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.
“This month, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections permitted The Appeal to photograph inside SCI Laurel Highlands, a prison in the southwestern part of the state that houses a large population of people who require long-term and personal care. The prison provides skilled nursing, hospice and palliative care for some of the oldest men in the Pennsylvania prison system.“
The Appeal
November 20, 2019
Read More“The plan, submitted in August by Sheriff Marlin Gusman’s office, proposes increasing the city’s jail population cap. The proposal also would expand a temporary facility to house people with mental health conditions, as well as 150 state prisoners who are on work release or are kitchen workers.“
The Appeal
October 7, 2019
Read More“From the beginning, the project faced significant pushback. There were locals who questioned the environmental impact and risks of a prison in a region already ravaged by decades of coal mining and challenged the notion that their area’s economic well-being should be reliant on incarceration.“
The Appeal
July 1, 2019
Read More“Gascón has endorsed a third option: The jail’s residents, or some of them, could be housed in what his office is calling a behavioral health justice center, meant to divert people from the jail by offering them mental health and substance use disorder treatment.”
The Appeal
December 14, 2018
Read More“In New York’s shock incarceration programs, prisoners with three years or less left on their sentences can spend six months doing drills, learning military discipline and taking substance abuse classes in a strict “therapeutic community” environment in exchange for an early shot at freedom. “
The Appeal
May 21, 2019
Read More“But increasingly, jails across the nation are cutting off these visits. Instead, all communication must take place through a digital screen. On March 18, the Newton County Sheriff’s Office in Missouri announced that, effective immediately, no in-person visits would be permitted. Visitors to the jail would use a video portal in the same area where visitations had always taken place. But the person they came to see would remain in the jail common spaces at a different video portal. Incarcerated people could still meet with one person face-to-face: their attorney.”
The Appeal
April 22, 2019
Read More“With 1,703 prisoners, MDC-Brooklyn is one of the largest federal jails in the country, sitting in a flood zone along the borough’s waterfront. The blackout plunged the jail into darkness, and paralyzed computer systems that are essential to maintaining humane conditions of confinement, including the provision of medical care and medication to detainees. The blackout also amplified allegations––from corrections officers and detainees––that the facility was not sufficiently heated.“
The Appeal
February 22, 2019
Read More“‘It is extremely unusual for prison officials to even acknowledge the legitimacy of prisoner grievances, much less negotiate with them,’ Wright said. ‘The response is almost invariably one of repression and silencing and terrorization to dissuade others from standing up for themselves’.“
The Appeal
January 25, 2019
Read More“In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call, and to search for other calls where the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.“
The Appeal
January 30, 2019
Read More“In Santa Clara County, incarcerated people, and a former undersheriff challenging six-term sheriff Laurie Smith, have turned conditions of confinement into a potent electoral issue.“
The Appeal
October 29, 2018
Read More“Denying treatment has proved fatal in jails and prisons across the country. ‘People who re-enter the community after a period of incarceration are 50 to 120 times more likely to overdose and die than the general population. This is because they go through detoxification and withdrawal, diminishing their tolerance,’ Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and of health sciences at Northeastern University, told The Appeal.“
The Appeal
October 11, 2018
Read More“The national prison strike that swept headlines formally ended Sept. 9. Yet in many ways, advocates say, the work has just begun. Some prisoners are still engaging in protests, while others will face retaliation and need support. And the groups that helped organize the strike hope to use its momentum to push for lasting change.“
The Appeal
September 25, 2018
Read More“A new policy has put Pennsylvania prisoners’ communications under intense surveillance in the name of stopping contraband drugs. On Sept. 5, the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that it would be largely restricting mail to prisoners. Effective immediately, all incoming mail would be sent to a private company in Florida, Smart Communications, for scanning into a searchable database. Prisoners would then receive photocopies of the incoming mail—and the originals would be shredded.“
The Appeal
September 24, 2018
Read More“‘Historically prisoners have not been part of hurricane planning,’ Mazurek said, ‘until it comes time to use them as cheap labor to help with disasters.’ The same prisoners forced to endure Florence may well be made to do unpaid labor cleaning up its damage, like prisoners in Florida after Irma.“
The Appeal
September 14, 2018
Read More"Some prisoners in Ohio have come to expect retaliation. The Appeal spoke by phone with a man in a minimum-security Ohio prison who asked to be identified only by his nickname, “Fridge.” 'Intimidation, threats all of that is coming down the pipe, without a doubt, for even discussing [the strike],' he explained."
The Appeal
August 31, 2018
Read More"The Bureau of Prisons claims that 'solitary confinement does not exist' in the federal prison system and considers placement in the SMU to be 'non-punitive.' It’s a rosy characterization roundly rejected by criminal justice advocates, incarcerated people, and reporters alike; 'USP Lewisburg might be the worst place in the federal prison system,' Justin Peters wrote in Slate in 2013, 'so bad that some inmates there actually dream of being transferred to the famously isolating Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado'."
The Appeal
August 21, 2018
Read More"'I’m not saying jails should be overly comfortable, but they should at the very least be humane,' Franks said. 'These young men that have died are human beings, and for whatever reason we lose sight of that once someone enters the jail. They were sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. They have people who miss them. They were worth something'."
The Appeal
August 15, 2018
Read More"Last week, the City Council passed a law that will make all calls in and out of city jails free. Once signed into law by the mayor, the legislation will be the first of its kind in the country. The prison phone industry has grown to a $1.2 billion a year business, mostly run by private companies that can charge as much as $1.22 a minute."
The Appeal
July 26, 2018
Read More"Florida is currently on track to outpace its 2017 record for most prison deaths at 428, with 97,794 prisoners in the state system. As of June 2018, 216 people have died in Florida prisons. In 2015, the Miami Herald chronicled a steep rise in prison deaths since 2000, and since then the numbers have continued to climb. "
The Appeal
June 25, 2018
Read More"He said he witnessed sewage leaking from toilets and that the jail’s kitchen reeked of the stench of mold buildup. Prisoners had to take their food back to their dorms. One prisoner yelled he had been bitten by a rodent, lifting his pant leg to reveal a gaping hole."
The Appeal
June 18, 2018
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