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+18 +1
Chelsea Manning’s Lawyer Upset He Learned of Possible Prison Transfer Through Pentagon Leak
The Pentagon won’t respond to Chelsea Manning’s requests for gender treatment, but they’ll apparently permit officials to leak information on how the agency plans to handle her requests to the media.
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+19 +1
A Modern Day Slave Plantation Exists, and It's Thriving in the Heart of America
It was 1972. Thousands of American troops were battling communist forces in Vietnam. Nixon had won re-election by a landslide, but Watergate would soon usher in his demise. Space travel and technology were advancing rapidly. Change was brewing across America, but one place stood still, frozen in time: Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. When Robert King arrived that year, he felt as though he'd stepped into the past.
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+11 +1
$25M lawsuit for inmate who 'baked to death' in New York prison
The mother of a mentally ill, homeless veteran who was found dead in a 37C (100F) New York City jail cell that overheated due to an equipment malfunction in February plans to file a $25m wrongful death lawsuit against the city. Alma Murdough's attorney, Derek Sells, said he will also ask the city to preserve all communications and 911 recordings regarding former Marine Jerome Murdough's death on Rikers Island. Sells scheduled a news conference for Friday afternoon.
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+21 +1
Innocent man cleared after serving 10 years as ‘Bronx rapist’
Disabled Navy veteran Tyrone Hicks spent 10 years behind bars, branded “the Bronx rapist” — but he knew all the while he was innocent and struggled every day to figure out a way to prove it. When he was released seven years ago, he enlisted the help of a group of law-school students.
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+19 +1
Doctors can’t research the health of black men, because they keep getting sent to prison
A federal rule intended to protect prisoners from being used in dangerous drug trials has compromised some of the biggest studies of heart health of the last 30 years.
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+15 +1
Halliburton may pay $500 million to keep Cheney out of prison: report
Oilfield services company Halliburton is in negotiations with the Nigerian government to keep its former CEO, Dick Cheney, out of prison, according to a news report. Sources inside Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission told GlobalPost this week that a settlement keeping the charges against Cheney out of court could cost as much as $500 million.
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+23 +1
Allegations Of Abuse Of Mentally-Ill In Florida Prison
A new investigative report from The Miami Herald this week profiles a prison in Miami-Dade County where employees have been accused of abusing mentally-ill inmates for “sport." According to the Herald, three former employees of the psychiatric unit at Dade Correctional Institution have alleged that staff at the facility were tormenting and abusing mentally-ill inmates for years. One of the former employees took their complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice last month.
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+16 +1
Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor
The kitchen of the detention center here was bustling as a dozen immigrants boiled beans and grilled hot dogs, preparing lunch for about 900 other detainees. Elsewhere, guards stood sentry and managers took head counts, but the detainees were doing most of the work — mopping bathroom stalls, folding linens, stocking commissary shelves.
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+26 +1
End Mass Incarceration Now
For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.
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+13 +1
Inmate in solitary confinement says jail ignored birth, leading to baby's death
A woman held on drug charges in the Wichita County Jail in 2012 filed a suit against Wichita County and other entities for allowing her to deliver her baby in solitary confinement without help, resulting in the infant’s death.
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+7 +1
Modern-Day Slavery in America's Prison Workforce
The median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively.
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+17 +1
Life After 'Life': Aging Inmates Struggle For Redemption
A Colorado program for long-term offenders helps a group of aging ex-cons as they attempt to make their way in a fast-paced world and rejoin a society that is not sure they deserve that chance.
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+15 +1
San Quentin plans psychiatric hospital for death row inmates
Under court pressure to improve psychiatric care for deeply disturbed death row inmates, state officials are moving quickly to open a 40-bed hospital at San Quentin prison to house them. The court-appointed monitor of mental health care in California's prison system reported to judges Tuesday that about three dozen men on death row are so mentally ill that they require inpatient care, with 24-hour nursing.
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+13 +1
This Brazilian Soccer Team Plays for a Chance to Battle Their Prison Guards
For one week each year, the Geraldo Beltrão maximum security penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil holds a soccer tournament for the prisoners. Five-member teams from the various cells compete against each other on a barbed-wire-encircled sand court until there’s just one left standing.
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+19 +1
Deaf inmate sues Oregon prison system for not providing sign-language interpreters
A deaf prison inmate accuses the Oregon Department of Corrections of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing him an interpreter during 13 years of incarceration. A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of 48-year-old David D. VanValkenburg seeks $460,000 in damages for what he describes as a systematic failure to effectively communicate with him from the beginning of his prison term in November 2000.
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+18 +1
The Night I Broke Back Into Prison
After serving thirteen years behind bars and struggling to rebuild his life, an ex-con finds solace in a surreptitious trip to the most unexpected place of all—his former cell.
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+14 +1
Texas inmates sue for relief from prison cells that ‘hold heat in like a parked car’
Texas prisoners have sued (again) to force the state’s Department of Criminal Justice to bring temperatures in their cells down to 88 degrees or less. Most people would probably consider the high 80′s to be uncomfortably hot, but the federal lawsuit — filed on behalf of four inmates at a facility that houses ill, geriatric and disabled prisoners — alleges that the status quo is far worse.
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+19 +1
Prisons are terrible, and there’s finally a way to get rid of them
How GPS tracking could make way for a cheaper, more humane system of punishment
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+39 +1
America's Floating Prisons
The U.S. Navy has taken on a curious new counterterrorism role.
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+19 +1
‘Hot felon’ Jeremy Meeks gets modelling contract
Jeremy Meeks became an Internet sensation last month when he earned the title “the sexiest criminal in America” after his mug shot made the rounds on social media. Since going viral, the photo has been “liked” on Facebook over 100,000 times and shared over 12,000 times, with many praising Meeks’ high cheek bones, chiselled face and striking blue eyes. All the attention has landed the 30-year-old a Hollywood agent and a modelling contract that could see him earning upwards of $30,000 a month.
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