Incarceration in a state or federal prison is bad. Incarceration in a state or federal prison while disabled is much worse. Consider the numbers. According to a recent Vice.com article, 31 percent of prisoners in state facilities reported having a physical or mental disability. And as the U.S. prison population ages, the number of disabled
In what is typically a politically risky move, six state governors recently granted pardons and commutations to hundreds of current and former prisoners. In California, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Arkansas, and Vermont, more than 500 pardons were granted along with another 20 commutations or grants of clemency. In January 2017, outgoing Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin
The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled against two Pennsylvania prisoners who were held in solitary confinement on death row for years after their death sentences were vacated. In the course of its opinion, however, the appellate court made it clear that in the future, the state may not subject prisoners to
A 17-year-old has made a startling discovery about Wisconsin: more than half of the state’s black “neighborhoods” are actually jails. The young researcher, Lew Blank, used the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map and Google Maps to come to this conclusion and released the results in August 2016. Defining a black neighborhood as “a certain
Wrongful convictions are a well-known phenomenon in the United States; the administration of one of the world’s largest criminal justice systems virtually guarantees mistakes and failures. Famous cases such as that of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was framed for murder and spent 20 years in prison, and whose case was made into a movie, have
Following demands from the Afrikan Black Coalition (ABC), the University of California has agreed to terminate $475 million worth of contracts with Wells Fargo Bank. According to a press release from ABC, the terminated contracts include a $25 million commercial paper contract, a $150 million interest rate contract, and a $300 million line of credit.
In a unanimous and lengthy opinion, the Vermont Supreme Court dismissed a charge of unauthorized practice of law brought against a jailhouse lawyer. Martin Serendipity Morales, a prisoner who identifies as female, was being held at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Center when she was charged with a felony by Bennington County prosecutors. Her crime?
Four guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, Rhode Island were placed on administrative leave after a prisoner escaped on New Year’s Eve 2016. James Morales, 35, scaled the backboard of a basketball goal in the facility’s recreation yard, cut through a fence using a homemade tool, and descended an exterior
Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old arrested in New York City in 2012 on charges of stealing a backpack. The charges were later dismissed, but not before he sat in jail on Rikers Island for three years—part of which was spent in solitary confinement—because he couldn’t afford to post $3,000 bail. He committed suicide after his
The American Bar Association (ABA) has declared war on the cash bail bond system, which it sees as crowding the nation’s jails with people who have not been convicted of a crime, but because—despite their constitutional presumption of innocence—they are too poor to come up with bail payments to guarantee they’ll appear for trial. The