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Prisoner Organ Transplants, Donations Create Controversy

By Prison Legal News Prison officials in several states are mulling over two sides of the same coin with respect to organ transplants for prisoners: first, the eligibility and cost of such medical procedures, and second, whether prisoners should be allowed to donate their organs. Prisoners in Need of Organ Transplants In Rhode Island, a

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GPS Monitoring System in Los Angeles Plagued by False Alerts, Ignored Alarms

Los Angeles County’s GPS monitoring system, designed to keep track of high-risk probationers, has overwhelmed probation officers with thousands of false alerts each day – so many that some officers simply ignore them. As a result, dozens of probationers have been able to roam unmonitored. In some cases, even when probationers removed their monitoring devices,

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Prison Gadfly: Interview with Christopher Zoukis

The term “gadfly” was used by Plato in The Apology to describe Socrates’s relationship to the Athenian political scene, which he compared to a slow and dimwitted horse.  Essentially, Socrates was a goad, a poignant reminder of right and wrong.  So a gadfly is someone who upsets the existing state of affairs by asking uncomfortable

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$750,000 Settlement for Washington State Prisoner’s Wrongful Death

By Carrie Wilkinson Although Prison Legal News and its parent organization, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), are best known for litigation involving censorship by prison and jail officials, HRDC also co-counsels select other cases, mainly involving wrongful deaths on behalf of prisoners’ surviving family members. As detailed in this issue’s cover story, one of

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$2.25 Million Jury Verdict Against LCS in Texas Prisoner Death Suit

By Matt Clarke On October 24, 2012, a federal jury in Texas awarded $2.25 million to the estate and survivors of a prisoner who died at a facility operated by LCS Corrections Services (LCS), after finding the company was 100% at fault. The district court subsequently reversed its dismissal of § 1983 claims against LCS

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Site Improvements

We are excited to announce that a new and improved site is on its way.  From January 12 through January 16, we will be migrating to the latest and greatest version of Squarespace.  Due to the vast number of articles, photos, and videos on the site, the migration will require four or five days to

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A New Way to Design and Build Prisons

By Dianne Frazee-Walker Raphael Sperry, founder of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) has the right idea about how to transform prisons and the people who reside in them. Designing prisons is fast becoming a hot topic in the world of architecture. Sperry has a specific interest in designing holding facilities that promote restoration rather than

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Innovative Education Can Help Fight Crime in Latin America

By Gabriel Zinny and Diego Gorgal Latin America is among the most violent regions of the world. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which each year releases its annual report on violence and the drug trade, has the bad news: with just 8 percent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for over

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We Need to Address the School to Prison Pipeline

By Gloria Romero and Rishawn Biddle The deaths at the hands of the police of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and the decisions not to prosecute officers in either case, should jolt reformers into demanding the transformation of both our failing public education and criminal justice systems – whose dysfunctions disproportionately affect poor, minority communities.

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Amount of Drugs a Factor for Departure Sentence

The Kansas Supreme Court reversed a prisoner’s sentence for possession of contraband – a small amount of marijuana – after it held the sentencing court misinterpreted its statutory authority by concluding it could not consider a downward departure to the presumptive criminal sentence. Prisoner Waddell Warren was convicted of introducing a controlled substance into a

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