After it was signed into law in 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 147 § 15601 et seq., remained unused for a decade while standards were developed and implemented to curtail rape and sexual assaults at prisons and jails nationwide. At that time, the Human Rights ...

Over the years Prison Legal News has reported extensively on the rape of prisoners around the country. In 35 years of publishing, about every 4- or 5-years prison systems have a major scandal at their local women’s prison where it comes to light that dozens of guards have raped or ...

In December 2023, Massachusetts became the fifth state to provide free phone calls in its prisons and the first in all local jails. Video calling and e-messaging were also made available at no cost [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p. 15]. Those progressive reforms were the culmination of years of ...

A guard pleaded guilty in June 4, 2025, in connection with the death of a man held at an Alabama jail who died in freezing conditions in January 2023. The guard, Braxton Kee, 23, pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law, and could face up to a ...

The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has long collected and published statistics on local jails nationwide, including the number of such facilities and how many people are booked into them each year. Who are these people and why are they jailed? On November 17, 2024, the Prison Policy Initiative ...

Over five years ago, in May 2020, Washington prisoners Michael Linear and Lonnie Burton filed a complaint in state court against prison telecom JPay LLC, which held the exclusive contract with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide prisoners their “sole means of access to any electronic content, email, ...

On May 27, 2025, President Donald Trump (R) issued an unconditional pardon for Scott Jenkins, 53, a former Northern Virginia sheriff who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for 12 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery. The pardon reportedly came hours before Jenkins was due to report at ...