Free Republic

A Florida man encased himself in concrete outside the Governor’s Mansion in the state capital apparently to protest prison conditions related to the coronavirus. A Tallahassee police spokesman says 28-year-old Jordan Mazurek put PVC pipes horizontally into two 55-gallon plastic drums filled with concrete, with some sort of mechanism that locked his arms in place.

The Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday announced it will begin confining federal inmates to their cells for 14 days in an attempt to prevent further exposure to coronavirus. The order is part of what the bureau is calling "Phase 5" of its plan to combat the spread of COVID-19. There will be some exceptions to the quasi-lockdown. The bureau is permitting smaller groups for things like phone calls, laundry and showering. Educational programs and mental health treatment will continue, "to the extent practicable." Previous phases of the bureau's plan included the quarantine of newly admitted inmates at all facilities and...

ISTANBUL - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party said on Tuesday it proposed a bill that would temporarily release roughly 45,000 prisoners in response to the risk that the coronavirus could spread in jails. A separate reform included in the legislation, which the AK Party (AKP) and its allies sent to parliament, would release another roughly 45,000 inmates permanently. There are about 300,000 prisoners in Turkey’s crowded jails. The government has been working on reforms to ease pressure on the system, while human rights groups have said infections could easily grow there. The move comes after the number of confirmed...

The number of detainees testing positive for coronavirus at the Cook County Jail in Chicago skyrocketed over the weekend, leaving Sheriff Tom Dart grabbling with a dilemma that runs against the very grain of a veteran lawman and former prosecutor: whether to free alleged criminals instead of keeping them locked up. As of Monday afternoon, one of America's largest single-site jails had 134 inmates who have tested positive for COVID-19, up from just 38 on Friday, Dart told ABC News. Of all the inmates tested so far only nine were negative, he said. “This is beyond complicated," Dart said. "There...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) requested the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) release prisoners who are vulnerable to coronavirus to prevent an outbreak in federal prisons. The letter, addressed to Attorney General Bill Barr and BOP Director Michael Carvajal called on the agencies to “take immediate action to safeguard” the prisoners, specifically those who are elderly or have chronic health conditions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has designated these demographics as most susceptible to serious illness or death. The union requested the officials “increase the use of compassionate release” to...

The city is considering freeing jailed suspects over the coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday — a move backed by the city Board of Correction and Manhattan and Brooklyn DAs. City officials are “evaluating right now people who might be particularly high-risk in terms of vulnerability to the virus,” de Blasio said at an afternoon press conference.

An Iowa man was given a two-year prison sentence...Carothers was open about his crimes, telling the arresting deputy he used a stick to kill the rabbit and then cut off its head,...The Animal Rescue League of Iowa submitted dozens of victim impact statements...Carothers told the arresting deputy he was hungry when asked why he killed the rabbit...

A female inmate at an Illinois women’s prison is suing the prison after she alleged she was raped by a transgender inmate and that the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) conducted a sham investigation of her report.

The Nonprofit Security Grants Program (NSPG) allows houses of worship and other nonprofits to apply for grants of up to $100 thousand for each institution. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer announced Monday he would push to quadruple the budget for the Nonprofit Security Grants Program (NSPG) from $90 million to $360m. a year. The program allows houses of worship and other nonprofits to apply for grants of up to $100,000 for each institution. The money can be used for security measures such as fencing, cameras, stronger doors and hiring of security personnel.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California moved to end the use of private, for-profit lockups in America’s largest state prison system as well as in federal immigration detention centers in the state under a measure signed into law on Friday by Governor Gavin Newsom. The new law bars the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from entering into or renewing a contract with a private company to run a state prison after Jan. 1, 2020, unless needed to meet court-ordered inmate housing limits. It will ban California from incarcerating anyone in privately run facilities altogether from 2028.

It’s getting harder and harder to take Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seriously. She may be extremely popular on social media to radical progressives, keyboard social justice warriors, and left-wing bot accounts, but she’s losing her edge when it comes to promoting extreme ideas. Other radicals have been stealing her thunder, so her natural response is one of the most predictable we’ve seen in DC in recent years. She doubled down on crazy ideas. Her latest scheme was to attempt to make a logical argument for “abolishing prisons” by highlighting anecdotal incidents that represent a tiny portion of the prison population. Then,...

2020 Dem has pledged to ban private prisons Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants to ban private prisons because "no one should make a profit locking people up," but the senator has financially benefited from private prison companies in the past. The Massachusetts senator invested up to $50,000 in a Vanguard Group fund that owned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares in leading private prison companies. Warren sold her stakes in that fund in exchange for a different retirement account in 2013. At the time, the fund was the largest shareholder of America's largest private prison corporation. Warren invested...

The Alaska Department of Corrections has agreed to policy changes to accommodate Muslim inmates who wish to practice their religion, settling a lawsuit brought last year. A federal judge Friday signed the agreement in a case brought on behalf of two Muslim inmates by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which argued that meals provided to the men during the holy month of Ramadan did not meet caloric standards under federal health guidelines. They also said the meals were cold when others received hot meals and sometimes contained pork at odds with their faith.

Shirley Skipper-Scott, the warden of the federal jail in New York City where wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself was reassigned out of that post by Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department said. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons also placed two staffers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center who had been assigned to Epstein’s cell unit on administrative leave pending ongoing investigations into Epstein’s death. Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, was being held without bail on child sex trafficking charges at the times of his death.

So much injustice everywhere. Those deserving of severe punishment and/or execution don't receive it, and yet this man with all of his wealth and connections does die? Now, reports say his cell mate was transferred prior to his death. If all of those inmates who haven't been executed for crimes far worse than Jeffrey's haven't been executed, isn't it time for prison reform?

SunTrust Banks Inc said on Monday it will no longer provide future financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigration holding facilities. "This decision was made after extensive consideration of the views of our stakeholders on this deeply complex issue," the company said in a statement.

While it should be obvious that women’s prisons are for convicted criminals who are female, California Senate Bill 132, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), requires men who say they are women to be housed in women’s prisons.The State Senate passed the bill in May, and it passed the state Assembly with very little opposition on June 25. The bill demands that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ask prisoners their preferred pronouns and gender identity at intake, then house them accordingly. This means that a man need only say at intake that he is a woman...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

An amendment (HR 5, the Equality Act) to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sponsored by 234 Democrats and two Republicans in the House of Representatives would compel schools to allow boys who claim to be girls to participate in girls' gym classes, play on girls' interscholastic athletic teams, and use the same locker rooms and showers. Religious schools would not be exempted from this new regulation. It would also require that biologically male criminals who claim to be women to be sent to women's prisons. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) hailed the legislation as "the logical next step in our...

Nearly 3 percent of illegal immigrants in Arizona end up in state prison or jail during the course of a year — four times the rate of U.S. citizens and legal residents, according to a study that uses federal reimbursements for prisons and jails to try to calculate one of the most important yet elusive statistics in the immigration debate. In New Jersey, illegal immigrants are incarcerated five times more often, and rates on the West Coast are triple that of legal residents and citizens, according to the study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR based its calculations...