On the day Layla got out of prison and back to her home in Georgia, she was told she would need to purchase a smartphone—not an insignificant task for someone who’d just completed a sentence, but Layla was lucky to have a friend who could buy one for her. She says she was at home in bed a few days later when the app she had been mandated to install under the terms of her release went off unexpectedly, the high-pitched warning alarm blaring as it sent a notification to her parole officers telling him that she was not, in fact, at home.

As factories and other businesses remain shuttered across America, people in prisons in at least 40 states continue going to work. Sometimes they earn pennies an hour, or nothing at all, making masks and hand sanitizer to help guard others from the coronavirus. Those same men and women have been cut off from family visits for weeks, but they get charged up to $25 for a 15-minute phone call — plus a surcharge every time they add credit.

A former pastor from Tennessee was convicted of raping his adopted teenage daughter. The usual sentence for a crime like this is a minimum of 72 years. But 41-year-old David Richards was given only 12 years of prison time by a Knox County judge. Giving the sexual predator less than a quarter of the actual sentencing for a crime of this nature, was attributed by the judge to the man's religious leadership as well as the outpouring support he received from his parishioners, reported Mirror.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s ailing health condition has led him to miss a hearing at a UK court this week, raising further concerns about the state of his health and strengthening calls for him to be released.

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.