On June 16, National Geographic will present A Decade Behind Bars: Return to the Farm (pdf), a sequel to the 10 year old film “The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison.”

For the last 10 years, filmmaker Jonathan Stack has continued to chronicle life and the surprising changes inside Angola, which is now an increasingly self-sustaining agricultural community that boasts five new churches and its own inmate-run TV and radio station.

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Marcia Powell, a mentally ill prostitute and drug addict, was in prison awaiting transfer to a psychiatric facility. Prison officials kept her outdoors in an unshaded cage for 4 hours in 107 degree heat. She died.

At least, it won't happen again.

Charles L. Ryan, the department's director, ordered the temporary suspension last week after the death of Marcia Powell at Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville. Powell, 48, died of heat-related causes after spending four hours in temperatures that reached 107.5 degrees.

Powell's death has led to the suspension of three prison officials and a criminal investigation into their conduct.

Does anyone remember Sara Jane Moore, the 45 year old frumpy looking woman who took a shot at then President Gerald Ford and missed?

Apparently she is now 80 and was released in 2007 on mandatory parole after serving 32 years in jail. She was on the Today Show this morning. [More...]

If you're looking for another source of unnecessary anxiety -- if Harry Reid's dread of Guantanamo detainees being housed in American prisons isn't enough to make you hide under your bed -- you should read the Wall Street Journal's alarmist warnings that the dark forces of Islam will find "fertile ground for terrorist recruitment" in the nation's prisons. This latest fear arises from the "possibility" that the four men charged with plotting bombings in New York are Muslim and that "some may have converted in prison." As usual, the WSJ story ignores the likelihood that the "plot" was devised and/or encouraged by the government informant who gave them away.

Terrorist recruiters looking for a collection of people with antisocial tendencies will certainly find them in prison. To convert criminals into terrorists, however, the recruiter must himself be sent to prison, and must build relationships with violent inmates who are willing to betray their country by engaging in risky mayhem without profit. His recruitment pool will be limited to inmates who will be released while they're still young enough to do some harm -- a serious limitation since the most violent criminals will be serving lengthy sentences. And since prisons are filled with snitches, the recruiter must do his work without being exposed to prison officials who will happily lock him up in segregation on an informant's say-so. On the whole, the threat that inmates will join an Islamic terrorist cell seems less dire than the threat that they'll join a violent group of white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood.

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The latest round of Republican fear-mongering (preemptively embraced by the Harry Reid gang) predicts catastrophe if Guantanamo's involuntary residents are imprisoned within the nation's borders. Those who fear that American prisons aren't up to the task of detaining foreign suspected terrorists will likely feel their personal threat levels rise when they read that the Bureau of Prisons routinely transfers prisoners by buying them a bus ticket and sending them on their way to their new destination.

This AP story opens with the news that a 55 year old motorcycle gang member who finished half of his 24 year sentence for delivering cocaine got off the bus in Las Vegas, didn't get back on, and hasn't been recaptured. Losing the biker dude in 2004 must be a bit embarrassing for the U.S. Marshals, who clearly did not know he had $12,000 stashed in a Vegas bank.

Only after reading more than halfway through the story do we learn that more than 90 percent of federal inmates who travel by Greyhound are on their way to a halfway house. It makes no sense to assign federal marshals to supervise the travel of an inmate who can easily flee once he's dropped off at his destination. [more ...]

A Nebraska resident petitioned a Lancaster County judge to change his name from Jonathan Thomas to Sinner Lawrence Bilskirnir. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Thomas will probably spend the next five years finishing up his felony sentences, a fact that influenced the judge's denial of Thomas' request. Law enforcement and correctional agencies, as well child support enforcement agencies, need to keep track of Thomas, according to the judge. That's fine, but wouldn't it be easier to keep track of Sinner Lawrence Bilskirnir than Jon Thomas?

Thomas asked for the name change “because he is a heathen and Thor is his ‘High God.’” The judge was unimpressed. “Simply because a person is a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, they do not change their name to Moses,” he ruled. It seems that Moses Malone was fortunate to have parents who made him a Moses from the start.

Here's a suggestion that would help California solve its budget crisis: put San Quentin on eBay (or just list it with a broker).

Offering a prime location and breathtaking scenery, officials think that, even in a down market, the prison's buildings and grounds would fetch as much as $2 billion from private developers.

An acupuncture program in Baltimore jails has been helping 700 inmates a year curb drug addiction:

Modern science has not found solid evidence that it works. Nonetheless, the inmates claim that with acupuncture, all they crave are the meditative moments it brings. They say it soothes them and helps clear their cluttered minds to find the strength to confront their addiction.

District Judge Jamey Hueston thinks every addict should try it....Acupuncture is the key element of the Addicts Changing Together Substance Abuse Program, administered by the drug court. Beginning for women in 1993 and for men three years later, the program steers nonviolent offenders to a rigorous 45-day, behind-bars regimen in lieu of a longer prison term.

How it works: [More...]

I hope someone in the Obama Administration takes note of the philosophy behind the Austrian prison system. It's one that could serve the U.S. well.

It's in the news today because Josef Fritzl, the 73 year old sentenced to life for abominable crimes against his daughter, has chosen Garsten as the place to serve his sentence. (Apparently, in Austria, the inmates get to choose their prison.) [More...]

Three federal judges, after hearing evidence of California's ongoing failure to provide adequate health care (including mental health care) to state inmates, told the State it had lost the lawsuit and had better settle quickly if it didn't want to face an order requiring it to release as many as 58,000 prisoners over the next two to three years.

Everyone (except maybe the correctional officers' union) agrees that overcrowding is the problem.

Because prisons are jammed beyond capacity, they lack medical facilities, doctors and nurses, can't make sure inmates are taking medications or receiving treatment, and are triple-bunking inmates in gyms and other locations, the panel said. Such overcrowding increases the risk of spreading diseases among prisoners and staff, the judges said.

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For the second time in a month, there's a riot underway at a private Texas prison.

This time it's the Reeves County Detention Center in West Texas. More than 1,000 prisoners are involved. The prison is run by The GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla. Here's a list of the prisons they operate in the U.S.

The Reeves County Detention Center, according to GEO, is low security and houses 2,400 inmates. Check out its description of programs -- almost sounds like a cross between rehab, summer camp and a hotel:

Unless they get caught having sex with inmates or smuggling drugs into a prison, it's rare for corrections officers (formerly known as prison guards) to be charged with criminal behavior in their administration of prison affairs. It's encouraging that charges have been filed twice in less than a year against corrections officers at the youth facility in the Rikers Island jail.

According to the new indictment, guards used violent inmates to ride herd over others, sanctioned assaults on inmates and decided when, where and how they would take place. Prosecutors accused the guards of setting up a system of warning signals to protect gang members from being discovered when they administered beatings. They said the guards directed their “teams” to avoid hitting inmates in the face so that any injuries would not be readily apparent.

The indictment charges three guards who were allegedly involved in the death of an 18 year old who was beaten to death in his cell. [more ...]