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.
“But Pennsylvania is one of many states that has far too few hospital beds for the mentally ill defendants who need them, leaving people like Elle to languish in jail while they wait for a spot. It has ranked among the worst states when it comes to these wait times, a nationwide problem that experts say may be linked to the downsizing of psychiatric hospitals and inadequate community mental-health resources. “
The Marshall Project
June 6, 2019
Read More“Temperatures are supposed to hover around 100 degrees this week at a federal prison in the Southern San Joaquin Valley, and they’ll remain in the high 90s all summer. For the third year running, prison staff say their air conditioning is broken under the strain of those high temperatures.“
McClatchy DC
June 6, 2019
Read More“There are more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and for many of them, access to books and other learning materials is not guaranteed and can even be purposely denied. One Illinois prison recently removed more than 200 of its books, many about race, from its library.“
New York Public Radio
June 5, 2019
Read More“Released Tuesday, the $4.4 billion spending plan is a 2.4 percent increase from last year’s budget, with county departments angling to get about $33.1 million for new or improved programs. The staff budget also recommends about $43 million in cuts, mostly by eliminating vacant positions. No layoffs are proposed. “
Sacramento Bee
June 4, 2019
Read More“When I was a teenager, my father and I shared books. We didn’t share the physical copy, at least not often—my dad was serving a ten-year sentence in California, and I was at school in Bath, England—but we did share the imaginary landscape offered within its pages, a place we could occupy together from afar. “
Literary Hub
June 4, 2019
Read More“Prison language, or language created by inmates while incarcerated, has a long and vivid history, and is likely as old as the modern prison itself. It can alternately can be described as prison slang (informal talk), cant (a secret language), or argot (jargon of a certain group). “
PBS News Hour
June 3, 2019
Read More“Bryan Stirling, SCDC’s director, should want to hear out his critics, not shut them up. If he doesn’t, the Legislature should. Warren Buffett, too, might want to ask what’s going on in one of his companies, even one far from Omaha.“
Charleston Post and Courier
June 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“I used to go out to the exercise yard completely alone. But one day when I was out there, it was suddenly like all the air around me became a pressure force. I felt like I was between two pillars of concrete that were moving and crushing me, like I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe. I started banging on the door to the yard to go back inside. I knew I needed to get out of this open area. I ran back to my cell. And within minutes, I was okay again. “
The Marshall Project
May 30, 2019
Read More“Federal prosecutors are investigating the Massachusetts state prison system over the treatment of elderly and severely ill prisoners, following a five-month investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) published in the Boston Globe and WGBH News.“
New England Center for Investigative Reporting
May 29, 2019
Read More“Every day there’s another story. In Alabama, the Justice Department recently concluded that the level of violence, sexual abuse, and weapons in that state’s prisons has created conditions that violate the Constitution. Arizona’s governor was forced to convene a task force to determine why broken cell locks, which led to the death of a state prisoner and assaults on corrections officers, were neglected for years. “
Washington Examiner
May 29, 2019
Read More“Surges in the number of Americans dying while incarcerated have occurred against a backdrop of an increase in the US prison population by 500% over the last 40 years. Based on the latest national figures available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 4,980 prisoners in US correctional facilities died in 2014, a nearly 3% increase from 2013. In state prisons, the mortality rate was 275 for every 100,000 people, the highest since data collection began in 2001.“
The Guardian
May 26, 2019
Read More“Smoot has been a nurse for about 20 years. She has worked for the Illinois Department of Corrections since 2016, and said hospice or end-of-life care is different for prisoners. They are not in their homes, in their own beds, and oftentimes are not surrounded by loved ones. But still, Smoot sees it as her job to comfort them.“
The Southern Illinoisan
May 26, 2019
Read More“Today, one out of every three men imprisoned in Colorado — and four out of every five women inmates — say they have some type of moderate to critical mental health need, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections. The number of inmates with mental health needs in Colorado’s prisons has steadily risen in the past two decades, from about 4,500 in 1998 to about 10,700 last year.“
The Denver Post
May 25, 2019
Read More“Ensuring that people are not prevented from staying in contact with their loved ones or their attorney — that a child growing up with an incarcerated parent feels just a little less distant — is a small step in chipping away at the system of mass incarceration that has swollen over the past half-century. For some a phone call is simply a phone call, but for others it is one of the only ways to stay connected to a world you’re scared will forget you. “
TIME Magazine
May 24, 2019
Read More“Solitary confinement — in a windowless room — was a common punishment; Garland says he lost track of whether it was day or night during a spell in solitary and began to hear voices. Mental-health help was hard to get, he alleged, even after he started swallowing shards of metal and tried to hang himself. He detailed the treatment in a lawsuit accusing the county of subjecting inmates to inhumane conditions — a claim the county denies.“
LA Times
May 23, 2019
Read More“De Blasio said the city will consider moving different agencies to Rikers Island after closing the jails. The number of detainees in New York City jails has decreased by roughly 30 percent since 2013, the year de Blasio took office. State and city criminal justice reforms related to bail and prosecution of low-level offenses are expected to further decrease the city’s jail population.“
Queens Daily Eagle
May 22, 2019
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“A federal court order officially ended a Tennessee program that shortened people's jail sentences if they agreed to get vasectomies or other forms of birth control. The order was filed Monday as part of a settlement reached in a federal lawsuit over the program. The lawsuit, filed in 2017, said White County Sheriff Oddie Shoupe and Judge Sam Benningfield violated the constitution by allowing inmates to get 30 days off a jail term if they agreed to a birth control implant or vasectomy.“
The Tennessean
May 20, 2019
Read More“Women miscarrying due to a lack of proper health care, a woman giving birth alone in a cell, and deaf inmates not getting interpretation services during doctor visits. These instances and numerous others were detailed in more than 200 letters lawyers sent to Arizona Department of Corrections officials over the past four months.“
Arizona Central
May 20, 2019
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