The prison service has apologised after a transgender inmate, charged with raping a woman, sexually assaulted four fellow inmates just days after being remanded into an all female jail.

The Department of Justice says prison labor is good for a company’s bottom line. By Alexia Fernández Campbell.

As a multi-state prison strike continues through a second week, many participants have been hit by prison officials with swift and vicious reprisals, advocates, prisoners and their families said. It is claimed that inmates – especially those seen as organizers – have been subject to solitary confinement, revocation of communication privileges and long-distance transfers, in attempts to weaken the effects of work stoppages and to chill dissent.

A U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children in a vacant office building in Phoenix, Arizona, despite claiming that it does not operate shelters or any type of housing for children detained by federal agents. By John Bowden.

The video was shown at the first day of an inquest into the death of a 26-year-old prisoner with schizophrenia and asthma.

Over and over again, the man protested: "You got the wrong guy." But the police didn't listen. They arrested him at work in front of his colleagues, hauled him off to jail and held him for 15 days believing he was someone else: a fugitive wanted for attempted murder. Six years later, the patient man — 43-year-old Marvin Seales of Harper Woods — got his payback. On a Friday afternoon in a federal courtroom in Detroit, after just one hour and 50 minutes of deliberations, a jury awarded Seales $3.5 million for the injustice he suffered in a case of mistaken identity.

For companies like JPay, the business model is simple: Whatever it costs to send a message, prisoners and their families will find a way to pay it.

THERE, UNDER FLUORESCENT lights, she scanned rows of brightly colored birthday cards to pick out the perfect greeting for her son—let’s call him Tim—who is imprisoned more than 100 miles from his mother’s home just outside New Orleans. The card she settled on was dark brown with trees and a birthday message that read, “For the best son in the world.”

A doomsday cult leader told a judge Wednesday he was following "heavenly laws" when he took a 7-year-old child as his bride last year. John Alvin Coltharp, 34, expressed no regret for sexually abusing the girl. Instead, he said he is Jacob from the Old Testament, among other biblical figures, and has returned to earth to promote child marriage. Family members of the child could be seen cringing in the courtroom as he spoke in Manti's 6th District Court.

I may be locked up in solitary confinement, but I stand with the men and women rejecting modern slavery in America

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.

Texas death row inmate Ray Jasper is scheduled to be put to death on March 19. He has written us a letter that, he acknowledges, "could be my final statement on earth." It is well worth your time. Ray Jasper was convicted of participating in the 1998 robbery and murder of recording studio owner David Alejandro. A teenager at the time of the crime, Jasper was sentenced to death. He wrote to us once before, as part of our Letters from Death Row series.

He has one of the most glittering resumes in the security business. The president of the United States said so himself when he tapped Bernard Kerik for one of the top posts in his administration. Kerik never got the job. Revelations of tax fraud and corruption landed him in court and then in prison. And those 36 months on the other side of the bars have transformed Kerik’s views of America’s criminal justice system.

Last summer, four alleged leaders of rival prison gangs worked together to coordinate a hunger strike at California's Pelican Bay State Prison. They were protesting long-term, indefinite incarceration in solitary confinement.