A year and a half into Louis A. Molina’s tenure as correction commissioner, the federal monitor overseeing the Rikers Island jail complex on Thursday took direct aim at his leadership, saying that the violence there remains unabated and that officials are hiding information about it. “The commitment to effective collaboration, as evidenced by the department’s […]
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IN APRIL 2020, Gales told me over the phone how he and his classmates, now confined to their cells most of the day in the prison version of quarantine, continued working on dance moves that would fit those constricted spaces. “We really wish we could do TikTok,” he said. “We would take over the world.” […]
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When Narges Mohammadi was just a little girl, her mother told her to never become political. The price of fighting the system in a country like Iran would be too high. That warning has proved prescient. Ms. Mohammadi, 51, Iran’s most prominent human rights and women’s rights activist, is now serving a 10-year jail sentence […]
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Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced entrepreneur who was convicted of defrauding investors at her failed blood testing start-up Theranos, is expected to report to a federal prison in Texas on Tuesday to begin her 11-year, three-month sentence. Ms. Holmes is expected to report to FPC Bryan, a minimum-security prison camp for women located roughly 90 minutes […]
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They beat prisoners relentlessly and tortured them with electric shocks, waterboarding and mock executions. Three people died in their custody. Yet such was their sense of impunity, the Russians who seized control of a detention center in southern Ukraine last year and filled it with 200 detainees were careless about concealing their identities. Last week, […]
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Mr. Salpeter sank into depression. Sometimes, he went to his office and slept. He spent a year, maybe two, mostly at home. His drinking increased. Several clients complained to state officials that he had not provided them with written contracts or detailed reports of the work he had done. He settled the matters with nominal […]
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BEACON, N.Y. — The way the prison guards described it in their paperwork, there was a minor disturbance the day they took Chad Stanbro to a dental clinic at a regional hospital. Mr. Stanbro, a prisoner, had been sedated but became agitated during surgery, took a swing at a dentist and kicked a correctional officer […]
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Shattered teeth. Punctured lungs. Broken bones. Over a dozen years, New York State officials have documented the results of attacks by hundreds of prison guards on the people in their custody. But when the state corrections department has tried to use this evidence to fire guards, it has failed 90 percent of the time, an […]
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Jeriod Price had served more than half of a 35-year prison sentence for murdering another man at a nightclub in 2002. Then, last month, he became a fugitive. The authorities in South Carolina warned the public that he was dangerous and “could be anywhere in the world,” pleading for information that could aid their sudden, frantic search. “My […]
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Shortly after D-Day during World War II, French resistance fighters took 47 captured German soldiers to a small wooden area in southwest-central France. In the scorching heat, they forced the soldiers to dig their own graves, shot them dead one by one and buried the bodies, covering the remains with quicklime, according to a witness. […]
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Ethan Frenchman, a lawyer in Washington who advocates on behalf of people with disabilities in jails, told me that while the nation’s roughly 1,500 state prisons are operated or overseen by 50 states, the 3,000 or so jails “are operated by who knows how many hundreds or thousands of different jurisdictions,” making it extremely hard […]
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The Supreme Court on Friday granted a stay of execution for the death row inmate Richard Glossip after Oklahoma’s attorney general made an extraordinary plea to stop what he says would have been an “unthinkable” error. The court put the execution on hold while it considers whether to formally review the case. That request from […]
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court granted a stay of execution on Friday to Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, after the state’s attorney general, Gentner F. Drummond, a Republican, told the justices that he agreed that Mr. Glossip’s execution should be halted. In a rare move, Mr. Drummond wrote that the state had […]
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The death this week of a Palestinian prisoner, Khader Adnan, who starved himself in Israel to protest his detention, threw a spotlight on a method of nonviolent resistance, part of a history of protest that turns the captive’s body into a tool to achieve change. As a tactic of activism, it was used most famously […]
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Khader Adnan, a Palestinian prisoner who had been on a hunger strike in an Israeli prison for 87 days to protest his detention, died early Tuesday, according to his lawyer and Palestinian and Israeli officials. It was Mr. Adnan, 44, who helped usher in the practice of individual hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners, conducting a […]
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From the outside, the prison complex in Florence, Colo., is a forbidding citadel of steel, concrete and coiled barbed wire, housing some of the most notorious inmates in federal custody. To hundreds of its employees, it is a stressful, isolated, short-staffed workplace. Like many other federal prisons, Florence is undergoing a staffing crisis, with head […]
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Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed Russian opposition leader, said on Wednesday that Russian authorities had initiated new “absurd” terrorism charges against him that could lead to life in prison. Mr. Navalny’s comments, which were posted on his team’s Twitter account, came as he appeared via video link at a court hearing over separate extremism charges […]
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The Biden administration this week accelerated efforts to fund opioid addiction treatment in jails and prisons, a core part of its drug policy agenda, calling on states to adopt a novel Medicaid program that will cover health care for incarcerated people. Under new guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, states can ask […]
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LIMA, Peru — Two of Peru’s former presidents find themselves behind bars, one convicted of human rights violations, the other accused of illegally trying to dissolve Congress. A third ex-president may soon join that ignominious group with all three sharing the same prison. Alejandro Toledo, who led Peru two decades ago, surrendered on Friday to […]
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New York City has agreed to pay as much as $53 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of thousands of pretrial detainees on Rikers Island and in Manhattan who were wrongfully isolated and held in small cells for up to 23 hours per day, according to documents filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in […]
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At an age when his peers were getting driver’s licenses and thinking about college, Jose Di Lenola, then 17, was behind bars in one of New York State’s most violent prisons, earning “a master’s degree in Prison Survival,” as he put it. He learned how to wield a metal can lid as a weapon and […]
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A heavy machine operator whose bare-chested modeling landed him on the covers of romance novels was sentenced on Thursday to three years in prison for assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the Justice Department said. The man, Logan James Barnhart, 41, of Holt, Mich., was involved in one of […]
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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In court this week, a psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the Central Intelligence Agency rolled up a towel, wrapped it around the neck of a criminal defense lawyer, and slowly pulled the lawyer toward him and up on her toes — a dramatic re-enactment of practices used on a Saudi detainee […]
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Hideji Suzuki served six years in a Chinese prison on spying charges — a sentence that stemmed, he said, from a dinner party where he did nothing more than try to make small talk with a Chinese academic about North Korea. Since returning to Japan in October, he has tried to raise the alarm about […]
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BEIJING — Two of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers were sentenced on Monday to 14 years and 12 years in prison, some of the lengthiest such sentences in recent years and an indication of how the space for expression has evaporated under China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The lawyers, Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, had […]
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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Sunday that he had spoken with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to demand the release of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been imprisoned in Russia. In a rare call between the two men since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, […]
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Oleksandr Fedorenko’s odyssey began with a triumph for his native Ukraine. It was last October, and Ukrainian troops were pressing an offensive that would ultimately liberate the southern city of Kherson. As Russian occupation forces prepared to withdraw, they took with them 2,500 Ukrainian criminals from the city’s jails, including Mr. Fedorenko. What followed over […]
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In 2004, Charles Bryant, then a father in his 30s, was arrested in the Bronx with not quite 50 grams of crack — a quantity roughly equal to four robust pats of butter. He was charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics, and based on policies established at the height of the war on drugs, he […]
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Along the riverbanks of Eastern Kentucky, the redbud trees are just starting to bloom, their branches still lumbering under the weight of last summer’s catastrophic flood: Lawn chairs, trampolines, twisted gutters and school backpacks remain high in the treetops, each item a persistent and disorienting sign of how life here was turned upside down last […]
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Mr. Nassar was, for a time, thought of as a suspect in the killings. At least two women who had escaped the Boston Strangler were taken to Bridgewater and identified Mr. Nassar, not Mr. DeSalvo, as the assailant, according to The Globe article. “I had nothing to do with it,” Mr. Nassar told the newspaper. […]
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WASHINGTON — When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, arranged a tour of the D.C. jail to inspect the conditions of defendants charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Democrats faced a choice: Boycott or participate. House Democrats had watched last Congress as the Republican leader Kevin McCarthy pulled his members from a Democratic-led […]
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