Margaret Winter is the Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project. She was lead counsel for plaintiffs in the case that led to the closing of Mississippi's supermax prison. She is currently challenging overcrowding, excessive force, mistreatment of the mentally ill, and other unconstitutional conditions of confinement in the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest jail in the nation. Winter has successfully argued a prisoner's rights case in the U.S. Supreme Court.
East Mississippi Correctional Facility is hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous. Patients with severe psychiatric disabilities go without basic mental health care. Many prisoners attempt suicide. This video is the story of a young man who succeeded.
For the past two years, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been investigating and exposing a horrifying pattern of abuse against juveniles and the mentally ill in two Mississippi prisons operated by the GEO Group, one of the biggest for-profit prison operators in the world.
Alabama segregates all prisoners with HIV, and houses them separately from all other prisoners – it’s an HIV ghetto. As soon as you walk into Limestone Correctional Facility, the prison where Alabama houses all male prisoners with HIV, you know who has the virus: they are forced to wear a white armband day and night.
Today a federal judge in Montgomery, Alabama entered a historic decision in the quarter-century-old fight for equality for prisoners living with HIV. It’s the culmination of a month-long trial in a class-action lawsuit by the ACLU that put Alabama’s discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment of prisoners with HIV under a national spotlight.
Driven by stubborn prejudice and willful ignorance, Alabama has been categorically excluding prisoners with HIV from a host of rehabilitative, educational, trade skills and vocational programs—even barring those with serious mental health needs and substance abuse problems from critically important treatment programs. Alabama houses them in HIV-only dormitories, and forces all male prisoners with HIV to wear a white wrist-band night and day—a latter-day yellow star.
The decree will also require the state to move such kids out of a brutally violent private prison and into a facility operated in accordance with juvenile justice standards.
A new report released today finds L.A. County's Men's Central Jail, the largest and most violence-plagued in the nation, can be shut down by the end of 2013.
John Horton was held in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles County Men‘s Central Jail following his arrest for drug possession. He committed suicide.
In the days leading up to his death in March 2009, jail staff noted that Mr. Horton was despondent. His cell was a dimly-lit, windowless, solid-front box the size of a closet. His body was already stiff by the time security staff discovered him hanging from a noose in his cell, with his hands bound – one of eight successful apparent suicides in the L.A. County jails in the past calendar year.
Gang-like cliques of sheriff's deputies operating with impunity inside L.A. County jails. Department top brass encouraging a culture of violence and brutality against inmates. And a sheriff with his head in the sand.
John Horton was held in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles County Men‘s Central Jail following his arrest for drug possession. He committed suicide.