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.
Healthy people who are forced into solitary confinement in prison may develop mental illnesses due to their isolation, but the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) deliberately ignores the problem, according to a brief filed in federal court last week by the SPLC.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a package of 10 criminal justice reform and reinvestment bills earlier this year that will reduce the state’s prison population by 10 percent and scale down the parole/probation population by 12 percent over the next decade.
A solution to fix the “horrendously inadequate” mental health care provided to people in Alabama prisons may require a series of evidentiary hearings, a federal judge indicated this week at a status hearing.
The policies and procedures at a private, for-profit immigrant detention center in Georgia are violating the due process rights of detainees by forcing them to wait hours to see their attorneys in one of only three meeting rooms at the facility that can house 1,900 detainees, the Southern Poverty Law Center told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the facility’s operator CoreCivic in a letter sent today.
A federal judge today declared the mental health care system in Alabama prisons to be “horrendously inadequate” – an unconstitutional failure that has resulted in a “skyrocketing suicide rate” among prisoners.
In five Southern states, people released from jail, prison, probation or parole encounter laws that make it more difficult for them to get a job, find housing and access basic services due to their conviction – significant obstacles that must be removed to help people successfully return to their communities, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a letter to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Mobile police likely violated people’s Constitutional rights when they conducted checkpoints that targeted crime in predominantly black neighborhoods – a practice that the department must stop, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a letter to Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste.
Louisiana may soon lose its title as the world’s leader in incarceration.
