PRESS RELEASE
 
Human Rights Defense Center
For Immediate Release 
September 25, 2014 – For Immediate Release

FCC Takes Further Action to Reduce Exorbitant Prison Phone Rates

A report released today raises concerns about inmate cancers and other serious health ailments at a state prison that sits next to a massive Fayette County coal waste dump full of toxic fly ash.

The preliminary report on the ongoing investigation by two human rights organizations into prisoner health at the State Correctional Institution Fayette in LaBelle [PA], found 11 prisoners died from cancer between January 2010 and December 2013, another six have been diagnosed with cancer and eight more have undiagnosed tumors or lumps.

The Netflix series "Orange is the New Black" isn't funny to the women who served time in Danbury Federal Prison. I know because I am one of those women.

The day after Monday's Emmy Awards, a television morning show invited viewers to tweet about their favorite part of the awards ceremony. I don't tweet. But if I did, I would have said that my favorite part was that "Orange is the New Black" didn't win an award for best comedy. And it shouldn't have.

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here

The officers got the wrong man, but charged him anyway—with getting his blood on their uniforms.  How the Ferguson PD ran the town where Michael Brown was gunned down.

Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him.

When Jeremy Romo was packed off to prison in 2012 for illegal possession of a firearm, he says he was as healthy as anyone, a construction worker who ran three miles each weekday and five miles on weekends.

By the time he was released in July 2013, the 34-year-old Manteca man says he had become a physical wreck, unable to run, suffering from joint pain and consigned to a life sentence of taking expensive medications to combat the Valley fever he contracted while in prison.

A federal judge in Sacramento on Wednesday awarded class-action status to California prison inmates who allege that their rights are violated by what they say are widespread instances of race-based punishment.

Prison officials acknowledge they respond to outbreaks of violence by ordering sanctions, including sweeping lockdowns, that can last for months. They say every inmate is assigned a race or ethnic code: black, Hispanic, white or other, and at some prisons, inmates live in cells where their race is denoted by color-coded signs.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature have been cutting down on prison overcrowding to comply with a federal court order, thus leading to a "realignment" policy that moves inmates from state-run prisons to county jails and a policy that may result in some early releases.

"[I]f the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can 'seize' and 'search' him in their discretion, we enter a new regime. The decision to enter it should be made only after a full debate by the people of this country."--U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Nearly 15 months after launching what he called the "boldest move in criminal justice in decades," Gov. Jerry Brown declared victory over a prison crisis that had appalled federal judges and stumped governors for two decades.

Diverting thousands of criminals from state prisons into county jails and probation departments not only had eased crowding, he said, but also reduced costs, increased safety and improved rehabilitation.

"The prison emergency is over in California," Brown said in early 2013.

The numbers tell a different story.