News

Prisoner’s Disciplinary Conviction Reversed

By Christopher Zoukis The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has taken the unusual step of reversing a prison disciplinary board’s finding that a prisoner was guilty of committing a prohibited act. Timothy W. Austin was a prisoner at an Indiana prison when he was found guilty of attempting to traffic in

Read More »

Travel Within the Federal Bureau of Prisons

The Federal Bureau of Prisons houses approximately 188,000 inmates in over 200 federal prisons, prison camps, and private contract prisons. Tens of thousands more are housed in federal custody in jails and detention centers not directly operated by the federal prison system. Federal prisoners are continually transported from one federal prison, detention center, or country

Read More »

The Processing of New Arrivals at Federal Prisons

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is a massive entity with over 41,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $7 billion. It is responsible for the housing and management of approximately 188,000 federal inmates, each of which must be cataloged, inventoried, and processed into the prison system, and ultimately into each individual federal prison.

Read More »

Use of Electronic Monitoring Skyrockets

A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, released on September 7, 2016, revealed that the number of accused and convicted offenders required to wear some kind of electronic monitoring device has increased by nearly 140 percent in the last decade. Electronic monitoring devices generally consist of GPS and radio-frequency (RF) units. GPS systems are used

Read More »

Delay in Biopsy Not Deliberate Indifference

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on October 12, 2016, that a two-month delay in ordering a biopsy of a prisoner’s potentially cancerous masses did not constitute deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs. Calvin Whiting was incarcerated at the Shawnee Correctional Center in Vienna, Illinois, in October 2010 when he developed

Read More »

Prison Publication Will Get BOP Documents and $420K

Fourteen years ago, the nonprofit monthly magazine Prison Legal News filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Federal Bureau of Prisons for documentation of how much money the BOP had paid out over an approximately seven-and-a-half-year period (from 1996 through the end of July 2003) in judgments and settlements of lawsuits and claims

Read More »

Measles Outbreak at AZ Detention Center

by Christopher Zoukis An infectious outbreak at an immigration detention facility in Pinal County, Arizona operated by CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA) resulted in over 20 people contracting measles. The outbreak was discovered in May 2016 when one detainee and an employee at the Eloy Detention Center tested positive for measles. Within two weeks, 16

Read More »

BOP Is Now Looking for More Space in Private Prisons

Only a little less than a year ago, the second-ranking official in the Department of Justice was declaring that the federal government planned to reduce and eventually eliminate the housing of federal inmates in privately owned prisons. Last August, the DOJ unveiled an Inspector General’s report purporting to show that privately run prison facilities are

Read More »

Verizon Terminates Collect Call Access for Federal Prisoners

On April 22, Verizon implemented a service change in which its landline customers are no longer allowed to accept collect calls from inmates confined within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Federal inmates were notified of this new policy through an April 17 notice posted to the Inmate Bulletin Board system on TRULINCS computers. This follows

Read More »

Bureau of Prisons Announces New Civil Commitment Review Policy

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has announced a new policy concerning the certification and civil commitment process for federal inmates. While civil commitment is nothing new for federal prisoners, the new policy better outlines the process, stages, and elements for review. This new policy is detailed in Program Statement 5394.01, Certification and Civil Commitment of

Read More »
Search
Categories
Categories
Archives
X