Tag: prison

Their son’s prison death was under investigation — then the funeral home found evidence in his body bag

Patrick LeBranch Jr. had just viewed the body of his brother at the Richardson Funeral Home of Jefferson in River Ridge when the funeral director pulled him aside. Something strange had happened, LeBranch said the man told him. He handed LeBranch a bulky, clear plastic bag sealed with red tape. On the front, in all black capitalized letters, was the word “EVIDENCE.”

LeBranch’s brother, Markus Lanieux Jr., had been found dead in early September while in state custody at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport. Prison officials told the family Lanieux killed himself, but they wouldn’t say how, or provide any additional information.

Lanieux Jr. is the son of Markus Lanieux, who is serving a life sentence at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel and was the subject of a joint report on Sept. 8 by Verite News and ProPublica. Lanieux Jr. died the day before that story was published. The death is still under investigation, according to corrections officials.

LeBranch held the plastic bag, squeezing the contents gently as he continued to read. Next to a line marked, “Description and/or location,” someone had written, “Sheet modified into a rope.” Inside the plastic bag was the bedsheet his brother had allegedly used to hang himself the prior week. LeBranch said the funeral director told him it came with his brother inside the body bag.

From the moment Laborde’s warden, Marcus Myers, told the family of Lanieux Jr. that the 22-year-old died by apparent suicide, they’ve had questions about it. While they don’t have firm evidence to suggest anything other than suicide, they reported receiving phone calls from Laborde inmates urging them to challenge the prison’s version of events. Adding to their doubts, family members said, is a lack of communication from Laborde.

A few days after getting the news, the family said prison officials cut off all contact. When they tried to call Myers back, an assistant instructed them to direct any future questions to Jonathan Vining, general counsel for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Despite calling him repeatedly, the family said Vining hasn’t returned any of their messages.

Then came the evidence bag, further deepening the family’s concerns about how the investigation was being handled.

“It took me for a loop,” LeBranch said of that moment when the funeral director handed him the evidence bag, which is still in the family’s possession. “For y’all to say he took his life, and this is y’all’s evidence — why would it be down here with us?”

Katherine Mattes, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Tulane Law School, said she has never heard of an evidence bag related to an in-custody death being misplaced like this. She described it as “bizarre” and said it is “certainly understandable why this mistake would cause the family to not trust the integrity of an investigation.”

The Department of Corrections acknowledged that the evidence should not have been sent to the funeral home with Lanieux’s body. A DOC spokesman, however, indicated the blame lies outside of the department.

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Banning Criminal Background Checks Will Lead To More Housing Discrimination, Not Less

America needs more housing. Pressure for reform is only growing as available homes get less and less affordable. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the root cause of high housing prices—an epidemic of local overregulation that prevents enough homes from being built—some legislators continue to flirt with social experiments that can harm both landlords and renters.

For example, some states and localities have implemented well-meaning “fair chance” laws banning criminal history on background checks for prospective tenants. Progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) recently introduced the idea as federal legislation. In a statement, Pressley said, “It’s time we remove the systemic obstacles that have exacerbated the prison-to-homelessness pipeline.”

We do indeed have an overcriminalization and overincarceration problem in this country, so on its face, this seems like a good idea. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,0000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, not counting the nearly 6.9 million people on probation, on parole, or still in jail or prison at any one time. Far too many face undeserved challenges when trying to re-acclimate into society and not reoffend.

That’s partly because relatively few landlords want to rent to people with criminal records. Landlords minimize the risk of delinquent or destructive tenants by selecting the best applicants on a given margin. From this perspective, avoiding people with criminal records seems like an easy choice, even though it means some potentially great tenants are rejected. The best reforms would correct the real problems of overcriminalization and overincarceration. That’s politically difficult and may take a long time. Equally important would be removing all artificial barriers to building more homes.

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Washington State Prison System Sued for Using Unreliable Drug Tests To Put Inmates in Solitary

Another state prison system is facing a lawsuit over its use of inaccurate drug field tests to throw incarcerated people in solitary confinement.

The class-action lawsuit, filed last Friday by Columbia Legal Services in a Washington state circuit court, alleges that the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) uses unreliable field kits to test mail for drugs and then uses the unverified results to put inmates in solitary confinement, move them to higher security prisons, and strip them of visitation rights and other privileges. This violates inmates’ due process rights and protections against cruel punishment under the state constitution, the suit argues.

“DOC continues to use these tests even though, upon information and belief, items that have tested ‘presumptive positive’ include blank notebook paper and manila envelopes purchased directly from DOC’s commissary or from DOC-approved vendors,” the suit says.

According to the lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs spent four months in solitary confinement after greeting cards shipped directly to him from a card company tested positive for drugs. The results were later invalidated by a lab. Another plaintiff, Gregory Hyde, was kept in solitary confinement—meaning he was in a cell for 23 hours a day—for nearly five months because some books of crossword and sudoku puzzles that his father mailed him tested positive for synthetic marijuana, also known as “spice,” a popular drug in prisons.

“I think DOC is using its power to punish people who can’t fight back,” Hyde said in a press release. “My elderly father just wanted to send me some puzzle books. Now they’re saying he’s a drug dealer. Now my father is too far away to see because I got transferred to a different facility. My father is impoverished and on a fixed income. I think it’s an abuse of power.”

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GEORGIA PRISONERS CAN BE DENIED VITAL HALFWAY HOUSE PLACEMENT DUE TO MEDICAL CONDITIONS

In August of 2021, Gus, a prisoner in Georgia, found himself entangled in red tape when seeking vital medical care for his Hepatitis C. His decision to begin the treatment would cost him dearly. Despite having no choice but to go to the doctor, Gus says the move rendered him ineligible for transfer to a transitional center (TC)—a sort of state-run “halfway house.” The decision extended his time behind bars by roughly a year, as those in transitional housing can receive extra credit toward their sentences.

Since the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) would not continue his treatment if he moved to a transitional center, Gus says he had to choose between his freedom and life.

Gus was released from prison on August 4. And, without spending the last year or two in a TC, he left his institution unprepared, unhoused, scared, and destitute—except for the $25 the state gives imprisoned people upon release.

In Georgia, some incarcerated people seeking transfers to transitional centers may face a troubling predicament: they may need to choose between access to vital medical treatments and the opportunity for successful rehabilitation. Transitional centers are pivotal for individuals reintegrating from incarceration into society. There are only 12 transitional centers in Georgia, which contain roughly 2,300 TC beds. Only two of those centers are accessible to women. These reentry centers provide a structured environment that offers steady employment, educational programs, and opportunities to develop necessary life skills. In addition, those participating in transitional center programs have an easier time getting driver’s licenses, securing community resources, and obtaining housing before their release.

Denying medical care to incarcerated people with chronic medical needs, who also need placement at these centers, can significantly reduce their chances of successful reintegration. This practice has raised concerns among both incarcerated people and advocates, who argue that denying necessary healthcare services undermines reentry efforts and perpetuates a cycle of incarceration.

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Confirmed: Man Who Raped His 10-Year-Old Daughter Housed With Female Prison Inmates

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections is housing a man who raped his own daughter in a women’s prison because he said he identifies as a woman himself—and the DOC is refusing to offer any kind of insight or explanation on the matter.

Mark Campbell is currently incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, inmate records show. He is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child.

That child was his own 10-year-old daughter, court documents allege.

Born in 1971, Campbell is currently 52 years old, weighs 225 pounds, and stands at 5 feet 9 inches, according to the DOC inmate locator.

Under Campbell’s listed “sex,” the Wisconsin DOC states in bold, “FEMALE.” The department has not responded to many requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

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Kenyan Immigrant, Named North Texas’s Deadliest Serial Killer, Killed in Prison

Billy Chemirmir, a 50-year-old Kenyan accused of murdering 24 elderly American women and convicted for two of the murders, has reportedly been killed by his cellmate at a prison southeast of Dallas, Texas.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office confirmed to WFAA that Chemirmir was found dead in his prison cell on Tuesday morning at the Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, which is southeast of Dallas. His cellmate was “identified as the assailant,” according to officials.

As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, Chemirmir was convicted last year for murdering 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris. Later that year, he was convicted of murdering 87-year-old Mary Brooks and had been indicted in multiple other murders.

Chemirmir stole from his elderly victims, posing as a caregiver, before selling their belongings on eBay from April 2016 to April 2018. To murder his victims, Chemirmir would smother them with a pillow, leading investigators to first assume that many of the victims had died of natural causes.

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Animal-Grade Prison Food Indicts US Society

I’ve written in the past about an awful experience I had in prison a decade ago while serving 23 months in prison after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program.  I was doing my time at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a low-security prison in the Appalachian Mountains.  One of the very first things I found, on my very first day, was that the food was bad. Very bad. 

I arrived in prison on a Thursday.  The next day, Friday, was “fish day.” A fellow prisoner warned me to skip the fish. “We call it sewer trout,” he said. “you don’t want to put that in your body.” Sure enough, when I got in line in the cafeteria, I saw boxes stacked behind the servers. Every box was very clearly marked, “Alaskan Cod.  Product of China. Not for human consumption. FEED USE ONLY.” That’s what the servers were slopping onto our trays. 

Things only got worse from there. I won’t go into detail about the rat that drowned in the Kool-Aid dispenser. I suppose things like that will happen from time to time. But one incident still makes me angry 10 years later. Every Wednesday evening was “taco night.”  This disgusting concoction was ground beef, some sort of “sauce,” and a little onion. It was truly inedible and I threw it away more often than I ate it.

One day, guards posted a memo from the warden in every housing unit saying, “Sorry. Through no mistake of our own, the company that sends us the ground beef for tacos accidentally mismarked a shipment of dog food as ‘ground beef’. That dog food was served to inmates. The Bureau of Prisons will fine the company.”

I later read in Prison Legal News magazine that the company was fined and the BOP kept the money.  But the real shame here isn’t even that we ate dog food.  The real shame is that we didn’t even realize that it was dog food because the food is so bad every day. I can’t tell you how many expired foods we were served, still in the packaging, and how many years-old frozen bagels, dyed green for some previous St. Patrick’s Day, we were served every Sunday for a year.

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Prison officer Joanne Hunter who sent X-rated photos to inmate she was having affair with and smuggled cannabis and mobile phone into his cell is jailed for three years

A former prison officer has been jailed for three years for having an inappropriate relationship with an inmate.

Joanne Hunter, 28, conducted the relationship with Connor Willis while working at HMP Forest Bank in Salford.

Hunter – described as ‘naive’ and ‘vulnerable’ in court – believed Willis was ‘in love’ with her and agreed to smuggle packages, including cannabis, into the prison for him. She also sent him explicit photographs, which were later found on her phone.

Manchester Crown Court heard how Hunter, who has a master’s degree in Childhood and Youth studies, began working at the prison in December 2018.

In December 2020, prison authorities received information that she was taking items inside and when she was interviewed by security managers she admitted having a relationship with Willis.

Rachel Widdicombe, prosecuting, told the court how Hunter had agreed smuggle packages into the prison for Willis, one containing a juice carton and another coating a Red Bull can.

Hunter received the packages from an unnamed woman after meeting her at a Tesco supermarket, the court heard. She then smuggled them inside the prison before passing them on to another prisoner – whom she knew as a ‘big player’ and member of crime gang – for Willis. Willis offered to pay her £200-300 for each package, but she refused to take the money.

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Federal Prison Guards Confessed to Rape and Got Away With It

Ron Berman agonizes over how to tell this story, where even to start, because the short version doesn’t capture the full travesty and the long version is overwhelming. But here’s the crux of it: A group of federal prison guards raped his daughter and got away with it. Not only did they get away with it, but they got away with it even after they admitted they did it.

Berman’s daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.

Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.

Most of the guards retired before they could be fired, meaning they walked with their retirement benefits intact. Over the last five years, Berman’s daughter and the rest of those women were failed by nearly everyone around them at every level of government.

Berman has been emailing and calling everyone he can think of—his congressional representatives, the FBI, federal prosecutors, local prosecutors, the county sheriff, reporters—trying to get justice for his daughter.

“It’s not the system that failed her,” he says. “It’s the people.”

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50% of trans-identifying biological males in Wisconsin prisons convicted of sex crimes

It has been revealed that half of the trans-identifying biological males currently serving out sentences in Wisconsin prisons have been convicted of at least one sex crime.

The statistic was uncovered by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project during its analysis of Wisconsin Department of Corrections data obtained via an April 2022 public records request.

According to the report, of the 161 trans-identifying biological males in prisons across the state, 81 have sex crimes on their record. 

There are a wide range of acts deemed sex crimes under Wisconsin law. They include adultery, incest, sexual exploitation of a child, forced viewing of a sexual act, rape, sexual intercourse without consent, sexual intercourse with a child, indecent behavior with a child, enticing a child, public fornication, and more.

The report did not divulge exactly which crimes the 81 inmates had been convicted of, though details of certain cases have been previously reported on.

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