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Supreme Court Takes Up Case That May Limit Civil Asset Forfeiture

On November 28, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Timbs v. Indiana, a case that could reshape civil asset forfeiture. Tyson Timbs, who attended the Court’s oral argument, is an Indiana resident who became addicted to opioids he was taking for chronic pain. To support his habit, he became a low-level drug dealer. When

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Boston Mobster Slain Within Hours of Entering New Prison

Notorious Boston gang chief James “Whitey” Bulger was found murdered in his cell on October 30 at the high-security federal prison in Hazelton, West Virginia, the morning after arriving from FTC Oklahoma City, a Bureau of Prisons transfer center in Oklahoma City. Bulger was New England’s chief organized crime figure, partly by informing federal law

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Nebraska High Security Prison Chaos After All Cell Doors Open

Shortly before 10:00 a.m. on September 7, 16 single-occupancy cells in a restrictive housing section of Nebraska’s top-security prison, the Tecumseh State Correctional Institute, unexpectedly opened. The cause of this irregularity was not specific, but a computer error in the system that controls the cellblock doors was suspected. The restrictive housing unit is home to

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Texas Non-Profit Helps Felons Start Their Own Businesses

The Prison Entrepreneur Program (PEP), a Texas-based non-profit formed in 2004, assists inmates convicted of felonies to prepare for life after prison by developing skills and character, finding post-release employment, and eventually making a success with their businesses. The group’s current CEO, Bryan Kelley, is a program graduate. Nearly finished serving a 20-year sentence for

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Drugs Suspected for Five Inmate Deaths in Four Days in Arkansas

Five inmates were found dead in their cells at southeastern Arkansas’ Varner Unit prison during a four-day period in late August, three of them in a single day. The Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that, between the morning of Sunday, August 26, and the early hours of the next day, inmates Edward Morris, 34,

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Virginia Pays $100K to Settle Suit over Inmate Suicide

On November 8, 2014, 19-year-old Dai’yaan Longmire was an inmate in Virginia’s Indian Creek Correctional Center in southern Chesapeake, placed in solitary confinement during the third year of a four-year term. He was serving time after pleading guilty to five felonies and two misdemeanors. The charges included burglary, grand larceny, theft of a firearm, and

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Federal Prisons Will Get Immigration Detainees

In what marks the first large-scale transfer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees to federal prisons, U.S. correctional facilities in five states will receive around 1,600 persons detained by ICE for being in this country illegally because ICE lacks sufficient space to hold them. ICE announced the new policy on June 7. As ICE steps

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Department of Justice Finds Higher Recidivism Rates for State-Released Inmates

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has taken a new look at recidivism rates for inmates released from state correctional institutions; the new study found recidivism rates over longer periods of time are higher than previously thought. Its new analysis, “2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014),” essentially updates

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Foreign-Born Are 21% of DOJ Prisoners; 94% Are Here Illegally

Mark Twain once famously maintained it could probably be shown through facts and statistics that there’s “no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.” What then would that celebrated observer of Gilded Age corruption and criminality make of the facts and statistics recently released by the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) in

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Inmate Program Reviews in Federal Prison

          The Federal Bureau of Prisons employs a wide variety of methods to create and maintain personal files on an inmate population of approximately 187,000 individuals. Some of the data contained in each file is static and is gathered from sources such as an inmate’s Pre-Sentence Investigative Report (PSR), Judgment and

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