By Christopher Zoukis Notorious Boston gang chief James “Whitey” Bulger was found murdered in his cell at the federal high-security prison in Hazelton, West Virginia on October 30, the morning after being arrived there from a Bureau of Prisons transfer center in Oklahoma City. Bulger was the chief organized crime…
By Christopher Zoukis In mid-October we reported on a federal prison chaplain who was being denied direct contact with inmates because for religious reasons he refused to carry pepper spray when meeting them. For a decade, the Rev. Ronald Apollo had been employed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)…
By Christopher Zoukis In what may be the state’s largest-ever settlement of a civil lawsuit, on Dec. 15 a federal judge approved a settlement agreement between Delaware and survivors of a correctional officer killed last February during an inmate riot and takeover at a state prison, and five other corrections…
By Chris Zoukis For the third year in row, the number of prisoners who died in America’s prisons and jails rose. Some 4,446 prisoners died in 2013, a two percent increase over 2012, continuing an upward trend, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of…
By Chris Zoukis On Sept. 20, 2016 the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York upheld the conviction of state prisoner Aaron Isaiah Young for violating prison rules. Young allegedly refused prison guard orders, and assaulted staff. During the altercation, multiple guards responded, and Young allegedly refused to…
By Chris Zoukis Privately-operated federal prisons, also known as contract prisons, have more violence, use-of-force incidents and contraband seizures than facilities run by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), among other findings in an August 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The…
Solitary confinement remains one of the most archaic punishments in the prison arsenal. Given the advances in our understanding of mental illness and penal rehabilitation over the last thirty years, it’s shocking that it has taken as long as it has for California penitentiaries to come to the conclusion that…
