President Uhuru Kenyatta commuted all death sentences in Kenya to life jail terms on Monday, removing 2,747 convicts from death row in a nation that has not executed anyone for about three decades. In addition to commuting the sentences of 2,655 men and 92 women, Kenyatta also signed pardon warrants to release 102 long-term serving convicts, the presidential State House said. Such pardons are granted to prisoners deemed reformed and rehabilitated, and found to be deserving of early release.

Richard Castillo has not yet been convicted of the crime – evading police in a vehicle – of which he stands accused. But he has been imprisoned since February 2013, including 12 months in solitary confinement. He still has a bullet lodged in his leg from being shot during his arrest, and his hand was broken in 10 places in a raid by guards on his accommodation block in June. His son, who turned 10 a few days after his father was imprisoned, is now nearly 14. His four-year-old daughter cries for her father every day, his wife Victoria said.

A Florida judge has sentenced a man who shot at George Zimmerman during a confrontation to 20 years in prison. Zimmerman fatally shot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 in a case that struck a chord nationwide. He was later acquitted of all charges. "A jury in Florida's Seminole County found Matthew Apperson guilty of second-degree attempted murder in the shooting — which happened as Apperson and Zimmerman were driving in separate vehicles," NPR's Greg Allen tells our Newscast unit.

After my first FBI raid I started reading those little guides on life in prison that one finds online and noticed several references to role-playing games. By Barrett Brown.

A massive federal racketeering and drug-trafficking case at Maryland's biggest prison offers a glimpse at the deep roots of corruption that criminal justice experts say grips the U.S. corrections system.

A 27-year-old prisoner who died at Franklin Correctional Institution in 2010 was killed by corrections officers who tortured, gassed and beat him, according to a 33-page federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday. The inmate, Randall Jordan-Aparo, suffered from a genetic blood disorder that had flared up in the months before his death. As his condition worsened, the lawsuit alleges, corrections officers, doctors and nurses at the prison denied him medical attention, and when he complained, they forced him into an isolation cell and gassed him until he could no longer breathe.'

The new boom in American prisons is happening in mostly white, rural and politically conservative areas.

A tale of repentance, redemption and reinvention. (June 30, 2016)

Last Thursday, private prison stocks dropped like a rock when the Department of Justice announced that it would be phasing out its use of for-profit detention facilities. If you were an investor who had no ethical qualms about profiting from an industry that’s been accused of perpetrating a number of human rights abuses, it would have been a good time to buy. It turns out that reports of the industry’s imminent death have been greatly exaggerated.

Ramen noodles have overtaken tobacco to become the most valuable commodity in US prisons, a new study suggests.

A federal judge made public still images from surveillance video in a class-action lawsuit alleging that migrants caught illegally entering the country are held in dirty, crowded cells. By Fernanda Santos. [Autoplay video]

A central Texas man serving a life sentence for a double murder in 1992 is innocent, as are three codefendants no longer in prison, a state judge has found. Retired district judge George Allen ruled Friday that Richard Bryan Kussmaul, 45, should be free. His three codefendants each received 20-year sentences and have already been released. DNA evidence not available two decades ago shows the four weren’t involved in the fatal shootings of 17-year-old Leslie Murphy and 14-year-old Stephen Neighbors at a home near Moody, south of Waco, Allen said in a four-page opinion.

The U.S. government halted a decade-long experiment to hire private companies to help manage the soaring prison population, sending shares of facility operators Corrections Corp. of America and GEO Group Inc. plunging.

Iran is preparing to indict a detained U.S. man, accusing him of acting against the country’s national security interests, a source familiar with the case has told The Foreign Desk. Gholamreza Shahini, 46, known to his friends as Robin, has come under the government's radar for allegedly participating in the Green Revolution of 2009 against the government and collaborating on a TV interview with the US’ State Department-backed Voice of America, according to the indictment set to be unveiled at a Revolutionary Court.

For two weeks in the winter of 1980, a small town in upstate New York had an Olympic Village filled with 1,800 of the world’s most elite athletes. Despite Cold War tensions, the mood in the village was jovial; the athletes shared meals, traded pins, and gathered in the Village’s “psychedelic room full of blinking electronic game machines” for endless rounds of pinball. Emotions ran high, as most Americans fondly remember the 1980 games for the “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet hockey team, one of the iconic moments of any Winter Olympics.

A chance meeting at Danbury prison would help start one of world's most powerful drug cartels. By Christopher Woody.

I met my granddaughter for the first time in a prison visiting room. I’ve been locked up in Maryland’s women’s prison for more than 18 years, since my daughter was 8 years old. In May of last year, she came to visit me carrying her newborn first child. I was overwhelmed with emotion as she placed the baby in my arms. I cried as I held my granddaughter, gave her a bottle and smelled her wonderful baby smell. It was a deeply meaningful moment.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday cut short the sentences of 214 federal inmates, including 67 life sentences, in what the White House called the largest batch of commutations on a single day in more than a century. Almost all the prisoners were serving time for nonviolent crimes related to cocaine, methamphetamine or other drugs, although a few were charged with firearms violations related to their drug activities. Almost all are men, though they represent a diverse cross-section of America geographically.

The Sordid Ways Death-Penalty States Obtain Execution Drugs. By Tana Ganeva.

Citing “unforeseen developments” that they would not describe, prosecutors said Thursday that they were dropping charges against the man they had long accused of killing a young intern in a Washington park more than 15 years ago. The surprise decision means that the death of the intern, Chandra Levy, remains one of the nation’s most notorious unsolved crimes.