Jails

I spent years visiting prisons and courts. At every turn, facilities forced me to comply with invasive searches that left me feeling sexually violated.

Even though the United Nations considers more than 15 days of solitary confinement a form of torture, American prisons still use the practice liberally. Prolonged isolation makes imprisoned people more violent and less likely to reintegrate into society.

Cordero Riley was badly beaten at Georgia’s Clayton County Jail due to longstanding issues with malfunctioning cell locks, a lawsuit alleges. Afterward, he says medical staff ignored his pleas for care.

Over the course of nine days at New Mexico’s Otero County Detention Center last June, Jacob Gutierrez repeatedly engaged in self-harm and survived multiple suicide attempts before taking his life. A lawsuit accuses jail staff of failing to keep him safe.

Less than five months into 2024, deaths at the Clayton County Jail have already surpassed last year’s total. The local sheriff’s lack of transparency has only compounded the pain for grieving families.

I had to return to jail before a resentencing hearing. It meant taking a trip back through hell.

Despite the frequency of in-custody deaths, their exact scope remains unknown and data is often intentionally obfuscated.

The phrase “toxic masculinity” is ubiquitous these days, but there are few places where it’s more all-consuming than in a men’s 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.

Gwinnett County Jail’s for-profit health provider NaphCare has been sued more than 100 times for malpractice and neglect.

With a special election for Clayton County sheriff coming up next week, people detained at the county’s scandal-plagued jail are speaking out about horrific conditions.

The Clayton County Sheriff’s Office is refusing to share information about in-custody deaths with the medical examiner’s office, which is responsible for conducting investigations.

Some recent redevelopment projects show how the work of reforming and dismantling the prison system can move us towards a society centered around restorative justice and social wellness.

The facility’s medical provider described people with mental illness wasting away in a unit overrun by an outbreak of lice and scabies.

The ban had helped the Broome County Sheriff rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits from detainee video and phone call fees.

More than two years into the pandemic, the Broome County Sheriff’s Office is still prohibiting all jail visits. The policy helped them take in more than a half-million dollars in 2021.

Cynthia Alvarado was raped in jail before she was sentenced to life in prison for a murder she did not commit. Now that her sentence has been overturned, Alvarado is fighting for women like her.

Less than two years after racial justice protests sparked calls to “defund the police,” states and jurisdictions are using pandemic aid to pad already bloated law enforcement budgets.

Barbed wire and a surveillance camera User 652243 via Pixabay Private Tech Surveillance Companies Are Taking Over Prisons by Nneka Ewulonu Incarcerated Americans are being watched like never before. Private American companies are rapidly digitizing prison mail. Some ankle-monitors can record whole conversations without people’s knowledge or consent. Most recently, at the end of last […]

Our team at the University of North Carolina analyzed death-in-custody reporting policies at every state and federal carceral entity. Data collection is a mess—and many states don’t follow the law at all.

After the state rolled back a progressive bail law, data from the Vera Institute of Justice suggests judges are ordering more people be held in jails, amid continued worry over COVID-19.

At the same time, state lawmakers are pushing to incarcerate more people pretrial.

Philadelphia’s top prosecutor has made good on promises to reduce incarceration in the city. His re-election bid will be a litmus test for the progressive prosecutor movement he helped start.

After more than a year in office—and despite pushback—the San Francisco DA’s policies have kept people out of jails and prisons.

Getting convicted of a “minor offense” inflicts serious, long-term harm. The state can and must divert more people to counseling, group meetings, or other interventions.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has suffered from years of poor funding and political interference by the Trump administration. Fixing it could be one of the most important tasks on Biden’s criminal justice reform agenda.

The percentage of people held pretrial for six months or longer is up six percent from January of last year, according to a UCLA School of Law report.

The city says COVID-19 budget constraints will set back its plans to close the jail but people incarcerated there are suffering from the disease right now.

The coronavirus has ripped through our prison and jail populations, infecting and killing hundreds of thousands of people most vulnerable to COVID-19.

A new study suggests that if counties—rather than states—bear the cost of incarceration, they may be less likely to incarcerate people.

New York City’s jail population is close to reaching pre-pandemic levels. Advocates say dishonest fearmongering about bail reform—and the politicians who capitulated to it—have created a very real safety crisis.

The governor has rolled back bail reform, not released enough prisoners during the pandemic, and failed to rein in police abuses, advocates and prisoners say.

Several recent killings have put the spotlight on the largest sheriff’s department in the U.S., but many of the LASD’s abuses go unseen, advocates say.

Qualified immunity is just one obstacle of many that incarcerated people face when seeking to hold correctional officers accountable for misconduct.

As thousands of people are freed from local jails, a group of nonprofits and activist organizations says the city’s housing authority must revamp its policies that banish the formerly incarcerated.

Reductions in budgets related to the novel coronavirus have slowed New York City’s plan to close Rikers by building new jails, and it’s becoming increasingly possible that the city will not meet its January 2027 deadline.

Legal, medical, and religious groups warn in a new report that the widespread use of solitary confinement in response to COVID-19 risks spreading the disease further and undoing a decade of progress.

As the country reopens, we can’t quickly forget these failures of government, which have disproportionately harmed Black, Latinx, and Native people. 

The state’s public defender asked the state Supreme Court in April to speed up reviews of people held pretrial, but advocates say it’s unclear if district courts have complied.

The city is flouting CDC guidance by continuing to dismantle homeless encampments during the COVID-19 pandemic, though it does not have nearly enough shelter space.