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fromwww.theguardian.com
22 hours agoTreat jailed drug dealers like radical extremists, says prisons watchdog
Jailed drug dealers should be isolated and managed assertively to reduce violence and chaos in prisons.
A detective garda who brutally assaulted his wife in front of their young children walked free from court without a custodial sentence, raising serious concerns about justice.
Pat Salmon, who was sentenced for the repeated sexual assault of a five-year-old girl, died in the Mater Hospital after serving only four months of his three-year sentence.
Jason Thompson, a guard at HMP Isis, was suspended as the Metropolitan Police investigated his involvement in smuggling drugs and contraband into the prison. He was sentenced to four years and six months for conspiracy and misconduct.
The Irish Prison Service confirmed that the inmate died in custody on April 1. All deaths in custody are investigated by the Irish Prison Service, the Inspector of Prisons and An Garda Síochána, where circumstances warrant.
At Dublin, she had been sexually harassed and verbally abused by an officer, physically assaulted by another, witnessed other officers sexually abusing women, and been subjected to retaliation. Before her arrest, Cristal had been a long-time permanent resident of the U.S. Her conviction for drugs invalidated her green card, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a final removal order based on her felony conviction.
Every state now has a legal avenue where people can request DNA testing of evidence after being convicted. But in many cases, it's not clear if those statutes apply once convicts have died, said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University.
Andrew Paul Johnson, 45, is among several January 6 defendants who have been charged with new crimes since Trump's sweeping act of clemency for Capitol rioters. On his first day back in the White House last year, Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences for or ordered the dismissal of cases for all 1,500-plus people charged in the attack.
As prison sentences have become longer, and as more prisoners are given whole-life tariffs or given minimum sentences of 20, 30 or 40 years, it is harder to persuade them to hold back on their violent instincts. They have nothing to lose. If you are serving a long sentence, you can feel as if you don't have a life ahead of you—your family may well have disowned you, your relationships may have broken down.
Lieutenant Thomas Conrad was standing in a control room in Nashville's new central jail when he noticed something off with one of the key rings hanging on the wall. It was midday on December 30, 2019, and in two weeks the still empty jail would take in about seven hundred inmates. While contractors were finishing their work, Conrad, a senior correctional officer with the Davidson County Sheriff's Office, was organizing equipment: handheld radios, handcuffs, and keys.
RDAP is a voluntary program that lasts between nine and 12 months (ordinarily, it requires roughly 38 weeks to complete in five-day workweeks, three-hour-a-day segments). The 500-hour program strives to educate inmates on the dangers of addiction. Most importantly, relapse prevention is stressed with the goal of helping inmates during post-release stay clean and sober to avoid reoffending. Congress appropriates more than $100 million annually for RDAP.
Grainy footage, filmed with contraband cell phones, forms the backbone of The Alabama Solution, a 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary that exposes the horrifying realities of life inside Alabama's prisons. Throughout the film, shocking videos from incarcerated activists Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council (who goes by the name Kinetik Justice), and Melvin Ray reveal how the Alabama Department of Corrections (the Alabama DOC) shields its prisons from outside scrutiny - and brutally retaliates against incarcerated people who try to make their conditions public.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.
Metropolitan Police/PA Wire Justice Secretary David Lammy has intervened to block the transfer of a killer to an open prison after it emerged he had released drill music with lyrics referencing the murder, under a pseudonym. Jake Fahri was sentenced to life in 2009 for killing 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen by throwing an oven dish at him that shattered and severed the arteries in his neck.
Dozens of Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons over the past two and a half years, some during torture while others as a result of medical neglect by prison authorities, rights groups say. Now, Israel is making plans for the execution of possibly hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held on charges of fatal attacks against Israelis, according to an Israeli media report, under what legal experts have called racist legislation that has rattled the families of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
The open-ended sentences, which were scrapped in 2012 and have been described as psychological torture by the UN, have left thousands trapped in jail for up to 22 times longer than their original tariff. This includes many who were children at the time of their offence and handed a type of IPP sentence for under-18s called a Detention for Public Protection (DPP) jail term.