Search Results for: Prison

How a Hacker’s Mom Broke Into a Prison—and the Warden’s Computer

Longreads Pick

“Security analyst John Strand had a contract to test a correctional facility’s defenses. He sent the best person for the job: his mother.”

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 26, 2020
Length: 5 minutes (1,279 words)

The Prison Inside Prison

Longreads Pick

Decades with no personal contact, no way back into the general prison population, cut off from the possibility of parole — solitary confinement is an ongoing experiment in cruelty on human subjects.

Source: Texas Observer
Published: Jan 21, 2020
Length: 25 minutes (6,335 words)

Think Debtors Prisons Are a Thing of the Past? Not in Mississippi.

Longreads Pick
Published: Jan 9, 2020
Length: 11 minutes (2,770 words)

They Were Extortionists and the Calls Came from Inside the Prison

Razor wire protects a perimeter of the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina. (AP Photo/Sean Rayford)

Jared Johns, a former soldier and father of two, thought he was swapping text messages with a pretty girl from a dating site. After getting calls from a spoofed police number and texts from outraged “parents” wanting to press charges against him for allegedly communicating with an underage girl, Johns — despite the fact he had done nothing wrong — was terrified that any resulting legal troubles could prevent him from seeing his two young sons. As Vince Beiser reports at Wired, what Johns didn’t realize was that he was the victim of a scam that would cost him everything.

Jared could never have been prosecuted for propositioning Caroline, for the simple reason that she didn’t exist. The pretty teenage girl Jared thought he was flirting with was, according to charges later filed by local authorities, two thickset, middle-aged, male inmates working contraband cell phones. Jared, it turns out, was just one of hundreds of US military service members and veterans suckered by a massive wave of catfishing scams launched from South Carolina correctional facilities over the past few years.

In May, Greenville’s chief of police convened a press conference to announce they had cracked the case: They were charging Dobbins and Smith with the blackmail and extortion of Jared Johns. Those charges could get each of them an additional 10 years behind bars. In a video posted to Facebook later that day, Kathy said through tears, “He may have been holding the gun, but it feels like they were the ones who took his life.”

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‘American Horror Story’: The Prison Voices you Don’t Hear from Have the Most to Tell Us

Longreads Pick

The Montgomery Advertiser interviewed more than two dozen inmates in the Alabama correction system, all of whom report extreme routine violence and “unhinged” drug-induced behavior among some inmates — often against elderly and vulnerable members of the prison population. Rehabilitation is impossible, they say with little access to programs, while guards remain indifferent at best, refusing to enforce prison rules, or at worst, helping to perpetrate heinous acts.

Published: Nov 13, 2019
Length: 30 minutes (7,590 words)

Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?

Longreads Pick

Houston Chronicle criminal justice reporter Keri Blakinger — who once served 21 months of a 2½-year sentence for felony drug possession — visits a women’s prison near Austin, Texas, and considers the ways in which women’s prisons don’t take into consideration women’s particular needs. She speaks with those involved in planning a new $97 million building at the prison, which would be “at the vanguard of a growing focus within criminal justice reform known as gender-responsive corrections.”

This piece is included in the Washington Post Magazine‘s “The Prison Issue,” exclusively featuring writing, photography, and illustrations by those who are currently incarcerated, or were in the past.

Published: Oct 29, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,694 words)

In Sickness, In Health — and In Prison

Najeebah Al-Ghadban for The Marshall Project.

Mia Armstrong | The Marshall Project | August 2019 | 9 minutes (2,400 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​.

Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder.

The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.”

In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

That decision, Turner v. Safley, established how courts should weigh the constitutionality of prison regulations, and has formed the legal basis for prison weddings across the country​—​most often between one incarcerated person and someone on the outside. It opened the doors for a niche industry of ​officiants​ ​who​ ​specialize​ ​in​ prison weddings. And its clear articulation of marriage as a fundamental human right was even cited in ​Obergefell v. Hodges​, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 2015 affirmed the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

It all started in 1980 at a prison in Missouri. Read more…

Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

Longreads Pick
Published: Apr 17, 2019
Length: 33 minutes (8,258 words)

How a Tiny Endangered Species Put a Man In Prison

Longreads Pick

In Death Valley National Park lies Devils Hole: an aquifer-fed pool home to one of the rarest fish species in the world — the Devils Hole pupfish. The pupfish has been the center of controversy between conservationists dedicated to protecting the inch-long fish species and Nevadans who believe the fish isn’t worth sacrificing their right to pump water on their land. Trent Sargent learned about how well the pupfish is protected the hard way.

Published: Apr 15, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,199 words)

Prison or Bust: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

Edward Averill was alone, and broke, and unwell. So he deliberately, non-violently robbed a bank to get sent to jail; at least there, people would have to take care of him and he’d get the help he needed. At The Atavist, Ciara O’Rourke tells his story with deep wells of compassion. It’s an emotional rollercoaster of profound loneliness, desperation, thwarted plans, revived hope, and an uncertain future — a man who slipped through every crack there was to slip through and tried to work a system that wasn’t working for him.

It wasn’t unheard of for people to commit crimes to get health care—a North Carolina man with arthritis and slipped discs robbed a bank of $1 in 2011, and two years later an Oregon man did the same thing for the same amount. Still, Brewer didn’t think anyone had ever done it in Austin. He asked if Averill was having a mental health crisis. “Nope,” Averill said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He described the robbery in meticulous detail. He said he wanted to be found guilty and go to prison as soon as possible.

When Brewer walked out of the room, he turned to his partner. “This is not one I’m going to brag about,” he said.

Brewer went to the municipal court to get a magistrate judge’s signature on Averill’s arrest affidavit. Judge Stephen Vigorito stared at Brewer after he read the document. “Are you kidding me?” Vigorito asked. After several minutes, the judge set a bond of $10,000, the lowest Brewer had ever seen for this particular crime—bonds in bank-robbery cases are usually several times that.

As the detective walked down the courthouse hallway to file the paperwork with the county clerk, he heard Vigorito running behind him. “Give it back, give it back,” the judge said, reaching for the affidavit when he caught up to Brewer. Vigorito wrote a new bond amount— $7,500—pressing hard with his pen so the numbers would be legible over the original figure.

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