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 that petition, Prison Legal News calls the 11th Circuit decision ‘an outlier ruling upholding an outlier policy.’ As it notes, Florida is alone in its position. Although the publication has battled censorship in 29 states, making it perhaps the most frequently banned magazine in the country, neither the federal prison system or any other state prison systems bans the magazine in its entirety.“
Reason Magazine
September 17, 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“This conduct shocks the conscience; our country’s Constitution simply cannot tolerate this type of discriminatory treatment, where all free citizens evacuate to save their life, but inmates are placed in dire straits at a local jail because they are incarcerated — noting that many inmates are pretrial detainees who have merely (been) accused of a crime.“
Charlotte Observer
September 14, 2018
Read MorePrison Legal News is petitioning the Supreme Court to take up their case against the state of Florida for censoring the distribution of Prison Legal News in state prisons. If the case is taken, it would be an attempt to reverse the decision of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Prison Legal News
September 14, 2018
Read More“Today, members of Congress introduced a bill that aims to make sure what happened to Winn never happens to anyone else. Cosponsored by a majority of Democratic and Republican women in the House, the bill would ban the shackling and solitary confinement of pregnant inmates in the federal prison system. The Pregnant Women in Custody Act, introduced by Reps. Karen Bass (D–Calif.), Mia Love (R–Utah) and Catherine Clark (D–Mass.), would ban the use of restraints and restrictive housing on female inmates during pregnancy, during labor, and post-partum. It would also set standards of care for pregnant female inmates.“
Reason Magazine
September 13, 2018
Read More“Despite an evacuation order encompassing the prison’s location in Jasper County issued Monday, S.C. Department of Corrections officials decided not to remove inmates at the Ridgeland Correctional Institution as of that afternoon, SCDC spokesman Dexter Lee said in an interview with The State.“
The State
September 11, 2018
Read More“‘That’s because it was a peaceful strike,’ said Dr. Breea Willingham, a criminal justice professor at State University of New York at Plattsburgh. ‘If people were getting killed inside those prisons, people would have been all over it.’ The relative lack of attention to the strike underlined the continued indifference to widespread claims of abuse and inhumane conditions inside the nation’s prison system, observers and prison activists told The Crime Report.“
The Crime Report
September 11, 2018
Read More“Incarcerated people at Lee Correctional continued to be held in conditions of solitary confinement following the riot, allegedly for safety reasons. One man held at Lee claimed that the officials were actually using solitary confinement as a method to prevent participation in the widely publicized nationwide strike. “
Solitary Watch
September 10, 2018
Read More"Since the first day of the call to action, reports of protests and other occurrences behind bars have trickled out through videos recorded by inmates, accounts from family members, statements by prison reform activists and statements from prison officials. It’s not known how many incarcerated people took part in the boycott. The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a labor union for prisoners, said that reports of prisoner participation have come from at least 14 states thus far."
USA Today
September 8, 2018
Read More“Gay expected to die in prison because of a long series of felony assaults on guards that consisted of throwing body waste or yanking back on chains. These sentences were consecutive and added 99 years to Gay’s prison time. He was up for parole at age 120.“
Belleville News Democrat
September 7, 2018
Read More"Recasting mass incarceration as “prison slavery” — usually by way of the Thirteenth Amendment — is perhaps the growing movement’s most innovative intervention. This terminology speaks to the various deprivations experienced behind bars, the movement’s base in states throughout the former Confederacy, and its long-term objective of prison abolition."
Jacobin Magazine
September 2, 2018
Read More"County officials have maintained that the reason why they ever wanted to include video visitation was to cut down on how often people were using the county’s assets — namely the county buildings and parking lots."
Denton Record Chronicle
September 1, 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"His death was announced through a statement that appeared on the department’s website Wednesday, but was not distributed to media outlets. The manner and cause of death are pending an autopsy, according to the statement."
Mississippi Today
August 30, 2018
Read More"Many of the women, held in chaotic and unsanitary conditions, are not receiving proper medical treatment and are deteriorating into states of psychosis, Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, wrote. Most of them face low-level misdemeanor charges and cannot post the $200 to $500 required for bail."
Atlanta Journal Constitution
August 30, 2018
Read More"But human beings just insist on being social creatures, and no matter how much you indoctrinate or denigrate them, they remain as much. Officers are not emotionless robots any more than death-row prisoners are reducible to the crimes for which we have been convicted and sentenced."
The Marshall Project
August 30, 2018
Read More"And from now until the end of the strike on September 9, everyone can lift the strikers up in prayer: that, as the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee puts it, "prisoners are safe, that they can have hopes and dreams for the future, that they can build towards redemption, rather than being condemned to a slow death inside a concrete box.""
National Catholic Review
August 30, 2018
Read More"Since the settlement, the department has also been working to move the most medically vulnerable inmates out of hot prisons across the state — almost 75 percent of Texas prisons and state-run jails don’t have air conditioning in housing areas. Collier said the department has identified about 10,000 inmates who are most at risk for heat sensitivity, and 3,000 were already in air-conditioned beds. Since the settlement, about 700 others have been moved to cooled housing, and the rest still need to be moved."
Texas Tribune
August 29, 2018
Read More"'The safety and security of our employees is my number one concern,' Secretary Wetzel said. 'Our state prisons, especially those in the western part of the state, have experienced recent incidents in which employees have been sickened and we need to get to the bottom of this issue now'."
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
August 29, 2018
Read More"Gov. Phil Bryant said Tuesday that multiple state and federal agencies are working together to investigate the numerous MDOC inmate deaths this month. He added officials are 'going to do everything that we can to find out what is going on with each and every one of them. They're just as important as anyone else in the state of Mississippi whose lives have been lost'."
Clarion Ledger
August 29, 2018
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