"An appeals court has breathed life back into a lawsuit alleging policies at Cook County Jail in Illinois that limit the number of books inmates can have at a time violates their First Amendment rights."
ABC News
August 26, 2018
Read MoreEven 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.
"An appeals court has breathed life back into a lawsuit alleging policies at Cook County Jail in Illinois that limit the number of books inmates can have at a time violates their First Amendment rights."
ABC News
August 26, 2018
Read More"They are making some very, very significant changes that will impact recidivism, rehabilitation and ultimately will increase safe communities in Texas...I'm extremely, extremely proud of them helping us out today."
Houston Chronicle
August 24, 2018
Read More"For the last seven years, inmates have stocked the libraries of their personal MP3 players with $2 downloads. Come January, they’ll be forced to hand it all over because the Florida Department of Corrections signed a new deal with a competing company."
Florida Times-Union
August 8, 2018
Read More"But those who have lived under this high-tech tether—including the two of us—see it differently. For many, electronic monitoring equals incarceration by another name. It is a shackle, rather than a bracelet. The rules for wearing a monitor are far more restrictive than most people realize. Most devices today have GPS tracking, recording every movement and potentially eroding rights in ways you can’t imagine."
Wired
August 4, 2018
Read More"This time, we looked at the sources of goods rather than spending patterns among incarcerated people, and discovered a couple of surprising findings alongside the usual major vendors."
Prison Policy Initiative
July 26, 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"The Northwest Arkansas Democrat reports on the upcoming launchof a remote video visitation system in Benton County, Arkansas, that will cost 50 cents a minute in 15-minute increments. The jail will no longer allow in-person visits, the only free way to visit inmates for those who are not attorneys."
American Bar Association Journal
July 24, 2018
Read More"In the two months following an April 15, 2018 riot at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina that left seven prisoners dead and at least 22 injured, the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has renewed its push to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve jamming contraband cell phones in prisons and jails. Additionally, several prisoners who were wounded during the riot have filed lawsuits alleging that staff at the facility failed to protect them from foreseeable violence."
Prison Legal News
July 1, 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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