At the conclusion of a federal court hearing in a case in which Morgan County, Alabama Sheriff Greg Bartlett was being sued for withholding adequate food from inmates, the Judge ordered him arrested.

A federal judge ordered an Alabama sheriff locked up in his own jail Wednesday after holding him in contempt for failing to adequately feed inmates while profiting from the skimpy meals. U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon had court security arrest Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett at the end of a hearing that produced dramatic testimony from skinny prisoners about paper-thin bologna and cold grits.

During the hearing the Sheriff acknowledged pocketing $212,000 from the prisoner food budget, but said it's legal and a practice that has gone on since the depression: [More...]

Every now and then a news story reminds us that the Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the prison where they happen to be housed when the census is taken, a decision that seriously overstates the populations of rural areas with prisons.

In 2006, experts commissioned by the Census Bureau recommended that the agency study whether prison inmates should be counted in 2010 as residents of the mostly urban neighborhoods where they last lived rather than as residents of the mostly rural districts where they are temporarily housed against their will.

That's a change a Republican legislature would never have approved. Next year it could happen. Democrats should make it a priority.

This post addresses the issue and links to three other posts that do, as well.

The Tulsa World has a two part series focusing on an inmate's family. Today's entry begins:

Nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. “B.B.” Battle jumps out of the car and races ahead of his mother and his little sister so he can be the first one inside the door.

He’s the first to slip off his shoes for the guards to inspect, the first to empty his pockets and step through the metal detector. Before anyone else has a chance to look around, he’s already sitting down at a table on the far side of the visiting center at the Dick Conner Correctional Center, north of Hominy and an hour’s drive from B.B.’s home in Tulsa.

Denver has come up with an innovative and smart program to cut prison overcrowding, save money and help the elderly at the same time:

Since May, Denver city jail inmates have been making weekly rounds to the homes of elderly and disabled residents who need help maintaining their yards.

"We take care of little minor issues," said Denver Sheriff's Deputy Michael Newtown. "If it's a tree branch that's fallen, or (at) a lot of homes, we'll take the trash out for them and stuff like that." This winter, they'll shovel snow.

The inmates, sentenced to the county jail for non-violent crimes like drug possession, disturbing the peace or shoplifting, volunteer for the program. If they have a ten day sentence and volunteer one day, the remainder of the sentence is deemed served. [More....]

Some welcome news from the Bureau of Prisons: Pregnant inmates will no longer be shackled during transport. The policy change is here (pdf.)

This new policy represents a sea change in the United States, where the shackling of pregnant women during transport, labor, and even delivery has long been routine in jails and prisons. Currently, only California, Illinois, and Vermont have enacted state laws restricting the practice of shackling pregnant women. By contrast, international human rights bodies have repeatedly expressed concern about policies that permit shackling of pregnant women.

In other good news, an Arizona judge has declared the conditions of the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix -- Sheriff Joe Arpaio's domain -- unconsitutional. [More...]

Prisoners buy cellphones from guards or smuggle them into the prison during visits with friends and family. Some phones are discovered during shakedowns, but inmates find creative hiding places, particularly in larger, older prisons that don't have Supermax technology.

To counter a perceived security risk, South Carolina prison officials are exploring the possibility of jamming cellphone signals inside prison walls. Would you want to live within a mile of a large institution that jams cellphone transmissions?

Critics say it's impossible to contain the jamming technology to one or two buildings, and that using it runs the risk of affecting people using phones nearby.

[more ...]

The New York Times had a long feature article this week about women prison guards in New York.

Women make up 45 percent of about 9,300 uniformed employees of the department, according to the agency. From guards to wardens to the four-star chief, Carolyn Thomas, they fill almost every rank. And in many respects, they are changing the culture of the city’s jails.

Walk down the corridors of any of the city’s 11 active jails, and it is clear that not only are there a high number of female officers, but a majority of those women — 75 percent — are black, said Stephen Morello, a department spokesman. They are former soldiers, beauticians and bank tellers. They are single mothers who took the job to support their children.

It's hard to think of a more stressful (or from my point of view, sadder) job. [More...]

Julia Sudbury envisions a utopian world in which imprisonment is not only unnecessary, but evokes the same revulsion as slavery. Until we find a more humane way to protect society from those cannot restrain their violent impulses, however, prisons will remain a necessary evil.

That reality does not diminish Sudbury's larger point: prisons are unnecessarily inhumane, and ever-growing prison populations are not the most effective response to crime. Rather than devoting a larger share of our shrinking resources to incarceration, society's dollars would be better spent on crime prevention. Reducing poverty and providing meaningful opportunities for a sound education, affordable housing, and well-paying jobs would help combat the despair and hopelessness that breeds crime. Helping parents learn to raise children in homes that are free from violence would also have a beneficial impact on crime rates. These are not easy or inexpensive solutions to implement, but they are more worthy of investment than supermax prisons.

[more ...]

It's understandable that Laci Peterson's mother is "outraged" that Scott Peterson posted his protestation of innocence on his family's website (his own website is relatively empty). She's nonetheless misguided in suggesting that "it isn't right that [inmates] should have access to the Internet, either direct access or through somebody else."

Her view that "being on death row is supposed to eliminate an inmate's privileges" is also understandable, but free speech is a right, not a privilege. Inmates lose some rights, but not all of them, by virtue of being incarcertated.

Free speech isn't free if people like Laci Peterson's mother can act as censors of words they find offensive. Whether or not Scott Peterson is guilty, there's no doubt that countless innocent inmates are serving time. If they don't bring their stories to the public's attention, who will? They often depend upon sympathetic journalists or columnists to call attention to their plight. Should they be barred from talking to reporters? Should they be prohibited from exposing abuses in the prison system that prison administrations will otherwise suppress? What's so different about eliminating the middleman and speaking to the public directly via the internet?

A new Justice Department report on conditions at the Cook County jail in Chicago finds the conditions at the jail deplorable.

Cook County Jail does not meet minimum constitutional standards and routinely puts inmates at serious risk, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald said Thursday at a news conference following the release of a scathing Justice Department report on the facility.

The jail falls well short of basic standards, Fitzgerald said, and inmates have been subjected to violence and poor medical care as a result. Among the chief concerns is that the jail fails to protect inmates against beatings, both by corrections officers and other prisoners.

Fitzgerald said "some guards have engaged in organized reprisals against inmates who insult them." Also,

Health care also is a serious problem, the Justice Department found. The report cited an example of an inmate who contracted sepsis from an untreated gunshot wound and died. Another had to have a limb amputated.

Go to jail, lose a limb or die? America. Prison Nation. [More...]

Here's the problem:

California's 33 adult prisons were designed for roughly 100,000 inmates but currently hold 159,000. Inmate advocacy groups say the crowding has led to numerous problems, including neglectful health care and poor mental health treatment.

Here's the proposed solution being negotiated to settle litigation commenced by inmate advocates:

Under the proposed settlement, 27,000 inmates would be released before serving their full sentences and a population cap would be set in place.

Here's the Republican alternative: [more ...]

The New York Times, Washington Post and 60 Minutes have published results of investigations into America's immigrant jails, all of which show "alarming evidence of shoddy care, inadequate staffing, lax standards, secrecy and chronic ineptitude." Background here.

The New York Times has an editorial in tomorrow's paper urging passage of the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act, introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ.) The House version of the bill, H.R. 5950 is here and the Senate version. S. 3005, is here.

The bill would impose more rigorous standards on the network of more than 300 publicly and privately run prisons that make up the federal system — current rules are voluntary, not legally enforceable and not uniformly followed. And it would require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

Congress should swiftly pass the bill, putting aside the poisoned debate over illegal immigration, which has no relevance here. Whether immigrants are legal or illegal has nothing to do with their right to humane care. As Ms. Lofgren bluntly put it: “You are not supposed to kill people who are in custody.”

There is no excuse for another life being lost.[More...]