Prison Administration & Conditions News

Prisons adapt to female inmates
Women are fastest growing segment of U.S. prison population
"SHAKOPEE, Minnesota (AP) -- Once the thin blue mattress rolls out from under the single bed, the prison cell is sleepover-ready.
The trundle bed is the best thing Suzanne Locke has here. Along with good behavior, it allows her to host her 6-year-old daughter, Marae, for monthly overnight visits during her 12-year sentence for arson in the state prison for women."

No release of DOC care audit, Brady won't comment on ruling
By Joe Rogalsky, Delaware State News
"DOVER — The state attorney general’s office declined Thursday to offer any additional explanation or clarification of its recommendation to the Department of Correction that an audit of the state’s prison health care system must be kept secret under Delaware law."

Facing their demons
By Ann Imse
"Despite evidence that treating inmates for their addictions pays off financially, Colorado legislators facing stark shortfalls in revenue cut state funding for drug and alcohol treatment inside prisons by around 40 percent in 2003."

Blunt to continue legal defense of inmate abortion policy
By David A. Lieb, The Associated Press
"Gov. Matt Blunt's administration is pushing ahead with its legal defense of a new policy effectively prohibiting most inmate abortions, despite a Supreme Court decision specifically allowing one Missouri inmate to get an abortion."

Court clears way for inmate's abortion
By Robert Patrick and Jo Mannies
"The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for a Missouri inmate to receive an abortion that was delayed for weeks by a new prison policy."

High court allows inmate's abortion
By Charles Lane
"Issuing its first abortion-related decision under new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court refused yesterday to block the court-ordered transport of a female prison inmate to an outside clinic for an abortion."

Inmates billed for treatment
By Lee Williams and Esteban Parra
"While in a state prison last year, Delaware's private health contractor gave Motrin to Ed Brittingham to treat the bacteria that was eating away at his flesh."

DOC responds to safety abuses with more video cameras, not staff
By the Associated Press
"The Indiana Department of Correction has reduced staffing at the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility instead of adding more guards as the U.S. Justice Department recommends in a recent report on civil rights violations at the institution."

BEHIND BARS: Prisons can be cages or schools
By Joan Petersilia
JOAN PETERSILIA, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine, is the author of "When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry." She is a visiting professor of law at Stanford Law
CALIFORNIA'S corrections leaders have again embraced rehabilitation, a shift from the 1980s, when prisons backed away from that goal and cut their education, work training and anti-drug abuse programs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports the reforms. "Corrections should correct," he has said repeatedly. Reflecting the state's new priorities, the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency has been renamed the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation."

TX: Suit underscores state's prison rape problem
By Dianne Solis, The Dallas Morning News (registration)
"WICHITA FALLS, Texas - In the Allred state prison near this ranching and oil town, Roderick Keith Johnson says he was bought and sold for sex by prison gangs with names like Gangster Disciples, Mandingo Warriors and the Mexican Mafia."

Editorial: Sexual Slavery in Prison
New York Times
"When Congress issued the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, that should have put corrections officials on notice. The measure requires the Justice Department to study the endemic problem of sexual assault behind bars and develop a strategy for coping with it. But prison officials have continued to play down this problem. The costs of denial are on vivid display this month in a federal courtroom in Texas, where a former inmate has told jurors how corrections officers ignored his written pleas for help, and even laughed at him, while he was repeatedly raped and sold into sexual slavery by prisoners who viewed him as "property."

Lawyers Go Behind Bars as Guardians of Prisoner Rights
By Maura Dolan, Times Staff Writer
"SAN FRANCISCO — They exposed the state's locking up of juvenile offenders for 23 hours at a stretch in cells smeared with blood and feces.
They helped spark an unprecedented federal court takeover of California's prison healthcare system after revealing that prisoners were dying because of medical neglect."