Via Sentencing Law and Policy, there is a new report on children of the incarcerated:

Fifty-three percent of the 1.5 million people held in U.S. prisons by 2007 were the parents of one or more minor children. This percentage translates into more than 1.7 million minor children with an incarcerated parent.

African American children are seven and Latino children two and half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.

The full report is here. [More...]

Over the past three years, Illinois taxpayers have shelled out close to $10 million in workers comp claims to prison guards at one prison in Illinois. The payments are mostly for claims of repetitive carpal tunnel syndrome due to opening and closing manually operated cell doors. 389 guards (more than half of those employed by the prison)have put in claims and collected.

Even the warden put in a claim and got $75,000. How many times a day do you think he personally opens or closes a cell door?

State lawmakers are calling for a fraud investigation.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released its annual report on the number of people in prisons and jails and on probation and parole.

For the first time in 30 years there was a slight drop in the number of state prisoners. Federally, the number is up 3.4%. The numbers for 2009 are still staggering:

7,225,800 people were either in prison, on probation or parole. That's 1 in 32 people or 3.1% of the population.

Of the 7.2 million, there were 1,319,426 inmates in state prisons and 205,087 in federal prisons. More than 4 million adults were on probation at the end of 2009, while 819,000 were under parole supervision.

There were 140,000 federal prisoners in 2000. In 2009, there were 205,000. The total number of incarcerated persons in 2008 was 2,300,700. In 2009, the number fell by a smidgen (0.7%) to 2,284,900. to The full report is here.

Inmates in at least six prisons have banded together and gone on strike, seeking better compensation and improved prison conditions. They have refused to leave their cells since Thursday.

Chief among the prisoners’ demands is that they be compensated for jailhouse labor. They are also demanding better educational opportunities, nutrition, and access to their families.

“We committed the crime, we’re here for a reason,” said the Hays inmate. “But at the same time we’re men. We can’t be treated like animals.”

How did they coordinate? Through banned cell phones and text messaging. How serious are they? The striking prisoners put gang affiliations and racial issues aside to join together.

Thomson Correctional Facility, an empty Illinois prison which now can't be used for Guantanamo inmates, is going on the auction block December 21. The minimum bid is $270 million.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois has been working to get the money for the sale via an omnibus spending bill, which could be on Obama’s desk awaiting his signature later this month.

Doesn't the U.S. have better things to spend $270 million on than yet another prison? Tell Dick Durbin and Congress to just say no to more of America, Prison Nation.

The U.S. Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v. Plata, the lawsuit over whether California must release prisoners pursuant to a court order as a step towards rectifying abysmal prison conditions in the state.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the conditions documented in court papers were horrendous. He referred, for instance, to a passage in one brief describing prisoners “found hanged to death in holding tanks where observation windows are obscured with smeared feces, and discovered catatonic in pools of their own urine after spending nights locked in small cages.”

Justice Sotomayor to the lawyer for California:

When are you going to avoid the needless deaths?” she asked. “When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state?”

[More...]

Via Sentencing Law and Policy, Steve Sady, chief deputy federal public defender for the District of Oregon who argued the case of Barber v. Thomas in the Supreme Court, writes a commentary, Too Much Time in Prison, in tomorrow's National Law Journal.

In a nutshell: Congress mandated federal prisoners serve 85% of their time, but according to the odd formula the Bureau of Prisons uses to calculate the 85%, it turns out prisoners get only 12.8%, and the Supreme Court has upheld their formula. How? "By finding that the phrase "term of imprisonment" could be interpreted in different ways within the same sentence of the statute." [More...]

The Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, today released a report, "Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates,2008-09, available here.

The report is required by the The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79) which directs the the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to conduct "a comprehensive statistical review and analysis of the incidents and effects of prison rape for each calendar year," and to "provide a list of prisons and jails according to the prevalence of sexual victimization."

The findings: 90,000 inmates, more than 4 percent of prison inmates and over 3 percent of jail inmates, reported being sexually victimized in custody. [More....]

Really outrageous that this is happening in Denver. Meet the "labia lift" -- It's like a strip search times 10, read the details. Thanks to the ACLU for protesting and bringing it to light. Their letter is here. It begins:

We write in response to a new and degrading type of body cavity search practiced at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility (DWCF). DWCF prisoners – who already submit to strip searches on a routine basis – now must hold open their labia as correctional officers, sometimes using a flashlight, sometimes positioning their faces only inches away from a prisoner’s genitals, conduct an inspection. Reports even indicate that some prisoners have been forced to pull back the skin of their clitorises. These searches occur even when the guards have no particularized reason to suspect concealment of contraband – correctional officers search prisoners’ body cavities on a frequent basis, after work assignments and visits from friends and family. Guards have threatened prisoners who resist with pepper spray.

More here. [More...]

New York Magazine has an in-depth, 6 page article on how Bernie Madoff is faring in prison. He's a hero, groupies and all.

Based on interviews with two dozen current and former inmates, and a lawyer he gave an interview to after his arrival, a portrait emerges: Repentent? Not one bit. He's had enough of that.

“F*ck my victims,” he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. “I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”

His Ego: Fully intact. Everyone wants his opinion about business. His closest buddies: those doing huge sentences like him, including convicted spy Jonathan Pollard and Mob Boss Carmine Persico. [More...]

For the first time since 1982, the inmate population at local jails across the country has declined.

The government says the number of inmates in county and city jails was more than 767,600 at the end of June 2009. That's down by nearly 18,000 inmates from a year earlier.

The top six local incarcerators in 2008 and 2009: LA, NYC, Houston, Chicago, Philly and Phoenix:

Los Angeles County Calif. 19,533/ 19,869
New York City N.Y. 13,804/ 13,130
Harris County Texas 10,063 /11,360
Cook County Ill. 9,984/ 9,737
Philadelphia City Pa. 8,824/ 9,436
Maricopa County Ariz. 9,536/ 8,745

The lowest: Denver and El Paso, TX. El Paso shows not every border town is a hotbed of crime. It's one of the safest cities in the country.

A guard at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Texas has been fired and ICE is investigating allegations he sexually assaulted women detainees being held for deportation. The prison is privately managed by Corrections Corp. of America, which has been put on probation while the investigation is conducted.

Several women who were held at T. Don Hutto detention facility in Taylor, Texas, were groped while being patted down and at least one was propositioned for sex, ICE said. "We understand that this employee was able to commit these alleged crimes because ICE-mandated transport policies and procedures were not followed," David Sanders, the Homeland Security Department's contracting officer said in a letter to Corrections Corporation of America obtained by The Associated Press.

Obama changed the Hutto facility from a family detention center to one holding only females because of past abuses such as prisoner neglect that resulted in the death of detainees. [More...]