Tag: Prisons and Prisoners

Woman Admits Killing Pregnant Teenager for Her Baby

A Chicago woman who killed a pregnant teenager and aimed to pass the baby off as her own pleaded guilty to murder Tuesday and was sentenced to 50 years in prison, prosecutors said. In April 2019, Clarisa Figueroa, 51, who had been pretending to be pregnant, fatally strangled Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, 19, who was eight months […]

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California Women’s Prison With Sex Abuse Culture Will Close

For years, the women housed at the low-security federal prison in Northern California said they were victims of sexual assault at the hands of staff. There were harrowing accounts of rape, sexual touching and voyeurism at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin. Some inmates said they were forced to strip naked, while others recounted being made […]

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Alvin Bragg: We Must Address New York City’s Mental Health Crisis

In September 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed with a seven-inch steel letter opener. He had been autographing copies of his first book in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. The woman who stabbed him was named Izola Ware Curry. When Dr. King found out she was schizophrenic, he harbored no ill […]

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Former Rikers Employees Charged With Smuggling in Contraband

Five people who worked at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, as well as a detainee there, have been charged with corruption, including smuggling contraband into the jail, according to three complaints unsealed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday. Federal prosecutors said that in 2021 and 2022, several former city correction officers, […]

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Ex-Ecuadorean Vice President, Arrested at Mexican Embassy, Is in Coma

Authorities found a former Ecuadorean vice president, Jorge Glas, in a “deep self-induced coma” in jail on Monday, just days after he was captured by the police in a dramatic arrest inside the Mexican embassy in Quito. Mr. Glas ingested anti-depressants and sedatives, according to a police report, and was being transferred to a military […]

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New York City Set to Pay a Record $28 Million to Settle Rikers Island Suit

New York City has agreed to pay more than $28 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of Nicholas Feliciano, who suffered severe brain damage after he attempted to hang himself in a Rikers Island jail cell as more than half a dozen correction officers stood by. If approved by a judge, it […]

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John Sinclair, 82, Dies; Counterculture Activist Who Led a ‘Guitar Army’

John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82. His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a […]

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Prisoners Who Sued Over Lockdown Will Be Allowed to View Solar Eclipse

New York State’s corrections department agreed on Thursday to allow six men who had sued to be able to view Monday’s total solar eclipse to do so at the upstate prison where they are held, but the department stopped short of lifting a statewide prison lockdown during the eclipse. The men, inmates at Woodbourne Correctional […]

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New York Prisoners, Denied a Solar Eclipse Viewing, Sue the State

When the moon crosses in front of the sun on Monday afternoon and, for a few minutes, casts a shadow over much of New York State, millions of people will be able to witness the rare celestial event just by looking up. Inmates in the state’s prisons will not. Last month, the state’s Department of […]

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New ‘Serial’ Podcast Explores Life at Guantánamo Bay

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. It was a sunny day in May 2015 when Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis stepped off a U.S. military-chartered plane and onto the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They were there to learn the […]

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