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A North Carolina guard was ordered to serve three months in jail after being found guilty of beating to death a prisoner who had been arrested on an open container charge and minor drug violation. Video footage from the Wake County Detention Center showed guard Markeith Council, 28, pick up Shon Demetrius McClain and slam

Sesame Street has a new muppet character: Alex, whose father is incarcerated. “My dad’s in jail,” he says in an online video. “I don’t like to talk about it.” Alex is featured in Sesame Street’s online teaching kit, “Little Children, Big Challenges,” which is a series of resources for children and their parents dealing with

The family of Oklahoma prisoner Clayton Lockett, whose botched execution caused international outrage, filed a federal lawsuit that accused the doctor who oversaw the April 29, 2014 execution of “human medical experimentation in torturing [him] to death.” The district court dismissed the case, and the family filed an appeal. David Lane, a civil rights attorney,

Charges against a Washington man awaiting trial on felony drug and stolen property charges were dropped by a Yakima County Superior Court after an investigation found that a prosecutor and sheriff’s detective had listened to phone calls made to his lawyer. Superior Court Judge Douglas Federspiel dismissed the charges against Daniel Woolem following a two-day

In an embarrassing coda to Vice President Joe Biden’s long career as one of the chief architects of the War on Drugs, one of his sons was booted from the U.S. Navy after testing positive for cocaine. Hunter Biden, 45, the younger of the Vice President’s two sons, was commissioned as an ensign in May

On November 7, 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it had received the largest grant in the organization’s history: $50 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The donation will fund an eight-year campaign to slash America’s incarceration rate and reduce its prison population, which is the largest in the world. The grant was

In 2013 public defenders across the country sounded the warning alarm when the federal sequester forced many offices to slash budgets and take on fewer cases. Many have yet to recover, and offices are still dealing with not enough lawyers, few resources, and not nearly enough time to help a dearth of clients. With indigent

It’s been over 20 years since Jon Marc Taylor, Ph.D., a Missouri state prisoner and author of the Prisoners’ Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada, published an op-ed in the New York Times urging federal lawmakers not to ban Pell grants for prisoners. In the two decades since his plea, the

A review of College for Convicts has been posted at sirreadalot.org. We thank them for taking the time to read it and for the excellent information they post about all the important non-fiction titles out there.

In the years and months since I’ve been writing about prison conditions across the United States, the insidious creep of privatization into our justice system has transformed into an all-out takeover. The prison-industrial complex has now grown into a $74 billion industry that spans across a broad spectrum of areas. Students at Columbia University have sought to