The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently inspected several detention facilities run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency – including the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia – and found numerous instances in which ICE agents mistreated detainees, in violation of DHS standards.
El Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés) entraron a los hogares de familias de inmigrantes sin órdenes de registro, sin el consentimiento de los residentes y sin causa probable – en violación a la Cuarta Enmienda de la Constitución estadounidense – solamente para detener y deportar familias, principalmente mujeres y niños, según una demanda radicada por la Southern Poverty Law Center y el bufete de abogados Barnwell Whaley Patterson & Helms (Barnwell Whaley).
A federal court hearing will begin today on the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) plan to address its failure to provide adequate staffing for the mental health care needs of prisoners.
A minor who was raped and beaten unconscious by other prisoners at Sumter Correctional Institution in Bushnell, Florida will receive $60,000 as part of a legal settlement with a guard who failed to intervene in the assault.
The bad news about the criminal justice system can seem overwhelming: vast racial disparities; an incarceration rate unprecedented in world history and more than quadrupling over the past four decades; a school-to-prison pipeline that short-circuits our children’s futures.
If law enforcement agencies in Alabama want to seize and keep someone’s property — cash, cars, real estate, guns, TVs or other assets — they don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was used in drug trafficking or obtained through criminal activity.
Today, families around Louisiana are being reunited as some people incarcerated for nonviolent, non-sex-related offenses are released due to bipartisan criminal justice reforms that state lawmakers adopted earlier this year.
Florida Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, and Rep. Ben Diamond, D-St. Petersburg, filed legislation — SB 694 and HB 481 — today that would create a safety valve, allowing judges to depart from mandatory minimum sentencing for low-level drug crimes.
Alabama is grappling with how to reform an overcrowded, understaffed prison system that perpetuates violence and fails to rehabilitate prisoners. It’s a problem that has confronted many other states as their prison populations mushroomed during the era of “tough-on- crime” policies that made America the incarceration capital of the world.
The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) must conduct a meaningful analysis of the staffing it needs to address an unconstitutionally inadequate level of care for prisoners who have mental illnesses, according to a brief filed in federal court yesterday by the SPLC.
