by Christopher Zoukis

The legal eagles at the Maine Department of Corrections have successfully okie-doked prisoner Kevin J. Collins out of $150 in his lawsuit challenging food services and the prison's telephone system.

Collins filed his lawsuit appealing the denial of his grievances in December 2012. He alleged indigency, and included a cover letter stating that he would be sending a copy of his general client account statement, as is required by Maine law when a prisoner claims indigent status. After being served, the DOC moved that the case be stayed until Collins paid the full $150 filing fee. The court agreed and ordered Collins to pay the fee within 90 days. Collins did so.

The DOC then pulled a classic dirty trick, and moved that the case be dismissed because Collins hadn't filed the required copy of his general client account statement within 30 days. Despite the fact that he had already paid the full filing fee, the court dismissed the case. Score one for the illustrious seekers of justice at the Maine DOC.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court may not have been amused, however. Despite its own dismissal of Collins' appeal for the same exact reason--failure to file a ...

On July 25, 2016, the Washington State Court of Appeals,  Division One, held that neither a prisoner or the person on the other end of the phone have an expectation of privacy in a jail phone call and that conversation can be used as evidence in a prosecution against the non-prisoner.

Zakaria Dare was convicted of robbery. Before trial he was housed in the King County Jail in Seattle with his codefendant, Mohamed Abdi Ali. Dere posted bond and was released. While free, Dere received several phone calls from Ali, who was still in jail. Their conversations were recorded by the jail's telephone system. According to court documents, the recordings "provided evidence of Dare's complicity in the robbery and were used by the State at trial."

Dere, who had moved to suppress the recordings as a violation of his privacy rights, appealed his conviction after the trial court denied that motion and Dere was convicted at a trial which included the jail phone recordings as evidence.

The Court of Appeals had no problem concluding that "Dere's conversations with Ali were not private communications." The court pointed to two factors that established that neither Dere nor Ali had a real expectation ...

by David M. Reutter

About 130 people have been arrested following a joint two-year investigation by the FBI and the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC). Indictments for 75 of the arrestees were announced in September 2015; another 46 indictments, all involving current or former prison employees, were reported in February 2016. [See: PLN, March 2017, p.38].

Known as “Operation Ghost Guard,” the investigation targeted contraband in GDOC facilities and crimes perpetuated by prisoners through cell phones and outside accomplices.

“The indictments allege that inmates managed and directed a number of fraud schemes that victimized citizens from across the country from within the Georgia prison system using contraband cell phones,” said John A. Horn, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

State prisoner Kevin Patterson, reportedly a member of the Ghost Face Gang who trafficked meth and heroin prior to his incarceration, was busted after state and federal law enforcement officials, relying on a confidential source, recorded him directing the sale of tens of thousands of dollars in drugs from his cell in July 2015, using a cell phone.

“The unfortunate common denominator to this criminal conduct,” Horn noted, “is the pervasive availability of contraband cell phones, which allows too ...

In December 2016, a $250,000 settlement was reached in a lawsuit brought by a deaf prisoner who was effectively unable to communicate during a six-week stay at a jail in Arlington County, Virginia. The suit pushed the sheriff’s office to implement new procedures to accommodate prisoners with disabilities.

Abreham Zemedagegehu, ...

by Paul Wright

By now all PLN subscribers should have received our fundraiser mailing which includes our 2016 annual report and details our many activities, ranging from publishing and litigation to advocacy and media outreach. This provides a great overview of the depth and breadth of everything we do. We rely on donors like you to fund our advocacy and activism above and beyond publishing Prison Legal News; for example, our Prison Phone Justice and Stop Prison Profiteering campaigns rely almost entirely on funding from our readers.

All donations, no matter how large or small, make a difference in the work we do. Contributions are tax deductible and will have a real-world impact on the lives of prisoners around the nation. Please encourage your friends and family to make donations to support our work as well. If your prison or jail phone bill has gone down in the past 5 years thanks to our Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, why not donate 20% of the savings so we can continue working on these issues?

About two or three weeks after receiving this copy of PLN, all our subscribers will receive a free introductory issue of Criminal Legal News ...

by Derek Gilna

An order entered by Western District of Arkansas federal judge Timothy L. Brooks on September 28, 2017 gave a mixed result to both sides in a hotly-contested lawsuit over excessive costs for prison and jail phone calls.

In this case, one of the nation’s largest prison phone companies, Global Tel*Link (GTL), was defending yet another in a series of lawsuits filed by prisoners and their families who have long had to pay inflated phone rates. The plaintiffs alleged “that GTL charged them excessive rates to cover the costs of site commissions it paid to correctional facilities, and charged them deposit fees that unreasonably exceeded the cost of processing deposits into prepaid accounts.”

Complicating the litigation was the fact that it was one of four lawsuits pending in the Western District of Arkansas raising various claims related to prison phone services – including whether phone calls made by prisoners were intrastate (in-state) or interstate (long distance). GTL was named as a defendant in two of the cases while its competitor, Securus Technologies, was named in the other two.

GTL, Securus and other prison phone providers have a simple business model: exploit the desire of prisoners’ families to maintain ...

by Brian Dolinar, Truthout

The election of Donald Trump has already given an economic boost to those profiting from mass incarceration. The stock prices of the two biggest private prison builders – CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group – doubled after Trump took office.

Companies that charge for expensive phone calls from prisons and jails also won big after Trump’s victory. One of the president’s first appointments placed Ajit Pai at the helm of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who promptly rolled back the agency’s 2015 decision to regulate the prison phone industry. The companies hailed it as a victory.

Shortly after the FCC’s reversal, Securus, one of the largest prison phone companies, announced it was being sold to Platinum Equity, a large investment firm for a reported $1.5 billion. (To date the deal has not been finalized.) Tom Gores, Platinum’s founder and CEO, is an investment mogul who also owns the Detroit Pistons. In 2011, Gores purchased the basketball team with the stated intent of improving the struggling city.

In the United States’ current economy, prisons and basketball are growth industries. Both profit from the exploitation of black bodies, pulling in people from poor neighborhoods in major cities ...

In January 2017, U.S. District Court Judge Henry T. Wingate sentenced Sam Waggoner, 62, to five years in prison for his role in a bribery scheme involving Mississippi’s former corrections commissioner. The sentence also included two years of supervised release.

Waggoner admitted to giving then-Mississippi DOC Commissioner Christopher B. Epps a portion of the money he earned as a prison telephone contractor. Waggoner told federal agents that before their investigation started, he wrote to Epps saying he wanted to end the payments.

“I don’t want the FBI knocking on my door in the middle of the night,” Waggoner said in the letter.

But Epps ripped the letter into “teeny, tiny pieces,” flushed it down a toilet and told him their arrangement would continue, Waggoner said. “He was basically my boss. He could hurt my business.”

At the time, in addition to serving as Commissioner of the Mississippi DOC, Epps was president of both the American Correctional Association (ACA) and Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA). [See: PLN, July 2016, p.1]. In 2011, the ASCA honored Epps with an award for Outstanding Corrections Commissioner.

Judge Wingate saw Waggoner’s attempt to end his involvement in the scheme as the result of a mix between remorse and ...

by Tim Cushing

From the it's-ok-because-prisoners-aren't-human-beings,-amirite dept

Jails and prisons continue to sacrifice what few physical interactions prisoners have with loved ones on the outside to phone service provider Securus. The New Orleans Advocate reports a local jail is the latest in a long line of correctional facilities to ban in-person visits, replacing them with Securus communication software and hardware.

To jailers, this move just makes sense. It all but eliminates contraband smuggling and allows prisons and jails to allocate fewer staffers to monitoring prisoner visits. But it makes little sense for those stuck inside and even less sense for those on the outside who will be spending a lot more money on visits that used to be free.

At this per minute rate, it makes no difference visiting hours are being expanded. While it may sometimes be more convenient to Skype prisoners than visit in person, no one's asking for $0.60/minute communications to be their only option.

But this is something Securus has pushed for a long time. Back in 2015, Securus finally dropped a clause in its contracts that mandated correctional facilities using its equipment move to video-only visits. But that doesn't mean jails aren't still heavily encouraged ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has refused to remand a case for further fact-finding about the government's use of cell-site simulators during investigations.

Damian Patrick was wanted for violating parole. In an effort to locate him, Milwaukee police obtained a search warrant which authorized the use of cellphone data. The warrant specifically authorized the collection of data from Patrick's cellphone service provider in order to locate him. Unbeknownst to the magistrate that issued the warrant, the Milwaukee police employed a cell-site simulator, also known as a Stingray, in order to find Patrick.

When Patrick was located, he was in the passenger seat of a car. A gun was in plain view, and he was ultimately charged and convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He appealed the conviction, arguing that his arrest was unlawful. Patrick initially made no argument about the use of a Stingray device, because the government did not reveal its use until after he filed his opening brief.

The appellate court found the arrest to be lawful, because the Milwaukee police "were entitled to arrest him without a warrant of any kind, let alone the two ...