United States of America
Seen in the press
Read our selection of press reports about this country.
USA : hurricane Harvey, forgotten prisoners
Natural disasters don’t stop at prison doors. Since August 27 , Hurricane Harvey has affected the Houston region (Texas, USA). Torrential rain has struck within a radius of 320 kilometers. Nearly 6,000 prisoners from five penal institutions have been evacuated due to the threatening flood of Brazos…
USA: at Guantánamo, men accused in 9/11 attacks faced their 24th round of pretrial hearings
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his nephew Ammar al-Baluchi donned new Baluchi hats last week for the 24th round of pretrial hearings in the military commission case against the five men accused in the 9/11 attacks.USA: why so few violent offenders are let out on parole
In recent years, national discussions of criminal-justice reform have largely revolved around non-violent drug-related convictions—as illustrated by the hundreds of federal inmates that Barack Obama granted clemency to at the end of his second term.USA: two more state prisons face evacuation due to Hurricane Harvey flooding
Two additional state prisons were facing evacuation late Monday as flooding from Harvey continued to escalate the high-water emergency southwest of Houston. Texas Department of Justice officials said rising floodwaters from the Brazos River were likely to force the relocation of an estimated 1,400…United States: condemned to death — and solitary confinement
Arizona death row inmate Scott Nordstrom lives alone in a room smaller than a parking space. He’s allowed to leave his cell a few times each week to shower or exercise alone in a similarly-sized mesh cage and is forbidden from making physical contact with visitors from the outside.United States: how the US imposes the worst of its prison paradigm abroad
At least $22 million have been devoted to a US international prison program focused mainly on Central American prisons. This program operates out of a web of government offices and programs, most prominently the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the US State Dep…United States : mentally ill prisoners in Louisiana were made to bark like dogs for food, new lawsuit claims
Reports to the Advocacy Center said that disabled people who are incarcerated at David Wade Correctional Center have been beaten, slapped, kicked, stripped of their clothing in the winter and sprayed with mace and bleach. One report to the center said that disabled inmates were made to bark like do…North Dakota’s Norway experiment
Late one night in October 2015, North Dakota prisons chief Leann Bertsch met Karianne Jackson, one of her deputies, for a drink in a hotel bar in Oslo, Norway. They had just spent an exhausting day touring Halden, the maximum-security facility Time has dubbed “the world’s most humane prison,” yet n…United States: the accident that changed my life in prison
Even though my boss and I didn’t quite get off to the right start, over the years I grew to respect him and see him more as a person and less as a badge. For one, he did not laugh at me when he caught me crying over the loss of my father, because he, too, had recently been in mourning. In prison, t…United States: nine lessons about criminal justice reform
“Reform” is one of those ambiguous words that mean different things to different people. I think of reform as something that aims to reduce the numbers of Americans who are removed from society and deprived of their freedom, and to do it without making us less safe. In 1972, when I was starting my…United States: how to count the hidden prisoners
Now, a new study by the Urban Institute is trying something different. The nonprofit counted how long people currently in prison — many of whom still have long sentences to serve — have been there. Examining data from 43 states and Washington, D.C., the organization’s Justice Policy Center found th…United States: my friend killed himself in an Alabama prison
We called him Tyson. He was a short kid. Very good looking. And he was kind of like a child. He was very soft-spoken. We knew he suffered from a mental illness. You can just tell when a person’s not normal. He was like our nephew—like a child that needed to be fostered. Sometimes he would stray aro…USA: jails are replacing visits with video chats and families are devastated
Governor Brown approved the state’s 2017 budget along with a measure that stops jails from continuing to replace in-person visitation with video calling and gives inmate families their first hour of video visitations each week for free.