Tag: prison

Justice Department Finds Unconstitutional Conditions in 3 More Mississippi Prisons

A report released today by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found that three Mississippi prisons fail to protect incarcerated people from rampant violence and sexual assault, and place hundreds of people in solitary confinement “for prolonged periods in appalling conditions.”

Federal investigators concluded that severe understaffing, unchecked gang violence, unsanitary living conditions, and the use of extreme isolation violated the 8th and 14th Amendment rights of inmates.

The Justice Department launched an investigation into the Mississippi prison system in 2020 following a string of gruesome deaths and years of deteriorating conditions. In 2022, the Justice Department released a report describing barbaric conditions at Mississippi State Penitentiary, more infamously known as Parchman Farm. 

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a press conference that today’s report shows that constitutional violations inside the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) are “systemic and longstanding.”

“Our investigation uncovered chronic, systemic deficiencies that create and perpetuate violent and unsafe environments for people incarcerated at these three Mississippi facilities,” Clarke said. “The unconstitutional conditions in Mississippi’s prisons have existed for far too long, and we hope that this announcement marks a turning point towards implementing sound, evidence-based solutions to these entrenched problems.”

The MDOC is the latest corrections system to come under federal scrutiny for barbaric conditions. The Justice Department sued Alabama in 2020 for ignoring multiple warnings that its gore-soaked prison system violated the Constitution. Last year, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Fulton County Jail in Georgia, where a schizophrenic man died covered in bedbugs, lice, and lesions.

But the problems in Mississippi have been profound. All three of the Mississippi prisons the Justice Department toured had 30 to 50 percent staff vacancy rates, leaving housing units with hundreds of people largely unsupervised. Emergency responses were often tardy and ineffective.

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Kentucky prison system in chaos after more than THIRTY workers are caught having sex with inmates behind bars, anally raping others and smuggling them drugs including meth for cash

More than 30 workers with the Kentucky Department of Corrections were caught having sex with inmates behind bars during a 16-month period, while others were found smuggling drugs and guns.

A shocking investigation by Herald-Leader revealed 59 cases of employee-on-inmate sexual offenses in the past five years, with 35 cases involving possible criminal charges.

Most recently, 42-year-old Amanda Kulka was charged with third-degree sodomy earlier this month for allegedly having a sexual relationship with an inmate half her age. 

The inmate, who has not been identified, was serving a lengthy sentence for burglary, assault and theft, according to the outlet.  

Meanwhile, at least 14 others were caught smuggling drugs like suboxone and meth into prisons in exchange for money. One officer faced charges for carrying a handgun.

A total of 62 employees were either fired or resigned across 13 state prisons and a minimum-security prison camp, which together house more than 11,300 inmates.  

Experts say that troubles in Kentucky state prisons extend beyond inappropriate relationships or smuggling, and the same holds true for correctional facilities across the country.  

‘Being a correctional officer is a very challenging job,’ said Judah Schept, an associate professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. 

‘In the popular imagination, we think of these jobs as being exposed to extreme forms of violence, and of course, that can happen,’ he said. 

‘But more often, I think what you’re dealing with are mundane daily tasks and being unappreciated and underpaid and feeling isolated and overworked. Given where you’re working, this can lead to some problems,’ Schept said.

DailyMail.com was able to identify and picture at least eight corrections officers who were charged with rape, sodomy, or sexual assault in recent years. 

In a federal lawsuit filed last year, Todd Steven Boyce, 56, was accused of sexually abusing an inmate in multiple ways between March and July 2022. Allegedly, prison officials were aware of his behaviors but made no effort to stop him. 

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SOUTH CAROLINA BAN ON PRISONERS’ MEDIA INTERVIEWS VIOLATES FIRST AMENDMENT, LAWSUIT SAYS

South Carolina violates the First Amendment by forbidding incarcerated people from speaking with the press, according to a lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of South Carolina against the state’s Department of Corrections.

“The South Carolina Department of Corrections (“SCDC”) enforces the nation’s most restrictive policy on media access to prisoners,” the complaint says. The suit alleges that the state “bans interviews by anyone, on any topic, and by any real-time means: in person, by video, or by phone. And although correspondence by mail is allowed, publication of a prisoner’s written speech is similarly prohibited.”

According to a copy of the SCDC’s media policy, the agency prohibits “personal contact interviews with any SCDC inmate, untried county safekeeper, or death row inmate by anyone,” and bans “news and non-news media representatives” from taking photographs, or audio or video recordings of SCDC prisoners.

In a press release last summer, the SCDC said, “Inmates in the custody of the S.C. Department of Corrections are not allowed to do interviews.”

“The department believes that victims of crime should not have to see or hear the person who victimized them or their family member on the news,” the press release said. “Inmates lose the privilege of speaking to the news media when they enter SCDC.”

The press release also included a copy of a letter from an SCDC official to the attorney of Richard Murdaugh, a former lawyer convicted of murdering his wife and son. (Murdaugh maintains his innocence.) The letter scolded Murdaugh and his legal team for speaking to the press.

The department’s letter stated that, in violation of the SCDC policy, Murdaugh read excerpts of his journal to his attorney, who recorded Murdaugh’s voice and sent the audio files to the media. Murdaugh received a disciplinary infraction. The letter warned the violation could jeopardize Murdaugh’s access to his attorney.

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CANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender Claim

A Canadian man who was convicted of the horrific rape of a 3-month-old infant boy has begun identifying as transgender while incarcerated and is currently being held in a women’s correctional facility with a mother and child unit.

In 1997, Adam Laboucan sexually assaulted a three-month-old baby boy in Quesnel, British Columbia. Laboucan was 15-years-old at the time and had been hired to babysit the child. The infant was so brutally injured by the attack that he had to be flown to Vancouver, 410 miles away, to undergo reconstructive surgery.

After committing the horrific assault, Laboucan “mutilated himself and ate his own flesh,” according to news reports.

During the trial, an expert witness stated that Laboucan displayed “everything from transsexual to pedophilic tendencies.” A forensic psychiatrist who examined Laboucan testified that even he believed himself to be a danger to the public. “He said he was not planning a life of crime, but he felt he had no way to control the flood of violent, murderous fantasies,” Dr. Ian Postnikoff told the B.C. Supreme Court.

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Putin Opponent Alexei Navalny Dies in Arctic Jail, Russia Says

Russia’s most prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny collapsed and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a long jail term, the Russian prison service said.

Mr. Navalny, a 47-year-old former lawyer, rose to prominence more than a decade ago with blogs on what he said was vast corruption and opulence among the “crooks and thieves” of Russia’s elite.

The Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said in a statement that Mr. Navalny felt unwell after a walk at the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, about 1,900 km (1,200 miles) north east of Moscow into the Arctic Circle.

He lost consciousness almost immediately, it said.

“All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results,” the prison service said, adding that causes of death were being established.

The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin was told about the death.

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Wall Street Is Finding New Ways to Milk the Prison System

As part of a growing effort to stop prison telecom monopolies from charging exorbitant fees for calls between prisoners and their families, last year Minnesota became one of the first states to make all phone calls free for prisoners. And to eliminate the kickback system perpetuating the scheme, the state barred its agencies from collecting commissions on prison phone services, as well as on video calling and e-messaging.

But records obtained by us show Minnesota’s Department of Corrections still collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks last year from commissions on other prison services private telecom companies controlled — including money transfers, music access, and other entertainment behind bars. All in all, the records suggest the telecom firms brought in nearly $3 million in revenue from an ever-increasing array of nonphone prison services in the state.

Minnesota, which was the fourth state in the country to make the government, not prisoners, pay for phone calls, is a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families.

According to a Minnesota state watchdog agency, under a current prison contract, people in state prisons must pay between $1.06 and $1.99 to listen to a single song on state-issued devices. Under a new contract with another telecom vendor, the cost will increase to up to $2.36 per song — and the state will pocket a bigger cut of the revenue.

“For-profit telecom companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars from incarcerated people and their families, while Minnesota families are going into debt to stay connected with their loved ones through phone calls and video calls,” said Margaret Zadra, Minnesota’s ombudsperson of corrections. “For-profit companies should not be allowed to erode that connection to line their own pockets.”

As digital tablets become increasingly ubiquitous behind bars, criminal justice reform advocates say Wall Street is poised to control and monetize an ever larger share of the daily lives of this captive audience.

“The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain,” said Paul Wright, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights Defense Center, which for years has led a campaign to lower prison telecom costs.

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Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

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The sex offenders who commit crimes as men before transitioning into women: The faces of dangerous crooks who ‘switched gender’ when faced with the prospect of prison

When Sophie Louise Carter was caught with indecent images of underage children she was a tree surgeon known as Dominic.

But by time the 39-year-old was hauled before court to face sentence, dressed in a pink-t-shirt and shorts with pink nail polish on, she identified as a woman.

The criminal is one of a number of trans sex offenders who committed their crimes as men before transitioning while facing justice or behind bars.

The spate of recent cases was brought into focus by the jailing of Isla Bryson in Scotland. The rapist was convicted of sex attacks on two women, a crime she committed while still a man.

Her case sparked uproar after she was initially sent to an all-female prison before being moved to a male facility. Since then a number of similar cases have been brought before the courts.

In the latest, Abigail Waller, who was jailed for child sex offences while living as a man named ‘Jamie’, returned to the dock just three years later to face new charges – now identifying as a woman named ‘Abi’ after transitioning in prison.

With Waller behind bars for a second time, MailOnline looks into the cases of sex offenders who committed their crimes as men but arrived in court to face trials as women.

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Man posing as transgender woman raped female prisoner at Rikers, lawsuit says

A former prisoner in the Rose M. Singer women’s jail on Rikers Island is suing New York City, alleging jail staff ignored her warnings in 2022 that a transgender woman housed among females was actually a man pretending to be a woman in order to prey on the opposite sex behind bars.

“His introduction was, ‘I’m not transgender. I’m straight. I like women,’” said the plaintiff, who is identified only as “Rose Doe” in the lawsuit.

According to the civil suit, Rose Doe not only believed the alleged perpetrator was lying about their gender identity but that the prisoner was purposely “instructed to claim that he was transgender by DOC staff so that he could stay in the female dorm where he would have access to female inmates.”

Investigative records obtained by Doe’s attorneys and provided to the I-Team, show shortly after the alleged perpetrator arrived in the female dorm, Doe complained to correctional staff, claiming the new detainee sexually propositioned her on April 4th and then groped her in the bathroom on April 6th. After reviewing those complaints, the Acting Warden of the Rose M. Singer Center (RMSC), Floyd Phipps, sent an email saying, “I feel that individual is not a suitable fit for RMSC. . . . [Rose Doe] does not want to remain in the unit due to feeling unsafe.”

Even after those warnings and complaints, Doe says correction officers failed to remove the alleged perpetrator from female housing. According to Doe’s lawsuit, early on the morning of April 7th, “while Plaintiff was sleeping in her bed, the Perpetrator, took the opportunity to sexually assault Plaintiff again. . . .pull[ing] down her pants while she was sleeping and begin[ing] to rape her.”

“I’ll be scarred for the rest of my life,” Doe told the I-Team.

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Internal Prison Files Suggest Epstein ‘Suicide’ Coverup

Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents obtained by The Grayzone under Freedom of Information laws raise extremely serious questions about whether Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged first suicide attempt on July 23, 2019 in fact happened, and suggest the Bureau distorted evidence to attribute his death to suicide before his autopsy had even been completed. This meant the narrative of suicide was pushed on the public – to the exclusion of all other explanations – before basic facts were ascertained.

The release in January of previously sealed court documents detailing official investigations and civil lawsuits leveled against Epstein has reignited public interest in the late sex offender. Yet establishment journalists have poured cold water on the disclosures, assuring readers they do not offer anything new or of any import, while strongly implying they many shocking accusations they contain are bogus. References to Epstein’s apparent death are largely absent from mainstream reporting.

Officially, Epstein was found to have died in his cell at New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10, 2019, with a medical examiner ruling at the time that he had taken his own life by hanging. The ruling was aggressively contested by Epstein’s associates and widely disbelieved by the public, with one poll suggesting just 16% of Americans think he committed suicide.

There was good reason for their skepticism. Epstein’s legal team publicly declared available evidence on his death was “far more consistent” with murder. Dr. Michael Baden, a leading forensic pathologist who monitored the autopsy, also claimed its findings “did not support suicide.” Moreover, knowledgeable sources revealed broken bones in Epstein’s neck were “more common in victims of homicide by strangulation.”

When a long-awaited Justice Department report on Epstein’s “custody, care, and supervision” by the BOP while briefly incarcerated was released in June 2023, it too was greeted with near-complete indifference by legacy media. Now, The Grayzone has secured the internal Bureau documents which indicate that efforts to cover up Epstein’s suspicious death were more extensive than previously known, and included prison staff.

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