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Prisons: United States
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Earlier this year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons removed a large portion of religious materials from prison chapel libraries, limiting the number of approved texts and books to 150 per denomination. The removal of these texts, and the opaque process by which the 150 texts that were left on the 'approved' list, generated a substantial public outcry, forcing the BOP to return the texts to the libraries. The BOP has... stated that after a comprehensive examination of chapel libraries in the federal prison system, it may institute a similar policy and once again remove a portion of religious texts that are made available to inmates. Human Rights Watch urges the BOP not to renew this policy, which violates the rights of prisoners.
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Prisons and Capital Punishment - Statistics and data on capital punishment in general, as well as specific articles and reports on capital punishment in Texas one of the states in the United States to still use this ultimate form of punishment. Great look at capital punishment in general as well as in Texas where this is enforced.
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Prisons now house three times more people with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression than mental health hospitals. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics says half of state prisoners nationwide have a mental health problem. In Massachusetts, there will likely be a victory in a lawsuit filed last week against the Department of Corrections challenging its practice of placing mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement. The evidence is overwhelming that it is cruel and a violation of basic human dignity to force prisoners with serious mental illness to spend years confined round the clock in claustrophobic cells, with nothing to do, and no one with whom to have a normal conversation.
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Surprisingly, private prisons are nothing new in U.S. history. In the mid-1800s, penny-pinching state legislatures awarded contracts to private entrepreneurs to operate and manage Louisiana's first state prison, New York's Auburn and Sing Sing penitentiaries, and others. These institutions became models for entire sections of the nation where privatized prisons were the norm later in the century. These prisons were supposed to turn a profit for the state, or at least pay for themselves. Typically, privatization was limited: The state leased or contracted convict labor to private companies. In some cases, such as Texas... the corrections function was turned over wholesale to private interests which prom ised to control delinquents at no cost to the state.
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Modern prison designs, particularly those of high-security prisons, have sought to increasingly restrict and control the movement of prisoners throughout the facility while minimizing the corrections staffing needed to monitor and control the population. As compared to the traditional landing-cellblock-hall designs, many newer prisons are designed in a decentralized "podular" layout with individual self-contained housing units, known as "pods" or "modules", arranged around centralized outdoor yards in a "campus". The pods contain tiers of cells laid out in an open pattern arranged around a central control station from which a single corrections officer can monitor all of the cells and the entire pod. Control of cell doors, communications and CCTV monitoring is conducted from the control station as well. Movement out of the pod to the exercise yard or work assignments can be restricted to individual pods at designated times, or else prisoners may be kept almost always within their pod or even their individual cells depending upon the level of security. Goods and services, such as meals, laundry, commissary, educational materials, religious services and medical care can increasingly be brought to individual pods or cells as well.
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It was not possible... to compare the extent to which drugs are getting into the Lawrenceville Correctional Center with prisons run by the Virginia Department of Corrections because the testing at Lawrenceville was not conducted according to state requirements. The Virginia State Crime Commission met inside the prison yesterday for a briefing on a report written by MGT of America Inc. for the Department of Corrections. The report found that Lawrenceville, despite its contraband problems, overall was a well-run, clean and safe facility and noted that any prison can have serious security breaches. "In this case those breaches resulted in the high incidence of drugs and cell phones being introduced inside the prison," the report said. In March, The Times-Dispatch, using state figures, reported that more than twice as many inmates were caught with drugs at Lawrenceville as in all other Virginia prisons combined, and that one in five cell phones confiscated in prisons in Virginia were seized there. Later, however, the Department of Corrections said those figures were incomplete and gave a misleading picture of the contraband problem at Lawrenceville.
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