Yesterday the Department of Justice (DOJ) released the long-awaited National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape. These standards – the first of their kind—create an historic opportunity to put an end to the epidemic of sexual abuse in prison, which disproportionately affects prisoners who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or have intersex conditions (LGBTI).
By Amy Fettig, ACLU National Prison Project at 12:05pm
Last Thursday’s release of the long-delayed national Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) regulations by the Department of Justice reminds us of the hundreds of prison rape victims we’ve heard from over the years who could not seek justice because the prison officials who failed to protect them were essentially immunized from liability by a 1996 federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The announced purpose of the PLRA was to curb the filing of frivolous litigation by prisoners. In reality, the law makes it
The issue of over-incarceration in America is gaining traction among state and local law makers – but not, apparently, on Long Island. The New York Civil Liberties Union recently sued Nassau and Suffolk counties, home to the Hamptons’ beach clubs and million-dollar estates, over squalid, life-threatening conditions at their jails.
After meeting with visitors, prisoners in a Michigan prison are forced to remove all of their clothing and spread open their vaginal lips as a guard peers into their vaginal cavities.
I’m writing from Buenos Aires, where I’m representing the ACLU at the Inter-Governmental Expert Meeting (IGEM) on the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Established in 1955, the SMRs are the leading international standards on protecting the human rights of prisoners. They’ve profoundly influenced the law in many countries, and have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
By Mike Tartaglia, Paralegal, National Prison Project & Andrew Waks, National Prison Project at 5:31pm
As America’s prison population has grown to unprecedented levels and imposed record-high costs on taxpayers, it is time to evaluate what we hope to achieve through incarceration: is it revenge, or safety? The two values appear to be in conflict as objectives of our criminal justice system. After decades of tough-on-crime policies, we have experienced little return on our investment— as rates of incarceration have continued to rise, rates of recidivism have increased since the early 1980s, remaining relatively unchanged from the mid-1990s through the present.
Joe Giarratano is hardly a typical prisoner: he’s been involved in two Supreme Court cases; he’s been published in the Yale Law Journal; and he’s taught a class on non-violence, all while locked up in some of the toughest prisons in the country.
But like tens of thousands of others, Giarratano has also spent time in solitary confinement.
Giarratano shared his story in a letter, which you can read here. This is how he described his first stint in “The Box,” in 1996:
By David Shapiro, ACLU National Prison Project at 9:50am
Earlier this year, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit incarceration company in America, sent a letter to officials in 48 states offering to buy state prisons and run them for a profit. We're still waiting to hear what most states will do with the offer.
Sure, at first blush, an injection of CCA money into government coffers might seem attractive to cash-strapped states. But here's the rub: states would be paying CCA for this short-term cash infusion with the liberties and freedoms of their citizens. For the corporation to buy a prison, a state would have to agree to keep it 90 percent full and CCA-operated for at least 20 years.
The announcement this week by Sheriff Lee Baca that he agrees with and intends to implement all 63 recommendations laid out in a new report by the Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence is welcome news. At a press conference Wednesday, Baca said of the recommendations, “I couldn’t have written them better myself,” continuing that by implementing them, “we will be a stronger and safer jail.”
