Prison, Prisoners | featured news

Stephen Slevin's 22 months in solitary left him traumatized and weak, but he'll soon be a multimillionaire for his suffering.

Faced with the daunting task of evaluating more than 34,000 drug cases handled by a Massachusetts chemist accused of misconduct, prosecutors and defense attorneys are starting with 1,140 cases of people who are already serving prison sentences based on potentially tainted evidence.

The attorney for an Ohio death-row inmate set for execution says the condemned man is sorry for killing two strangers 23 years ago and wants to give their families justice.

Pressed by the state to take more prisoners but facing tightening budgets, California counties face hard choices. A one-night stay in this city’s finest hotel costs $190, complete with sumptuous sheets and a gourmet restaurant. Soon, a twin metal bunk at the county jail, with meals served on plastic trays, will run $142.42.

Hundreds of thousands of people are rallying to support Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis. They not only oppose capital punishment but they also believe the state could put an innocent man to death. The case is packed with drama: the murder of an off-duty police officer; conflicting eyewitness testimony; last-minute court decisions sparing a condemned man's life and global dignitaries who say they fear an innocent man could die.

A U.S. presidential commission will release on Monday its findings on a government research project that deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s.

Sheriff says he will cut costs at Florida jail by $45,000 a year by charging prisoners a fee for underwear... “For those who want underwear, they can buy underwear. For those who don’t, they can let the breeze blow up one leg and down the other,” he told reporters.

For the last four years, inmates housed in Zimbabwe's overcrowded prisons in have been served a vegetarian diet, but a new government proposal aims to put meat back on the menu; Pachyderm meat, to be exact.

An examination of state budgets has revealed a startling discrepancy: most states are spending three to four times more incarcerating prisoners than they are educating students. According to research gathered from the Department of Justice, Georgia lawmakers, for example, dole out almost $18,000 a year to house one inmate in a state prison. But the National Education Association says the state spends about one-third of that to put a child through the public education system.

The bus was evacuating prisoners from a penitentiary in the fire’s path when it got caught in the flames, rescue workers reported.