By Christopher Zoukis Federal inmates expecting to be transferred from a penitentiary to a halfway house — what the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) calls a “residential re-entry center” — are being informed shortages of spaces mean they’ll face delays in their transfer, and consequently more time in prison. BOP can…
By Christopher Zoukis A report issued September 18 by the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) identifies shortcomings in how the leaders of DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the correctional facilities it runs fail to meet the needs of its female inmates. Women are about 7%…
By Christopher Zoukis 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 certain, but a computer error in the system which controls the cellblock doors was…
By Christopher Zoukis The Sentencing Project, a non-profit advocacy group, recently released a short study on privately-owned prisons in the U.S. One of the most striking facts documented by the study, Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons, was that in the first sixteen years of this century,…
By Christopher Zoukis 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 a total of around 1,600 persons detained by ICE for being in this country illegally because ICE lacks sufficient space to hold them.…
By Christopher Zoukis 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…
By Christopher Zoukis A 17-year-old has made a startling discovery about Wisconsin: more than half of the state’s black “neighborhoods” are actually jails. The young researcher, Lew Blank, used the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map and Google Maps to come to this conclusion, and released the results in August…
Declining prison populations may eventually help alleviate the effects of overcrowding. By Christopher Zoukis The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) reported last month that during Fiscal Year 2016 — which closed at the end of September — the number of federal inmates in its facilities declined for the third consecutive…
By Christopher Zoukis Midway through his first term as governor of California, in 1976 Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. signed into law a strict mandatory sentencing measure. The “determinate” sentencing bill set fixed lengths of time that had to be served before an inmate could be considered for parole. Now,…
By Dianne Frazee-Walker Raphael Sperry, founder of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) has the right idea about how to transform prisons and the people who reside in them. Designing prisons is fast becoming a hot topic in the world of architecture. Sperry has a specific interest in designing holding facilities…
