The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a federal district court's $276,660 damage award to South Carolina state court judges who alleged that Greenville County law enforcement officers ran unlawful wiretaps on their telephones and recorded their conversations for 4 years.


In 1994, Greenville County, South Carolina, completed the construction of a new Detention Center which included a jail, visitation facilities, a separate section with a courtroom and offices for judges, and a system that recorded incoming and outgoing telephone calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. County officials claimed that the system was intended to record the conversations of administrative personnel and guards in the jail however the system also recorded conversations on the judges' telephones and did so without their permission or knowledge.


In August 1998, plaintiff Michael Abraham, a City Administrative Judge, began to suspect that his telephone was wiretapped. When confronted, James McDonald, the jail administrator, confirmed Abraham's suspicions. On September 30, 1998, Greenville County deactivated the entire recording system.


Thereafter, Abraham and several other state court judges brought suit against Greenville County and four individual defendants under the federal wiretapping statute, 18 U.S.C. §2501 et seq. Section 2520(c)(2) of ...

On December 14, 2001, Texas finally released its stranglehold on the right to confidential phone calls between prisoners and attorneys. Texas had been the only state that monitored attorney phone calls. Even then the American Civil Liberties Union had to pry every last finger off the receiver.

In a letter dated October 16, 2001, Yolanda Torres, Litigation Director for the ACLU of Texas, pointed out that when questioned about its abusive policy regarding the confidentiality of phone calls between prisoners and their attorneys TDCJ had dodged the issue for over a year. She outlined in depth the various ways in which Texas was out of step with the rest of the nation's state and federal prisons. Even conservative states like Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon have long forbidden prison officials to monitor properly placed phone calls between prisoners and their attorneys.

Carl Reynolds, Esq., Special Counsel to the Executive Director of TDCJ, tried to justify the draconian practice under the thin guise of prison security. His arguments included the need to verify an attorney's identity; the need to guard against non-legal conversation; and the danger that an attorney might engage in criminal activity.

However, Ms. Torres quickly pointed out that ...

by John E. Dannenberg

Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) officials settled the 42 USC § 1983 class action civil rights suit brought by seriously mentally ill prisoners housed in the Boscobel, WI Supermax state prison by agreeing not to house the mentally ill there, by substantially reducing "barbaric" conditions and by implementing programs and services consistent with other high-security Wisconsin prisons. Additionally, the two principal plaintiffs were awarded $3,500 each in damages.

After the prisoners won a substantial preliminary injunction (PI) on October 11, 2001 prohibiting the housing of such mentally ill prisoners at Supermax [ Jones v. Berge , 164 F. Supp.2d 1096 (W.D. Wis. 2001)], and after prison officials lost a procedural end-run maneuver on September 18, 2001 alleging failure to exhaust administrative remedies [ Jones v. Berge , 172 F.Supp.2d 1128 (W.D.Wis. 2001)], defendant prison officials quietly entered into a settlement agreement on January 24, 2002 that permanently altered the "Supermax" concept.

The Agreement, which went to the heart of the problem by eliminating the name "Supermax" and by eliminating the labeling of its prisoners as the "worst of the worst," set forth specific minimum standards (details listed below), all of which were subject to a Court ...

The governor of New Mexico signed a bill in February 2001, prohibiting prisons from profiting on prisoners' phone calls, which was exceeding 10 times the regular competitive rates with a 15 minute call costing up to $20. The Public Communications Services, a Los Angeles-based carrier kicked back 48.25% of their gross profits to the New Mexico Department of Corrections (DOC) as part of their contract that amounted to over a million dollars a year. Robert Perry the secretary of corrections for New Mexico says that the high rates are justifiable, with the money being used for monitoring calls by prisoners along with anger-management courses, plus monitoring devices used to track prisoners upon their release.

Carol Royal, founder of Families Advocating Correctional Effective Services, (FACES) was one of the factors in the lowering of the high phone rates. Her persistence and determination on campaigning against "(DOC) which as she saw it, was acting (like an evil empire) and gouging prisoners' families," paid off when the bill was passed in the states legislature.

The New Mexico legislature enacted the following statute:

"A. A contract to provide inmates with access to telecommunications services in a correctional facility or jail shall be negotiated and ...

On May 15, 2001, at a human rights conference in Geneva, the United States was denounced for its inhumane and discriminatory practices. Amnesty International and the U.N. Committee Against Torture cited the U.S. for oppressive tactics by both public law enforcement and prison agencies.

Of particular importance to Amnesty International was the impunity with which two unarmed black men were gunned down by police in Los Angeles and New York. In a 46-page report they demanded an end to the brutalizing and shooting of defenseless suspects by police.

A Committee report cited specific abuses in U.S. prisons. In their own words, "The committee recommends that the state party abolish electro-shock stun belts and restraint chairs as methods of restraining those in custody. Their use almost invariably leads to breaches of ... the convention." Also listed were the excessive severity of super-max prisons and the dehumanizing effect of chain gangs, especially in public.

In addition, the conference expressed a strong regard for the safety of female prisoners from sexual assault by guards and the practice of holding minors in adult jail facilities. According to the conference report, "The committee expresses its concern about the number of cases of police ill-treatment of ...

In a characteristically colorful opinion from Judge Richard Posner, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit breathed new life into an otherwise moribund lawsuit where plaintiffs sought relief from the exorbitant charges for collect telephone calls made from Illinois' prisons and jails.

Prisoners, their families, and a public interest law firm brought a 42 U.S.C. §1983 action against the state of Illinois and certain telephone companies where they challenged the practice by which prisons and jails grant to one telephone company the exclusive right to provide prisoner telephone service in exchange for 50 percent of the revenue generated by the service.

Federal and state statutes require telephone companies to file tariffs with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC). The statutes grant the FCC and the ICC exclusive authority to determine and approve the reasonableness of the tariffs. Under the "filed-rate doctrine," a customer cannot ask the court in a civil rights or antitrust action to usurp the authority of the FCC or ICC by invalidating or modifying the approved tariff and rate schedule.

Finding itself in no position to invade the province of the FCC or ICC, the district court dismissed the plaintiffs' ...

The United States District Court of South Carolina has remanded to state court a suit by prisoners' family members against Sprint Payphone Services and other communications providers, the State of South Carolina, and the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) and its prisons, alleging that the state illegally entered into payphone contracts with the service providers.

Mildred Fair, Pamela Simpson, Jacqueline Anderson, Rhonda Lunsford, and Walter Fair are family members or friends of South Carolina prisoners who have accepted telephone calls from prisoners. Prisoners have no choice of telephone service provider, as DOC contracts for the services. Plaintiffs filed suit under various South Carolina statutes alleging that the contracts were illegal because the rates are unlawful and uncompetitive and the defendants receive kickbacks from the service providers. The defendants, citing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. §276(b), and a federal jurisdictional statute, 28 U.S.C. §1441, moved for removal of the case to federal court. The State court granted the motion, and Plaintiffs moved the district court to remand.

The district court discussed statutory and case law causes for removal from state to federal court. The court then examined the defendants' asserted cause of federal jurisdiction under 47 U.S.C. §276(b), ...

MCI WorldCom owns the exclusive contract to provide phone services to the 45,000 prisoners incarcerated in the State of Georgia. Of course, the prisoners are only allowed to place collect calls, and have no choice on which company to use. The state decides that for them. It's MCI WorldCom or nothing. For much of August and September of 2001, family or friends of Georgia prisoners heard a recorded message prior to accepting the call that stated that the rates for the call would be $2.44 for the first minute, and 24 cents for each additional minute.

But, in fact, the actual bill was more than double. Those who accepted the collect calls were actually billed $4.64 for the first minute, and 69 cents for each additional minute. In August alone, MCI WorldCom collected more than $1.5 million on 158,796 calls. Their contract with Georgia DOC calls for the state to receive a 65 percent kickback on all prisoner calls, which gave them more than a $1 million windfall on the overcharges.

Neither the state nor MCI WorldCom will say what they will do with their portion of the money that the Corrections Department concedes was improperly collected. But MCI WorldCom ...

by Matthew T .Clarke

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the claims in the first published challenge to the implementation of Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) dismissed without prejudice for failure to exhaust administrative remedies.

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a federal prisoner at the ADX in Florence, Colorado, filed a Bivens action against various government officials alleging that his placement under SAMs violated: the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; his rights to due process, counsel, freedom of speech, and to freely exercise his religion, and sought declaratory and injunctive relief and monetary damages .Yousef was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and attempts to bomb various U.S.-flagged commercial aircraft .This case was decided prior to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9-11-01 .Due to Yousef's association with terrorist activities, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) implemented SAMs restricting Yousef's access to mail, telephone, media, and visitors and limited his carrying of religious materials, recreation and exercise time.

Yousef filed formal and informal applications seeking review of the SAMs .They were denied .He then filed suit in federal district court .The Attorney General (AG) replied ...

It was September 19, 2001. Elizabeth McAlister had not heard from her husband, Philip Berrigan, in more than a week. Such silence on Berrigan's part was "most unusual," she says. Convinced that something was wrong, she telephoned the Federal Correctional Institution in Elkton, Ohio, where the seventy-seven-year-old peace activist is serving a sentence of a year and a day for hammering on a military aircraft while on probation for a similar action in another state.

"It took ten phone calls to the prison to get them to admit to me that he was in segregation," she says. McAlister also learned that Berrigan was being denied all phone calls and visits, even from family members. "I was not told why or for how long."

So McAlister telephoned the office of her Senator, Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski. Mikulski's office called the prison and, according to McAlister, was told "that Phil was put in segregation on September 11, 2001, as a direct consequence of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, [and] that this was done `for his protection.'"

But that explanation did not ring true. "If Philip is in segregation `for his protection,' why the punitive denial of visits ...