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+13 +1
More Prisoners Using Smuggled Phones To Plot Escapes, Illegal Activity
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.
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+22 +1
Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says
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.
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+23 +1
Solitary Confinement Costs $78K Per Inmate And Should Be Curbed, Critics Say
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.
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+18 +1
A Letter From Ray Jasper, Who Is About to Be Executed
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.
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+13 +1
From top cop to ex-con, Kerik slams U.S. prison system
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.
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+12 +1
How 4 Inmates Launched A Statewide Hunger Strike From Solitary
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.
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+14 +1
FBI Investigates Company Running 'Gladiator School' Prison
The FBI has launched an investigation of the Corrections Corporation of America over the company's running of an Idaho prison with a reputation so violent that inmates dubbed it "Gladiator School." The Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA has operated Idaho's largest prison for more than a decade, but last year, CCA officials acknowledged it had understaffed the Idaho Correctional Center by thousands of hours in violation of the state contract.
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+13 +1
A letter from Guantanamo: 'Nobody can truly understand how we suffer'
I write this letter, as I wrote my last, between bouts of violent vomiting and sharp pains in my stomach caused by this morning's force-feeding session. Reading news articles, you would think that we have stopped striking. Perhaps you might think that our protests had even been sated by government concessions. We may be trapped behind the walls of Guantanamo, but we will not be silenced.
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+15 +1
The Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence
Most states shut down their debtors’ prisons more than 100 years ago; in 2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.
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+23 +1
Why do we lock up so many people?
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens.
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+16 +1
Inmates Sent To Solitary Confinement For Helping Other Inmates Assert Their Rights
Former US Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. was reportedly punished with solitary confinement for giving legal advice to his fellow inmates, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. An anonymous source told the Sun-Times that Jackson spent four or five days in isolation over a month ago, when a guard “took exception” to Jackson advising other inmates on their rights in prison.
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+11 +1
Solitary Confinement Is Being Rebranded in US Prisons
It’s a common practice within the US criminal justice system: treating children as adults, in both prosecution and punishment.
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+20 +1
Netherlands Closing 19 Prisons Due to Lack of Criminals
In 2009, the Dutch justice ministry announced the planned closing of eight prisons in the Netherlands due to a declining crime rate which was expected to continue. In 2013, a staggering 19 prisons were scheduled to be closed. This is caused, in part, by a continued decline in crime rates.
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+15 +1
Man who ended up never serving his prison sentence due to clerical error awaits fate
In 1999, Cornealious “Mike” Anderson was convicted of armed robbery after taking money from a Burger King manager who was making a bank deposit. He was sentenced to 13 years in jail, but after he posted bond and went home during the appeals process, he was never forced to serve his sentence.
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+15 +1
Abu Ghraib closes, bitter memories of torture remain
The prison at Abu Ghraib was notorious for its treatment of those confined within its walls long before U.S. Army Private Lynndie England dragged a naked Iraqi prisoner around on a dog leash. Located some nine miles west of Baghdad in the Abu Ghraib district, Iraqis steered clear of the huge prison complex where, for decades, political prisoners brought there would disappear, and only wails of torture could be heard through the metal bars that covered its high windows.
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+3 +1
Thousands of prisoners could qualify for clemency
Thousands of federal offenders could become eligible for clemency consideration by President Obama under new guidelines set to be released later this week by the Justice Department.
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+44 +1
How Many People Are Wrongly Convicted? Researchers Do the Math.
Rarely, at least according to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In a 2006 opinion he cited an approximate error rate of 0.027 percent, based on back-of-the-envelope calculations by an Oregon district attorney in a fiery op-ed for the New York Times. The op-ed was in response to a report by Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, cataloguing 340 exonerations between 1989 and 2003.
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+19 +1
There’s no humane way to carry out the death penalty
No one who supports the death penalty should have the slightest problem with the way Clayton Lockett died. Lockett, a convicted murderer, spent 43 minutes in apparent agony Tuesday night as the state of Oklahoma tried to execute him by injecting an untested cocktail of drugs. Instead of quickly losing consciousness, he writhed in obvious distress and attempted to speak. Witnesses described what they saw as horrific.
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+6 +1
The U.S. Sends 2 Million Kids to Prison Every Year. Congress Is Trying to Change That.
The two lawmakers are working together with colleagues to completely overhaul the juvenile-justice system in the United States, where more youths are incarcerated than in any other nation by a 5-to-1 ratio. On average, the U.S. sends 2 million children to juvenile detention every year, 95 percent of whom have not committed a violent crime.
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+16 +1
Meet the Vigilante Prisoner Who Beats Up Jail Rapists
Last year I spoke to a guy named Shaun Attwood about making millions on the stock market and plunging it all into a new career as a rave-organizing ecstasy kingpin. One unfortunate side effect of selling drugs on a large scale, I discovered during our conversation, is that if the police find out about it, they’re probably going to send you to jail.
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