By Panagioti Tsolkas / Prison Legal News After more than three years of a controversial environmental review process for the proposed USP Letcher, conducted by the Bureau of Prisons and their consulting firm Cardno, lawyers filed a lawsuit in November 2018 on behalf of 21 federal prisoners spread across the country. Plaintiffs in the case […]

This week, a global climate justice convergence in San Francisco will coincide with the national prison strike. Alongside the Prison Ecology Project and Fight Toxic Prisons, Nation Inside’s #StopTheHeat Campaign has been drawing connections between these movements, and now it’s time to turn it up a notch. In recent years, prisoners across the country having been decrying chronic abuse due […]

While its been looking dismal in a federal realm, news from the Prison Phone Justice front in Texas may be an indication of changes bubbling up at the state leve

Merging Movements to Bring Climate Justice, Abolish ICE and End Prison Slavery TAKE ACTION NOW! Larry McCollum was supposed to return home to his family after serving a two-year sentence for passing a bad check. Instead, he died of heatstroke in Hutchins State Jail near Dallas, Texas. McCollum spent his last moments trapped in an […]

In July of this year, former prisoners and their family members raised concerns about a variety of prison issues at a hearing with state lawmakers. This included repeated concerns with water quality at multiple facilities. One former prisoner stated that water in the East Arkansas Unit was not even “fit to take a shower in.” […]

By Panagioti Tsolkas Wayland Coleman, a prisoner at MCI-Norfolk, stepped out of the shower and noticed something strange last year. It was as if his towel was, in his words, “was used to wipe dirt off the floor.” [Image of Coleman to the right] “I don’t know exactly what is in this water, but I […]

The area was once locally renown for coal mining and uranium milling, and while the beauty of the land endured despite the industrial activity, there’s not much aside from prisons happening there economically anymore.

Two years ago, the concept of Prison Ecology was introduced to the world, building off the work of jailhouse lawyers, scholars and activists around the country. On many occasions spanning the last 4 decades of the prison boom (in which prisoner populations increased by 700%), prisoners and their advocates had noted environmental concerns in local […]

On July 13, Miami-Dade State Attorney Rundle responded to our petition appealing to her to allow independent testing of the evidence in the Darren Rainey case. She passed the buck, saying the decision was entirely in the hands of the Medical Examiner. This is disputable, but what is indisputable is that the very next day […]

Late last month, we started a petition asking Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle to allow an independent investigation of the death of Darren Rainey (https://www.change.org/p/justice-for-darren-rainey-a-mentally-ill-inmate-killed-by-state-prison-guards-in-florida). Now, with over 9,100 signatures, we have send the letter below, making our case to Ms. Rundle, with the help of everyone who supported this effort. We will […]