United States of America
Seen in the press
Read our selection of press reports about this country. This is a short description of prison conditions on a national scale.
USA: federal prisons official used prisons labor
The Bureau of Prison’s South Central regional director utilized incarcerated people from a Texas prison to work on a landscaping project at his church. A high-ranking Federal Bureau of Prisons official used incarcerated people from a Texas prison to provide labor for his church to finish a landscap…USA: Terminal Island prison inmates went without heat during the coldest February in decades
Hundreds of inmates at the Terminal Island federal prison on the harbor front spent one of the coldest periods in decades in frigid cells with no heat and only blankets for warmth before they were transferred temporarily to another facility.USA: Gangs, lack of guards spark teen riot at understaffed Texas juvenile prison
Spurred by boredom, gang conflicts and anger over a lack of guards, teens at a North Texas juvenile prison rioted for six days, assaulting officers and each other during a mass disturbance that boiled over during a football game.USA: it costs about 50 times more to make a call from an Illinois jail Than from an Illinois state prison
This article is not available in English.
USA: from life in prison to published author
Drug deals and gun violence were everyday realities for Chris Wilson growing up. Straddling homes in D.C.‘s Lincoln Heights neighborhood and Prince George’s County’s Temple Hills community, Wilson watched his mother fall victim to both domestic abuse and drug abuse. Many of his friends were locked…USA: Alabama will build 3 prisons for men, Ivey announces
Gov. Kay Ivey announced today that her administration will seek bids for building three regional prisons for men to replace aging, cramped facilities that the Alabama Department of Corrections has said are too costly to maintain and repair. The governor said new prisons are a necessary part of a la…USA: emergency declared at Kansas prison because of staffing shortage - 95 jobs unfilled
Kansas prisons have been under-staffed for years. Inmate populations are overcapacity. Uprisings in recent years have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Now, the state’s corrections agency is declaring an emergency at one of its largest prisons – El Dorado Correctional – because of…USA: women in prison in Florida get some needed attention
Florida legislators, no matter their party — and no matter their gender — have shown a heartening amount of empathy for incarcerated women on an issue that affects them, uniquely. On Monday, the state Senate Criminal Justice Committee unanimously approve the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act. The…USA: want to shrink the prison population? Look at parole.
This article is not available in English.
USA: why the justice department can’t be trusted to investigate abysmal conditions in federal prisons
The humanitarian crisis at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center will have come as a shock to many. It is horrifying. If there is one institution, however, which has no grounds for shock, nor the performance of it, it is the Justice Department. As a late-January polar vortex hit New York with fr…USA: Mississippi’s prison bribery scandal is in the past, but the state still hasn’t learned its lesson
Since 2014, a massive bribery scandal involving some of the most powerful prison industry corporations in America has hung like a cloud over Mississippi’s already-troubled corrections system, which locks people up at a higher rate than almost any other state.