Even if an inmate's sentence is not oppressively long, their treatment while incarcerated can still constitute subhuman treatment. Prisons are not medical facilities, but they regularly are forced to deal with mental health problems and care for elderly and terminally ill inmates. Food, if it's even edible, usually lacks enough nutrition for inmates' health to not deteriorate. Plus, with a lack of opportunities to see family, read, or gain skill sets, inmates are placed in buildings which lack any resemblance of the civilized world.
“In recent months, city officials have set out to find answers, touring facilities across the United States and in Europe. In late September, they touched down in a place far different from New York: Norway, a welfare state with a low crime rate whose population is fairly homogeneous and smaller than New York’s.“
New York Times
November 12, 2019
Read More“Owing in large part to the reforms, New York City officials project that by 2026 the city’s jails will be tasked with housing no more than 3,300 people. With that number in mind, the City Council is expected to vote this month on a plan to close the jail complex at Rikers Island completely by 2026 by sending New Yorkers instead to four jails spread across the five boroughs. The plan would be safer for inmates, safer for guards and more compassionate for the residents of a city that is playing a lead role in ending the era of mass incarceration.“
New York Times
October 13, 2019
Read More“In the years since it opened, the Bain Center has stayed relatively the same. Inside, the walls and ceilings are still colored an off-white gray. The barge sways with the waves. Inmates can exercise on the top floor inside a caged-enclosed recreational area that has views of Rikers Island. From their cells, inmates can look out through tiny portholes.“
New York Times
October 10, 2019
Read More“Alabama is not alone in having troubled, violent prisons. But the state has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates and its correctional system is notoriously antiquated, dangerous and short-staffed. The major prisons are at 182 percent of their capacity, the report found, contraband is rampant and prisoners sleep in dorms they are not assigned to in order to escape violence.“
New York Times
April 3, 2019
Read More“More than a thousand inmates have been stuck in freezing cells at a federal jail on the Brooklyn waterfront that has had limited power and heat for at least this week, according to federal public defenders and leaders of the union representing the jail’s corrections officers.“
New York Times
February 1, 2019
Read More“More than a thousand inmates have been stuck in freezing cells at a federal jail on the Brooklyn waterfront that has had limited power and heat for at least this week, according to federal public defenders and leaders of the union representing the jail’s corrections officers.“
New York Times
February 1, 2019
Read More"Inmate protests have been happening for generations, but it is only in the last few years that organizers have had success coordinating from penitentiary to penitentiary and state to state."
New York Times
August 26, 2018
Read More"Department officials have said all four drugs were purchased in the United States, but declined to say how the drugs were obtained or who provided them. They're currently fighting lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska and Nebraska media outlets that could force them to release documents identifying the supplier. Nebraska's last execution was in 1997, using the electric chair, but the state Supreme Court later declared the chair unconstitutional."
New York Times
July 27, 2018
Read More"There is some evidence that the program helps people stay out of emergency rooms and hospitals: A study in the American Journal of Public Health of 200 chronically ill former inmates in San Francisco, half assigned to a Transitions clinic and half to a primary care program, found that the Transitions patients’ use of emergency rooms was 50 percent lower."
New York Times
May 29, 2018
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