‘A Crazy System’: How Arbitration Returns Abusive Guards to New York Prisons By Alysia Santo and Joseph Neff This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. It is reprrinted with permission. A guard working at a Hudson Valley prison pummeled a 19-year-old shackled by the legs to a restraint chair. An officer at a facility near the Canadian border denied food to a man in solitary confinement 13 times over a week. Outside Alb ..read more

Does working for a government agency give a forensic psychologist license to do or say pretty much anything without legal consequence, even if it violates a subject’s Constitutional rights?   That is the intriguing question addressed by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a recent decision relating to the civil rights of people behind bars. The ruling in Gay v. Parsons stems from a risk assessment by two psychologists working for California’s Board of Parole hearings. Omar Sharrieff Gay, a California prisoner, filed suit against the psychologists, claiming that their opinion tha ..read more

There’s this forensic psychologist, we’ll call him Dr. Harms, who is infamous for his unorthodox approach. He scampers around the country deploying a bizarre admixture of obscure, outdated and unpublished tests that no one else has ever heard of. Oh, and the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Dr. Harms never omits that. To him, everyone is a chillingly dangerous psychopath. Even a 30-year-old whose last crime was at age 15. What’s most bizarre about Dr. Harms’s esoteric method is that he gets away with it. Attorneys may try to challenge him in court, but their protests usually fall flat. Ju ..read more

Back in the 1980s, southern Alameda County in the East Bay was the hellmouth for serial murder. As a newspaper reporter covering the crime beat, I was reporting on at least three separate fiends prowling the suburbs and picking off young teenage girls at whim. It was harder to stop them back then. Forensic DNA was still in its infancy. The historic evidentiary hearings in Oakland, California on the admissibility of DNA typing, with full-scale scientific battles tying up courtrooms for months on end, were still a few years away. Tina Faelz and her mother Shirley Fourteen-year-old Tina Fa ..read more

A new government report reinforces harmful misconceptions about people convicted of sex offenses. Here's our take on how to parse the data. Guest post by Wendy Sawyer, Prison Policy Initiative* By now, most people who pay any attention to criminal justice reform know better than to label people convicted of drug offenses “drug offenders,” a dehumanizing label that presumes that these individuals will be criminals for life. But we continue to label people “sex offenders” – implying that people convicted of sex offenses are somehow different. A new report released by the Bureau of Justice St ..read more