The Supreme Court yesterday upheld a ruling by a panel of three federal judge holding that conditions in California's prisons are so horrendous they violate the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The panel had found that overcrowding was a primary cause of the abysmal conditions, and ordered California to reduce its prison population to no more than 137% of design capacity. The Supreme Court's opinion is here. From the opinion:

Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

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The Oklahoman has an article today highlighting elderly non-violent defendants in drug cases who are sentenced to terms that, due to their age, amount to a life sentence. Often, these seniors' offense is selling their own lawfully obtained precription pills.

Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control spokesman Mark Woodward said the argument is sometimes made that selling prescriptions becomes the only way for the elderly to supplement Social Security benefits and make money.

Check out these photographic exhibitions of aging and ill prisoners: Tim Gruber's Served Out – Aging and Dying Behind Bars and Grace Before Dying [More...].

A welcome news story to wake up to: Haxtun High School, located in a farm town in Northeastern Colorado, will have its spring prom catered by inmates at the Sterling Correctional Facility.

This may be the inmates first catered prom, but the community is used to their catering other functions, including some National Honor Society banquets and town functions. At the latter, they whipped up some tasty cinnamon rolls.

The tradition is not new. This year, the inmates will be cooking around 120 meals, including chicken alfredo, vegetables, salad and cheesecake.

The cooking is not done inside the school, but behind it. Other local communities also use the inmates' catering services, "which is supported by an inmate culinary training program."

Reentry programs are a win-win for all. They teach inmates skills with which to get jobs when they are released, lowering the risk of recidivism, which makes the entire community safer.

For years, there have been rumors that Congress might increase good time credit for federal inmates. None have come to pass.

There is no parole in the federal system. The amount of good time is the same for everyone -- 54 days a year after the first year.

Sentencing Law and Policy reports that one of the speakers at the Sentencing Commission's hearings last week was Bureau of Prisons Director Harley Lappin. After discussing how overcrowded our prisons are, and what can be done to alleviate it, he said that the Justice Department is working with Congress on two proposals. The first would increase the good time from 54 days a year to 61 days (not much of a change.) The second proposal is more promising: [More...]

Chief Warrant Officer Denise Barnes, the commander at the Military brig at Quantico says Bradley Manning will continue to be stripped of his underwear at bedtime because he is on a prevention of injury watch (which is different than a suicide watch.)

He is given two blankets. What can he do with a pair of underpants that he can't do with a blanket? And what prompted this? According to Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, on his blog today, events went like this. Manning was told his petition to be moved out of maximum custody had been denied due to the prevention of injury watch. Manning, who has been a model detainee, asked what he could do to change it. He was told there was nothing he could do, because of the perception he was a risk of self-harm:

PFC Manning then remarked that the POI restrictions were "absurd" and sarcastically stated that if he wanted to harm himself, he could conceivably do so with the elastic waistband of his underwear or with his flip-flops.

The Department of Justice today announced new rules for the Bureau of Prisons and other correctional agencies for addressing and preventing sexual abuse of inmates.

The Justice Department today released a proposed rule that aims to prevent and respond to sexual abuse in incarceration settings, in accordance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Based on recommendations of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC), the proposed rule contains four sets of national standards aimed at combating sexual abuse in four types of confinement facilities: adult prisons and jails, juvenile facilities, lockups and community confinement facilities.

A 60-day public comment period will follow publication in the Federal Register, after which the department will make revisions as warranted and the standards will be published as a final rule. The department expects the final rule will be published by the end of the year.

The standards will be immediately binding on the federal Bureau of Prisons upon publication. States that do not comply with the standards may lose five percent of the funds they would otherwise receive for prison purposes from DOJ.

There are separate standards for each of the four categories of facilities: [More...]

The Denver Post has an article on Project Noble Mustang. Wild mustang horses are rounded up and trained by inmates for months and then deployed along the nation's border to catch drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants.

[A]gents now use the prison-trained mustangs to catch illegal immigrants every day. Rafael V. Garza, horse patrol commander for the Border Patrol in the Laredo, Texas, sector, said in the first year of service, his nine mounted agents caught 500 illegal immigrants. "It's the intimidation factor," Garza said.

It sounds like a great program for the inmates, who get valuable life skills from it. I just wish the horses were used for a purpose other than rounding up suspected lawbreakers. Like what? Hippotherapy. More here and here.

Via Sentencing Law and Policy, there is a new report on children of the incarcerated:

Fifty-three percent of the 1.5 million people held in U.S. prisons by 2007 were the parents of one or more minor children. This percentage translates into more than 1.7 million minor children with an incarcerated parent.

African American children are seven and Latino children two and half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.

The full report is here. [More...]

Over the past three years, Illinois taxpayers have shelled out close to $10 million in workers comp claims to prison guards at one prison in Illinois. The payments are mostly for claims of repetitive carpal tunnel syndrome due to opening and closing manually operated cell doors. 389 guards (more than half of those employed by the prison)have put in claims and collected.

Even the warden put in a claim and got $75,000. How many times a day do you think he personally opens or closes a cell door?

State lawmakers are calling for a fraud investigation.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released its annual report on the number of people in prisons and jails and on probation and parole.

For the first time in 30 years there was a slight drop in the number of state prisoners. Federally, the number is up 3.4%. The numbers for 2009 are still staggering:

7,225,800 people were either in prison, on probation or parole. That's 1 in 32 people or 3.1% of the population.

Of the 7.2 million, there were 1,319,426 inmates in state prisons and 205,087 in federal prisons. More than 4 million adults were on probation at the end of 2009, while 819,000 were under parole supervision.

There were 140,000 federal prisoners in 2000. In 2009, there were 205,000. The total number of incarcerated persons in 2008 was 2,300,700. In 2009, the number fell by a smidgen (0.7%) to 2,284,900. to The full report is here.

Inmates in at least six prisons have banded together and gone on strike, seeking better compensation and improved prison conditions. They have refused to leave their cells since Thursday.

Chief among the prisoners’ demands is that they be compensated for jailhouse labor. They are also demanding better educational opportunities, nutrition, and access to their families.

“We committed the crime, we’re here for a reason,” said the Hays inmate. “But at the same time we’re men. We can’t be treated like animals.”

How did they coordinate? Through banned cell phones and text messaging. How serious are they? The striking prisoners put gang affiliations and racial issues aside to join together.

Thomson Correctional Facility, an empty Illinois prison which now can't be used for Guantanamo inmates, is going on the auction block December 21. The minimum bid is $270 million.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois has been working to get the money for the sale via an omnibus spending bill, which could be on Obama’s desk awaiting his signature later this month.

Doesn't the U.S. have better things to spend $270 million on than yet another prison? Tell Dick Durbin and Congress to just say no to more of America, Prison Nation.

The U.S. Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v. Plata, the lawsuit over whether California must release prisoners pursuant to a court order as a step towards rectifying abysmal prison conditions in the state.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the conditions documented in court papers were horrendous. He referred, for instance, to a passage in one brief describing prisoners “found hanged to death in holding tanks where observation windows are obscured with smeared feces, and discovered catatonic in pools of their own urine after spending nights locked in small cages.”

Justice Sotomayor to the lawyer for California:

When are you going to avoid the needless deaths?” she asked. “When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state?”

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Via Sentencing Law and Policy, Steve Sady, chief deputy federal public defender for the District of Oregon who argued the case of Barber v. Thomas in the Supreme Court, writes a commentary, Too Much Time in Prison, in tomorrow's National Law Journal.

In a nutshell: Congress mandated federal prisoners serve 85% of their time, but according to the odd formula the Bureau of Prisons uses to calculate the 85%, it turns out prisoners get only 12.8%, and the Supreme Court has upheld their formula. How? "By finding that the phrase "term of imprisonment" could be interpreted in different ways within the same sentence of the statute." [More...]

The Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, today released a report, "Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates,2008-09, available here.

The report is required by the The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79) which directs the the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to conduct "a comprehensive statistical review and analysis of the incidents and effects of prison rape for each calendar year," and to "provide a list of prisons and jails according to the prevalence of sexual victimization."

The findings: 90,000 inmates, more than 4 percent of prison inmates and over 3 percent of jail inmates, reported being sexually victimized in custody. [More....]