Yesterday, Felicity Huffman released a statement confirming she is set to plead guilty in the college admissions cheating case. Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli, the two other celebrities named, have not indicated they are pleading guilty yet. But according to TMZ, whether the two enter a plea or let their case go to a federal grand jury, they are set to face years of prison time because of the amount of money they used in their bribes.

Russian prison authorities have reinstated yoga for inmates after dismissing a claim by a religious scholar that the practice could make them gay. Both a Moscow pre-trial detention center for women and the renowned Butyrka prison in the Russian capital introduced yoga classes last year, according to The Moscow Times.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a summary of its findings on the state of Alabama’s prisons. The accounts are stomach-churning: The New York Times noted that one prisoner had been lying dead for so long that “his face was flattened,” while another “was tied up and tortured for two days.” A dive into the 53-page report reveals yet more horror. One prisoner was doused with bleach and beaten with a broken mop handle. Another was attacked with shaving cream so hot that it caused chemical burns, requiring treatment from an outside hospital.

The contraband is scary enough: Homemade knives with grips whittled to fit particular hands. Homemade machetes. And homemade armor, with books and magazines for padding. Then there is the blood: In puddles. In toilets. Scrawled on the wall in desperate messages. Bloody scalps, bloody footprints, blood streaming down a cheek like tears. And the dead: a man kneeling like a supplicant, hands bound behind his back with white fabric strips and black laces. Another, hanging from a twisted sheet in the dark, virtually naked, illuminated by a flashlight beam.

Over $86,000 of contraband --including a drone, cell phones, and multiple drugs  --were seized from a maximum security prison in Agassiz, BC.

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say the claim of job training is more evidence of hype around the promises of AI.

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave. Poverty and loneliness are two of the possible causes.

Pigeonly, InmateAid and Flikshop are offering a cheaper way for families to connect with incarcerated loved ones.

Daughter of Swedish bookseller jailed in China says Anna Lindstedt set up meetings in Stockholm

A California man who was wrongfully convicted for killing an ex-girlfriend and her son four decades ago has reached a $21 million settlement with the city of Simi Valley, officials said.

Switching music providers made inmates’ old music useless

Armed with a contraband phone, an incarcerated Martin Shkreli is plotting a comeback with his notorious pharmaceutical company, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. So far, however, the company is still losing millions of dollars. Shkreli is just 16 months into a seven-year prison sentence over securities-fraud charges. He landed in jail last year for running what federal prosecutors described as a Ponzi-like scheme that duped investors of his hedge funds.

Chris Watts said he's found God since strangling his pregnant wife and smothering his two daughters in a rage this past August. In a new interview with investigators at the federal prison where he is serving his three consecutive life sentences, the 33-year-old Colorado man delved into his newfound Christian faith.

We throw thousands of men in the hole for the books they read, the company they keep, the beliefs they hold. Here's why.

Nearly half of the detainees who escaped from a flooded jail at the height of Super Typhoon Haiyan have returned, many after helping their families deal with the storm's aftermath. There were nearly 600 detainees at the Leyte Provincial Jail when the typhoon, one of the strongest ever to make landfall, flattened dozens of towns across the islands of Leyte and Samar on November 8.

On Wednesday 27 November, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be removed from prison in Sweden and extradited to neighboring Denmark on hacking charges, despite already being cleared of similar charges in his home country. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Gottfrid’s mother Kristina raises a number of serious concerns over her son’s deportation to a country that has not formally indicted him.

Nearly two dozen Islamist women and girls, some as young as 15, were handed heavy prison sentences Wednesday for protesting in a court ruling that came a day after police beat and terrorized prominent female activists in a crackdown on secular demonstrators under a tough new anti-protest law.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to introduce a mandatory prison sentence for anyone caught with an illegal firearm. But reams of data shows that incarceration creates more crime.

Years ago, a rare-books dealer browsing at an estate sale in Rochester came across an unusual manuscript, dated 1858. The family selling it said little about where it had been for the last 150 years. It appeared never to have left upstate New York.

A German state spent €4.3 million on a prison which only had one inmate and then closed, according to a report on Thursday. The single inmate was accompanied by 26 members of staff for a year.

It's probably not a question that gets asked around your office every day. But it can happen. A Microsoft executive was charged with insider trading last week, for instance (although he does not face prison time). Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, former eBay affiliate marketers accused of defrauding the auction site of $35 million, face up to 20 years in prison (they have yet to be sentenced).

An international media campaign is targeting the Danish legal system’s treatment of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svarholm Warg by arguing that convicted Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik receives more humane conviction than the Swedish hacker.

If there were ever a person who might be able to clue you in on what life in a white-collar—or minimum-security or “country club”—prison was actually like, it was this guy. You know this guy. How many former New York City police commissioners, former overseers of Rikers Island, former consultants for U.S. security in Iraq or former almost-heads of the Department of Homeland Security are there in the world who ended up in the slammer?

Party Prison: The villains and murderers banged up in a South American Benidorm Latin American jails are usually dark places. But San Antonio Prison in Venezuela could be mistaken for a holiday resort, with its swimming pool, food stalls and overnight accommodation for guests.

Why a cheap, decade-and-a-half-old model of AM/FM radio remains ubiquitous in correctional facilities and coveted outside them.

The “No Separate Justice" campaign is taking aim at an abusive system that has wreaked havoc on the lives of hundreds of Muslims. For nearly three years, a Muslim-American named Syed Fahad Hashmi was held under restrictive conditions inside the walls of the MCC. Before he had his day in court on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda, Hashmi was locked in solitary confinement, confined to his cell for 23 hours a day and only allowed out for one hour of recreation - in a cage.

A California measure to reduce prison overcrowding reveals how America is, once again, failing some of its most vulnerable.

About 2.4 million people live behind bars in America — the highest number in the world. That's a little more than 0.7% of the population and more than 700 for every 100,000 people. This world map illustrates how disconcerting that is. The size of each country corresponds to the size of its total prison population (as of 2010), and a darker color indicates a higher incarceration rate.

Allegations of sex abuse across the country's prisons are on the rise, with nearly half of cases allegedly being perpetrated by guards, according to a new study conducted by the Justice Department. The new Bureau of Justice Statistics report documented more than 8,763 allegations of prisoner sexual victimization between 2009 and 2011, which they say is an 11 percent increase over the number of allegations documented in a report covering 2007-08.

The American administration has promised to close Guantánamo prison, the facility at the American naval base in Cuba where those captured in the “war on terror” are held for up to 12 years without trial. But it needs to find a place to move the inmates. Of the 155 current prisoners, 90 are Yemeni (so are 56 of the 77 “approved for transfer”).

The US Army's use of Metallica's oeuvre as a tool in its interrogations in Iraq is well documented, but it opted for something a little more esoteric in Guantanamo Bay, according to one Canadian industrial metal band.

As Philip Seymour Hoffman’s friends, family and admirers come to terms with his tragic and untimely death and fentanyl-laced heroin kills addicts across the Northeast, the media have responded to the news in the best way it knows how: with a seemingly endless stream of programming on the dangers of heroin and the tenuous lives of those who use it. Unfortunately, even when they get it right, there are often crucial factors missing from the discussion.

They're hidden in babies' diapers, ramen noodle soup packages, footballs, soda cans and even body cavities. Not drugs or weapons, but cellphones. They're becoming a growing problem in prisons across the country as they are used to make threats, plan escapes and for inmates to continue to make money from illegal activity even while behind bars.

Solitary confinement has been called a “living death,” cruel and unusual, and torture. Studies of the prison practice of placing inmates in a solitary, often concrete windowless cell for 23 hours a day with almost no human contact, have found that the psychological impact is dramatic after just a few days.

Former prisoners spoke about the effects of solitary confinement Tuesday in a congressional hearing aimed at banning it for some inmates. Solitary confinement is also extremely expensive, critics say.