June Patti had a hunger to be heard.

A large woman with scarlet-dyed hair and a loud, raspy voice, Patti was a known drug addict who presented herself as a paralegal. Raised in the Redondo Beach area, she moved to northwest Washington state in the 1990s and soon became a local fixture, quick to phone law enforcement. One year she called 800 times, recalled Skagit County Sheriff Will Reichardt.

Who says the government can’t do anything anymore?

Even as Ronald Reagan argued that “government is the problem” throughout the 1980s, the state imprisoned twice the percentage of Americans previously incarcerated. As Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government” over in the 1990s, incarcerations skyrocketed to almost five times their rate in the 1970s—a rate that had been stable across the twentieth century. How did this happen?

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina inmate with mental illness who died of thirst was held in solitary confinement for 35 days and cited twice for flooding his cell, according to prison records.

PRESS RELEASE
 
Human Rights Defense Center
For Immediate Release 
September 25, 2014 – For Immediate Release

FCC Takes Further Action to Reduce Exorbitant Prison Phone Rates

A report released today raises concerns about inmate cancers and other serious health ailments at a state prison that sits next to a massive Fayette County coal waste dump full of toxic fly ash.

The preliminary report on the ongoing investigation by two human rights organizations into prisoner health at the State Correctional Institution Fayette in LaBelle [PA], found 11 prisoners died from cancer between January 2010 and December 2013, another six have been diagnosed with cancer and eight more have undiagnosed tumors or lumps.

The Netflix series "Orange is the New Black" isn't funny to the women who served time in Danbury Federal Prison. I know because I am one of those women.

The day after Monday's Emmy Awards, a television morning show invited viewers to tweet about their favorite part of the awards ceremony. I don't tweet. But if I did, I would have said that my favorite part was that "Orange is the New Black" didn't win an award for best comedy. And it shouldn't have.

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here

The officers got the wrong man, but charged him anyway—with getting his blood on their uniforms.  How the Ferguson PD ran the town where Michael Brown was gunned down.

Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him.

When Jeremy Romo was packed off to prison in 2012 for illegal possession of a firearm, he says he was as healthy as anyone, a construction worker who ran three miles each weekday and five miles on weekends.

By the time he was released in July 2013, the 34-year-old Manteca man says he had become a physical wreck, unable to run, suffering from joint pain and consigned to a life sentence of taking expensive medications to combat the Valley fever he contracted while in prison.

A federal judge in Sacramento on Wednesday awarded class-action status to California prison inmates who allege that their rights are violated by what they say are widespread instances of race-based punishment.

Prison officials acknowledge they respond to outbreaks of violence by ordering sanctions, including sweeping lockdowns, that can last for months. They say every inmate is assigned a race or ethnic code: black, Hispanic, white or other, and at some prisons, inmates live in cells where their race is denoted by color-coded signs.