Police Misconduct Blog

Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility is one of the nation’s worst prisons. It has the dubious distinction of the prison with the nation’s highest homicide rate and among the highest suicide rates. Recently, the New York Times received over 2,000 photos taken inside the prison...

In Oklahoma’s Nowata County, the sheriff and 12 members of her department – including deputies and civilian employees – resigned on March 18 instead of obeying a court order to move inmates back into the county jail.
The jail has been closed since last month when four...

Banking behemoth JP Morgan Chase recently announced that it will no longer finance the private prison industry. The largest United States bank in terms of assets is following the lead of other well-known banks that have stopped such financing.
JP Morgan Chase was involved in the financing of...

A California man who spent 39 years in prison for two murders he didn’t commit is free – and rich. Craig Coley, now 71, received a $21 million settlement from the city of Simi Valley for the time spent behind bars after his wrongful 1980 conviction in the deaths of his former girlfriend...

New York City’s Rikers Island jail has long been known as one of the worst such institutions in the country. Now, a new book by Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services, outlines just how deadly Rikers Island is.
From...

A whole generation has come of age unfamiliar with phone booths and other means of communicating in the pre-cell phone era. Pay phones are still a staple of local jails, and the fees charged inmates to make such calls are often exorbitant. One 15-minute phone call will often cost an inmate over...

In the middle of the afternoon on January 20, 2015, Mark Pajas Sr. was found face down in his own vomit in his detox jail cell at the Monterey County Jail. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead at age 56.
Just over four years later, his family was awarded $1.6 million by a jury who...

Last year, Sequita Eddy Thompson watched in horror as two police officers shot her 22-year-old grandson, Stephon Clark, to death in the backyard of her Sacramento home. Clark was unarmed, carrying his cellphone, which the cops apparently mistook for a gun.
He was shot either seven or eight...

Hundreds of inmates became sick and “frantic” as heat failed in a Brooklyn jail during the recent polar vortex. The temperature in New York City was as low as two degrees, but more than 1,000 inmates had neither heat nor power during this perilous cold spell.
The Metropolitan...

Almost from the moment Lamekia Dockery entered the Elkhart Community Corrections (“ECC”) work-release facility in Goshen, Indiana, she told guards she was having severe stomach pains and needed medical attention. For six days, she begged to go to a hospital, only to have corrections...