The Netflix show "Orange Is the New Black" makes jail look horrible. In reality, it's much worse, as we at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) know from collecting stories from prisoners and their families for decades.

California parole officials Monday said the state is ready to begin the early release of elderly and frail prisoners who meet new criteria for parole.

The program's details were released publicly for the first time at a meeting of the Board of Parole Hearings. They were ordered by a panel of federal judges earlier this year, as part of required steps the state must take to reduce prison crowding to acceptable levels.

A special legislative committee created last fall in the wake of federal court orders to improve state prison conditions and reduce crowding is calling for increases in the services and spending the state devotes to rehabilitation efforts and post-prison work programs. In a letter sent this week to Assembly Speaker John Perez, whose term ended Friday, committee co-chairs Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) and Reginald Jones-Sawyer (D-South Los Angeles) recommended increased

Jailing is big business. California spends approximately $9 billion a year on its correctional system, and hosts one in seven of the nation’s prisoners. It has the largest prison population of any state. The number of correctional facilities, the amount of compensation for their unionized staffs, and the total cost of incarcerating a prisoner in the state—$44,563 a year—have exploded over the past 30 years. Over that same period, the quality of the state’s prison system declined precipitously.

2014 North American Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) Conference

People engaged in support work for political prisoners/prisoners of war from across North America will be gathering together this September to create new strategies for freeing our imprisoned comrades and to figure out ways to strengthen existing efforts. We need help from everyone who wants to see our comrades walk free to make this crucial yearly gathering happen this fall! We need $7000 to pull off this year's conference!

by Victoria Law 

Today, the ACLU released Worse than Second Class: Solitary Confinement of Women in the United States. Recognizing that women in solitary are often ignored, the report examines the gendered impact of solitary and issues a series of recommendations. These recommendations assume that vulnerable populations will continue to be incarcerated and focus on ameliorating the harmful effects of solitary.

MINEOLA, N.Y. — Two suburban New York men who spent 18 years in prison for the 1984 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, only to be exonerated when a DNA test showed that another unknown assailant had committed the crimes, were awarded $18 million each Thursday in a federal civil rights lawsuit.

More than ten times the number of mentally ill people are in prisons across the United States then are under treatment in mental health facilities. As of 2012, according to a new report, there were an estimated 356,000 prisoners with severe mental illness – including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other acute forms of brain disease -- in prisons and jails, while state psychiatric hospitals contained approximately 35,000 patients with severe mental illness.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez has concluded that the state of New York violated the rights of three incarcerated men “to be free from torture” by locking them up them in long-term solitary confinement.  The findings, which were submitted to the UN Human Rights Council last month, were published alongside similar “observations” on the human rights practices of nearly 70 other countries.

A review of Oakland City Attorney lawsuit data and hundreds of federal and state court cases has found that since 1990, Oakland has spent $74 million dollars to settle at least 417 lawsuits accusing its police officers of brutality, misconduct and other civil rights violations.