At its meeting in Pittsburgh earlier this month, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted by an overwhelming margin to accept a resolution recognizing that the use of solitary confinement can be a form of torture.
By Amy Fettig, ACLU National Prison Project at 11:41am
In 2003, Congress took an important first step in addressing a national tragedy: epidemic levels of rape and sexual abuse in our nation’s prisons, jails and youth detention centers. The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed unanimously in Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, called for the development of binding national standards for the prevention, detection, response and monitoring of sexual violence behind bars. After nine years, these standards were finally released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month. They represent the first national effort to hold correctional facilities accountable for abuse while at the same time instituting policies and procedures that will help prevent abuse in the first place.
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:
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
Today the Department of Justice released the long-awaited Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) regulations, representing the first time that the federal government has issued national standards to help end sexual abuse in correctional facilities. The regulations are two years late and a lot of harm has been done in their absence, but now that they’ve finally been released they can help us protect important constitutional and human rights and ensure safe and fair correctional facilities that assist prisoners in rehabilitation rather than needlessly brutalizing them. The ACLU supports the Department’s efforts to protect and prevent sexual abuse in places of detention, although we regret that immigration facilities are not yet included in these standards.
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.
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.
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.
