Ruiz v. Brown

The amended complaint in the federal class action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constituional Rights and several other advocate and legal organizations on behalf of prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison who have spent more than 10 years in solitary confinement, some more than 25 years, is available on the CCR website.  Other CCR prisoners' rights cases have included: Al-Jundi v. Estate of Oswald, filed in 1974 by survivors of the Attica uprising, Byrd v. Goord, challenging New York DOCS collect-call only telephone policy, and NLG and CCR v. Johnson, challenging the Virigina DOC decision placing Jailhouse Lawyer's Handbook on a "disapproved publications list."

Arizona's deadly prisons

Bob Ortega, senior investigative reporter at the Arizona Republic, has recently written a series of articles on "a prison system that houses inmates under brutal conditions that can foster self-harm, allows deadly drugs to flow in from the outside, leaves inmates to die from treatable medical conditions and fails to protect inmates from prison predators."  The individual articles cover the high number of deaths, including suicides, the struggle to control the availability of drugs in prison, the inadequate medical care prisoners receive, and the deaths that result from increasing inmate-on-inmate violence.    

Comparing PREA Standards

The Project on Addressing Prison Rape at the Washington College of Law (American University) has just uploaded Comparing PREA Standards from NPREC Inception to Final DOJ Standards, consisting of side-by-side comparison charts for the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission's standards, the DOJ's Feburary 2011 standards, and the DOJ's final standards. Members of the Project are still working on the analysis.