Category Archives: US prisons

Hundreds wait in jail for trials as San Francisco backlog balloons

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Nearly a quarter of those awaiting trial are held beyond deadlines amid pandemic, at cost to their wellbeing

More than two years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly a quarter of those incarcerated in San Francisco county jail are being held past their original trial deadlines, with some individuals waiting for years for their cases to be heard.

In June 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, 68 people were incarcerated in the county past their original trial deadlines, according to data from the public defender. By January 2022, the latest data available, that number had grown to nearly 250. Hundreds more are awaiting trial out of custody.

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Job ad for US bureau of prisons highlights patients’ mental illness as recruiting tool

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Some readers offended by its reference to high rates of mental illness among incarcerated people to attract psychologists

Psychologists who work for the bureau that runs federal prisons in the US can treat incarcerated people with every mental illness imaginable, according to an employment ad that stirred controversy on social media.

The ad, bought by the US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on Facebook as part of a broader campaign, asks readers to flip to any page in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard US text.

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‘A way to deal with emotion’: how teaching art can help prisoners

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The Prison Arts Collective brings art, and renowned artists, to incarcerated people as a form of therapy and escape

The American prison has a long cultural history, depicted in movies from The Shawshank Redemption to The Green Mile. They are generally portrayed as harsh, dehumanising places populated by hardened criminals and vicious guards.

Who better, then, to demystify prisons and those who live in them than artists themselves? “We’ve had this glorified TV version of what a prison is in America and sure, it’s not a cakewalk, but it’s also humans in there – our fellow humans,” says Brian Roettinger, a graphic designer based in Los Angeles.

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27 years, prison and youth detention: how two friends survived a rotten penal system

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Wisconsin’s hardline criminal justice policies ensnared Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar and David Thompson. Over decades, they helped each other find freedom

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

On a December afternoon in 2018, Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Milwaukee’s north side. Overhead, under the company’s iconic arches, the “M” was smashed out. A stretch of cracked pavement connected the restaurant to the headquarters of 414LIFE, the violence prevention nonprofit where he worked.

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‘They let people die’: US prisons bureau denied tens of thousands compassionate release during Covid

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New data shows officials approved fewer applications during the pandemic than the year before, despite risks from virus

The last time Sean McQuiddy called home from federal prison, it was just before Christmas in 2020, and he had just tested positive for Covid-19.

“If I don’t make it out of here,” his brother recalled him saying, “just know that I love you.”

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Ny Nourn: the woman convicted of murder and pardoned – who now fights for other battered women

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Nourn moved from Cambodia to the US as a child, and ended up in an abusive relationship that led to a man’s murder. After years in prison, she is now a powerful voice for those who face incarceration and deportation

When Ny Nourn entered Central California Women’s Facility, the largest women’s prison in the world, there was every reason to believe she would never walk free on American soil again.

She was just 21, and had been sentenced to “life without parole” for her part in a hauntingly brutal murder – a part she was forced into. Even if, at some distant date, a successful appeal commuted that sentence, her conviction made Nourn deportable – so when she had served her time, she was likely to be transported to another prison and ultimately to Cambodia, the country of her parents’ birth, a country she had never set foot in.

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Man in Black at 50: Johnny Cash’s empathy is needed more than ever

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The country star is not always remembered for his politics, but his about-face to withdraw support for Nixon and the Vietnam war may be his finest moment

“I speak my mind in a lot of these songs,” Johnny Cash wrote in the liner notes to the album Man in Black, released 50 years ago today. He might be better known now for the outlaw songs of his youth or the reckonings with death in his final recordings, but Cash used his 1971 album to set out his less-discussed political vision: long on feeling and empathy, and short on ideology and partisanship. The United States seemed hopelessly polarised, and Cash confronted that division head-on, demanding more of his fellow citizens and Christians amid the apparently endless war in Vietnam.

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11 Texas sheriff’s office employees fired after death of inmate

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Six were also suspended after three-month investigation into death of Jaquaree Simmons, which was ruled a homicide

Eleven employees of a Texas sheriff’s office have been fired and six suspended following the death of an inmate who was hit multiple times in the head by detention officers, authorities said on Friday.

The Harris county sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, said he was “very upset and heartbroken” after a three-month investigation into the death of Jaquaree Simmons, 23, in February. Medical examiners ruled Simmons’ death a homicide from injuries to his head.

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California governor pardons formerly incarcerated firefighters

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Bounchan Keola and Kao Saelee were facing deportation to Laos after spending decades in prison for teenage convictions

California’s governor has issued pardons to two formerly incarcerated firefighters who had been threatened with deportation to Laos after spending most of their lives in the US.

Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the pardons for Bounchan Keola, 39, and Kao Saelee, 41, who were both sent to US immigration authorities last year after spending decades in prison for teenage convictions and had battled wildfires as incarcerated firefighters.

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Texas executes Quintin Jones by lethal injection without media witnesses

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Prison agency officials didn’t notify reporters, marking first time in at least 40 years that press wasn’t present at an execution

Texas inmate Quintin Jones was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday without media witnesses present.

The press could not witness the death of the 41-year-old because prison agency officials neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment, according to the Associated Press. It was the first time in at least 40 years that media was not present at an execution.

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‘They track every move’: how US parole apps created digital prisoners

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Is smartphone tracking a less intrusive reward for good behaviour or just a way to enrich the incarceration industry?

In 2018, William Frederick Keck III pleaded guilty in a court in Manassas, Virginia, to possession with intent to distribute cannabis. He served three months in prison, then began a three-year probation. He was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor before his trial and then to report for random drug tests after his release. Eventually, the state reduced his level of monitoring to scheduled meetings with his parole officer. Finally, after continued good behaviour, Keck’s parole officer moved him to Virginia’s lowest level of monitoring: an app on his smartphone.

Once a month, Keck would open up the Shadowtrack app and speak his answers to a series of questions so that a voice-recognition algorithm could confirm it was really him. He would then type out answers to several more questions – such as whether he had taken drugs – and the app would send his responses and location to his parole officer. Unless there was a problem, Keck would not have to interact with a human and the process could be completed during a TV ad break.

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The scars of solitary: Albert Woodfox on freedom after 44 years in a concrete cell

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Woodfox was a member of the Angola 3, a group of men wrongfully accused of murder. Now he marks the fifth anniversary of his freedom

Every morning for almost 44 years, Albert Woodfox would awake in his 6ft by 9ft concrete cell and brace himself for the day ahead. He was America’s longest-serving solitary confinement prisoner, and each day stretched before him identical to the one before.

Did he have the strength, he would ask himself, to endure the torture of his prolonged isolation? Or might this be the day when he would finally lose his mind and, like so many others on the tier, suddenly start screaming and never stop?

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Biden signs four executive orders aimed at promoting racial equity – video

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The US president, Joe Biden, has signed four executive orders aimed at healing the racial divide in America, including one to curb the US government’s use of private prisons and another to bolster anti-discrimination enforcement in housing. They are among several steps Biden is taking to roll back policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and to promote racial justice reforms that he pledged to address during his campaign

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‘Things have changed’: can Biden overcome the racist legacy of the crime bill he backed?

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The 1994 crime bill paved the way to mass incarceration of Black Americans. Biden says his support was a ‘mistake’

In 1994, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware stood proudly behind Bill Clinton as he signed into law a reform bill that touched nearly every aspect of the US criminal justice system.

Related: Trump trails Biden with two weeks to go – but there could yet be surprises

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‘I picked up a drink and casually set fire to my life’: how addiction nearly destroyed me

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Find a job, lose the job, go to jail: Guardian reporter Mario Koran found himself in a dangerous cycle. But behind bars, he discovered a new purpose

In July 2016, I stood behind a podium in a San Diego banquet hall and wept in front of a room full of reporters. I’d just been named the city’s journalist of the year for my work on a series that helped unseat a school board president and led to a criminal conviction.

I had reached a peak: I had a meaningful job in a postcard-perfect beach city. A wife I loved, a gorgeous baby girl and another on the way. Most everywhere I went, people told me I had a beautiful family, and I knew it was true.

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I saved lives as an incarcerated firefighter. To California, I was just cheap labor

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The state sees us as safe enough to handle emergencies – but it refuses to provide a pathway to work after release

The wildfires burning across California have put a national spotlight on the incarcerated firefighters the state depends on to fight these blazes.

But while state leaders scramble to backfill vacant positions on the firefighting lines, it’s important to remember the backdrop that helped create the crisis in the first place. This is the result of policies that value the preservation of cheap labor over a system that benefits communities and offers incarcerated individuals a path to freedom and a fair shot at employment.

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Alfre Woodard: ‘We want all those with a stake in the death row business to see this film’

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The star of the award-winning film Clemency talks about the US prison system, her enslaved great-grandfather and her hopes for Black Lives Matter

The focus of Black Lives Matter protests has inevitably fallen on the most visible injustice - instances of police brutality. More systemic racial disparities in the American penal system are too often hidden from plain sight. The US incarcerates more of its citizens – 2.2 million people – than any other country on Earth. African American adults are nearly six times more likely to receive a prison sentence than white adults. Nearly half of the 206,000 people serving life sentences in 2018 were black, though black people represent only 13.4% of the population; almost equal numbers of white and black prisoners are currently on death row – just over 1,000 of each ethnicity – but as the prosecution of capital punishment has declined, so the racial imbalance has increased.

If ever a film could bring home the buried trauma of those latter statistics it is Clemency. The film, which won a grand jury prize at Sundance last year, has been instrumental in catalysing again urgent debates around mass incarceration, capital punishment and race.

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Pandemic potentially a ‘death sentence’ for many prison inmates, experts warn

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Lack of space and funding combined with often limited access to medical support increases vulnerability of prisoners, says study

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    • Chronic overcrowding and underfunding have left prisons around the world vulnerable to being ravaged by coronavirus, criminal justice experts have warned.

    The challenges of a record global prison population of 11 million have been brought to light in a report published by Penal Reform International (PRI) which found that 102 countries have prison occupancy levels of more than 110%.

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    Mass incarceration could add 100,000 deaths to US coronavirus toll, study finds

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    Jails could act as incubators for disease to be spread widely both inside and in local communities, ACLU says

    America’s addiction to mass incarceration could almost double its number of deaths from coronavirus, with jails acting as incubators of the disease and spreading a further 100,000 fatalities across the US.

    The startling warning comes from groundbreaking modeling by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and academic researchers, released on Wednesday.

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