivism cycle in which prisoners are released only to land right back behind bars. These prisoners are among the most poorly educated people in the country, and that fact holds the key to a solution. Decades of researchhas shown that inmates who participate in prison education programs - even if they fail to earn degrees - are far more likely to stay out of prison once they are freed. That prison education programs are highly cost effective is confirmed by a 2013 RAND Corporation study that covered 30 years of prison education research. Among other things, the study found that every dollar spent on prison education translated into savings of $4 to $5 on imprisonment costs down the line. Other studies suggest that prisons with education programs have fewer violent incidents, making it easier for officials to keep order, and that the children of people who complete college are more likely to do so themselves, disrupting the typical pattern of poverty and incarceration. Findings like these have persuaded corrections officials in both Democratic and Republican states to embrace education as a cost-effective way of cutting recidivism. But Republican legislators in New York - which spends about $60,000 per inmate per year - remain mired in know-nothingism and argue that spending public money on inmates insults taxpayers. They have steadfastly resisted Gov. Andrew Cuomo's common-sense proposal for making a modest investment in prison education programs that have already proved highly successful on a small scale in New York's prisons. Read More |
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