ACLU

At least six people at Red Onion intentionally lit themselves on fire last year. Now, prisoners say staff are forcing people to comply—or cutting their electricity.

At least one trans woman in federal prison says Trump’s executive order has already prevented her from receiving hormone therapy, leading to “thoughts of suicide and self-harm.”

Attorneys say the district’s practice of sending armed police officers to mental health emergencies violates the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The federal Bureau of Prisons has suggested banning imprisoned people from using social media—but First Amendment defenders say the rule would chill free speech and silence whistleblowers.

The ACLU sued the state after it moved children to the former death row unit at the notorious Angola prison. But a court filing says the kids have faced abuse in their new facility, too.

The ACLU says the state’s policy is the “most restrictive” in the nation.

One boy detained at Louisiana’s Jackson Parish Correctional Center said children were maced and then forced to sit outside for hours.

The state argues there would be a “near certainty” of “serious bodily injury” to children, staff, and the public if kids are transferred out of the prison.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has taken legal action against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to stop deputies from hitting incarcerated people in the head so often. Yesterday, LASD said it should not be forced to change.

Youth in solitary confinement wrote letters to save their lives. One lawyer responded.

Last year, the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice began transferring children to Angola, the state’s most notorious prison. Since then, kids say they’ve suffered through horrific conditions and routine mistreatment.

County officials agree that conditions have deteriorated at L.A.’s Inmate Reception Center. But they’re resisting calls for substantive change.

Leaving prison often hinges on completing rehabilitative programming. The pandemic caused many of these required courses to be put on hold.

Despite sentencing reforms, hundreds of thousands of people who have been incarcerated over the last several decades are ineligible for parole.

The criminal legal system “relies heavily on collecting money from the very people targeted by the system,” in the process incentivizing police to punish as many people as possible, the authors of the ACLU report write.

A new report de-anonymizes hundreds of officers in the city and shows more than 1,800 cops have had complaints filed about them.

Legal experts say the IRS is illegally denying CARES Act payments to incarcerated people.

A civil rights advocate calls the scheduled executions of four men ‘appalling’ and a return to a ‘biased, arbitrary, and error-prone’ system.

A U.S. district court judge said the Michigan jail has demonstrated ‘deliberate indifference’ to the lives of ‘medically vulnerable’ prisoners who are at particular risk of the novel coronavirus.

A district court judge who issued a temporary restraining order in the case said jail officials had not ‘imposed even the most basic safety measures recommended by health experts.’

Faculty members of the Yale School of Public Health, the Yale School of Medicine, and the Yale School of Nursing wrote to the governor that sending patients there is “inhumane and ineffective.”

District attorneys in the state could decarcerate quickly by dropping unnecessary cases.

Delaying trials will mean more people stay in jail while a life-threatening disease spreads throughout the state.

In California, a Vallejo detective and a Solano County prosecutor concealed exculpatory evidence from a man facing murder charges. They went on to face accusations of misconduct in other high-profile cases.

After protests over the police shooting of Alton Sterling, DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist, was sued by a police officer.

Neither agency had written policies on how to capture or store the location data without violating privacy rights.

His legal team had pushed for clemency, arguing that Bucklew’s previous attorneys mishandled his capital murder case.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his execution, which experts have said will be bloody and gruesome, does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. But problems with his case started long before that, his attorneys say.

A lawsuit is challenging Mohave County’s practice of charging certain people for mandatory GPS monitoring before trial.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Yesterday seemed by all accounts a good day for police accountability. Scholars recently revealed that police violence is a leading cause of death for Black men, but […]

Richard Kinder thought he would die in an Alabama prison until the Supreme Court ruled mandatory juvenile life without parole unconstitutional. But last year, despite a judge concluding there was “uncontradicted evidence” that Kinder had worked to rehabilitate himself, the state parole board refused him release.

In California, Texas and Florida, advocates sent letters to district attorneys, demanding that they refuse to work with officers with histories of misconduct.

Four transgender women say clinicians and staff deny them gender-affirming care and see their identity as in conflict with sex offender treatment.

A new report charges the Los Angeles DA with seeking the death penalty in unjust and harsh ways.

Advocates and attorneys say Jackie Lacey’s rhetoric doesn’t match her actions.

Prosecutors are supremely powerful and have played an outsize role in mass incarceration. What can be done?

The ACLU of Arizona is suing Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery’s office over its alleged lack of transparency.

The DeKalb County Jail, now at the center of protests, has a long history of problems and a legacy of housing people for unpaid fines.

Videos and audio posted by the group and its supporters on social media raise questions about the agency’s role.

A Philadelphia-born man was detained by ICE and nearly deported. The agency’s mistake was caught, but the case exposes a new collaborative program that encourages jails to hold immigrants for ICE.