Prison System Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Prison System Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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When incarcerated people face abuse and mistreatment, they can typically file a formal complaint with jail or prison administrators. In federal prisons, the system for resolving these complaints is known as the "Administrative Remedy Program," but it's more commonly referred to as a "grievance system" in state prisons and local jails. Grievance systems are supposed to provide incarcerated people with a way to challenge issues they face behind bars – such as inadequate medical care, harassment by corrections officers, or unsanitary living conditions – and (hopefully) receive some kind of relief. In practice, however, incarcerated people who turn to grievance systems are forced to run a gauntlet of rules and regulations just to be heard, and very rarely succeed. This is especially true when it comes to medical complaints: our analysis of a decade of data from the Data Liberation Project finds that, between 2014 and 2024, a startling 98% of medical grievances were rejected for reasons ranging from the bureaucratic (such as using the wrong size sheet of paper) to the substantive (actually being denied on the merits of the complaint). Less than 1% of medical cases ended in a grant of relief. Conditions are so bad on the inside that since 2000, roughly half of all state prison systems have been court-ordered to improve mental and medical healthcare. In practice ... the grievance system is a black hole, a time-waster, and a deterrent to complaining at all.

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A federal statement announcing Jeffrey Epstein's death has surfaced in newly released Justice Department files but it carries a date that appears to precede the moment he was officially found dead inside his New York prison cell. The document, issued by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and dated Friday, August 9, 2019, states that Epstein had already been found unresponsive and pronounced dead. But prison records and official accounts show Epstein was not discovered unresponsive until the morning of August 10, 2019. According to official accounts, Epstein was discovered unresponsive in his cell shortly after 6.30am on August 10 by a corrections officer. Medical personnel attempted to revive him, but he was pronounced dead soon afterward. Epstein's death came amid a cascade of failures inside one of the federal government's most secure detention facilities. Prison records show that guards assigned to monitor Epstein did not conduct required checks during the overnight hours before his body was discovered. Scheduled rounds at 3am and 5am were missed, according to official findings. Furthermore, cameras positioned outside Epstein's cell were not functioning properly that night. Investigators later confirmed that at least two surveillance cameras had malfunctioned, leaving critical gaps in visual monitoring. Because of those failures, officials were unable to establish a definitive timeline of Epstein's final moments.

Note: Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, believes that his death involved an official cover-up. An email thread between high-level federal investigators discusses what appears to be an unnamed individual attempting to extort Mark Epstein. The sender claims: "with the coordination of the director of prison regulations, the cameras were tampered with and some the videos of the prison cameras were cut. At that time, prison guards [redacted] were paid $6,500 so that they would not visit prisoners at this time. Within 15 minutes, a man named [redacted] entered your brother's prison cell and strangled him." For more, internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures.

America talks about recidivism as if it were a mystery. It isn't. It is a predictable outcome of how we run prisons. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has tracked what happens after release for decades. In a 10-year follow-up of people released from state prison, about two-thirds were arrested again within three years, and more than eight in ten within 10 years. A newer national analysis still showed roughly six in ten rearrested within three years. That is not just a series of bad individual choices – rather, it is a system producing a revolving door. Other countries have demonstrated a different way to operate secure prisons – one that changes outcomes without weakening accountability or surrendering public control. Over the past year, I have toured facilities and spoken directly with leaders connected to the only nonprofit prison systems operating at scale internationally. They share one defining feature: rehabilitation is treated as a core operational mission, not a secondary program. The question is not government prisons versus private prisons. It is whether correctional systems are designed to reward safety, stability and successful reentry, or whether they default to capacity management and crisis response. Nonprofit operators differ fundamentally from both traditional government bureaucracy and for-profit incarceration. There are no shareholders, no pressure to pay dividends, no incentives to keep beds full. Success is measured by what happens after release.

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One morning in July 2013, tens of thousands of California prisoners made history when they refused to eat. They were participating in a state-wide hunger strike, protesting policies that kept people locked in solitary confinement indefinitely. Hundreds of people in Pelican Bay State Prison, the state's supermax facility near the Oregon state line, had been in isolation for over a decade. After 60 days of refusing food, and along with a concurrent lawsuit, the hunger strikers ultimately won major policy changes from the California corrections department. Among them was an agreement to move most people in long-term solitary back into the general population, giving many a renewed chance at parole. Now, back in the community and over a decade since the protest, these men are working to rebuild their lives, help others inside, and make sense of the trauma they endured. While in the SHU at Pelican Bay, men were alone in their cells for roughly 23 hours a day, with every meal provided through a slot in their door. Many said they never received a phone call, unless a family member died. Visits with loved ones were behind a thick plexiglass window. And any time spent outside their cells to exercise took place in an open-air cement room, with walls so high they couldn't see their surroundings. Such prolonged isolation led to paranoia, anxiety, despair, anger and, eventually, numbness among people in the SHU.

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More than a decade ago, I walked into the Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Los Angeles County to gather data for a lawsuit related to their "failure to provide an adequate education to detained youth." What our team found was much more horrifying: masses of teachers not showing up or late to work, leaving youth in their cells; children in solitary confinement for weeks; sexual assault by probation officers and detention staff; teacher-run fight clubs during class; and more. These abuses continue even today, as exposed earlier this year by sex tapes recorded in a juvenile detention facility in Seattle and videos of gladiator fights between teens in custody in Los Angeles County. The juvenile justice system was originally designed to be supportive and child-centered, but it became increasingly punitive and harsh through the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which resulted in exponentially higher rates of arrests and imprisonment. As a result, children with externalizing symptoms of trauma – abuse, neglect, domestic violence – have been incarcerated without treatment for their behavioral and mental health symptoms. Youth incarceration is extremely harmful to communities, causing worse adult health and functional limits. If we want a healthy society, we need to address trauma through treatment, not incarceration. Punishment provides immediate, visible results, while empowering youth requires patience, understanding and time.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Jeffrey Collins has watched 14 men draw their final breaths. Over 25 years at the Associated Press, the South Carolina-based journalist has repeatedly served as an observer inside the state's execution chamber, watching from feet away as prison officials kill men who were sentenced to capital punishment. South Carolina has recently kept him unusually busy, with seven back-to-back executions in 14 months. The state revived the death penalty last September after a 13-year pause caused by the decision of pharmaceutical makers to stop selling lethal injection drugs to the state. Officials acquired pentobarbital, a sedative, only after legislators passed a law shielding the identities of suppliers. That secrecy surrounding the execution process means the role of observers has never been more vital. Executions aren't filmed, making journalists' accounts the only impartial record of state-sponsored killings, their words often cited by lawyers and courts. "I don't think executions should be publicly broadcast, but I think they need to be videotaped," [said Collins]. "We don't get to see everything. With lethal injections, there could be problems if the needle isn't put in the vein correctly or the drugs are bad, but we don't get any look into either of those things. With firing squads ... the target could get placed poorly. But when the curtain opens, the target has already been placed, so we don't get to witness that either. The secrecy prevents the entire story from being told."

Note: Wrongful convictions and official misconduct have led to at least 93 innocent defendants being sentenced to death. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold. The book by Leslie Soble ... describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people. The prison food crisis [is] a public health crisis, with estimates suggesting each year behind bars reduces life expectancy by two years. It's a labor rights issue, as incarcerated people earn pennies per hour running the kitchens, barely enough to buy canteen snacks to supplement their meager diets. And there are environmental ramifications: US correctional facilities create an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually as residents reject unpalatable offerings. A typical prison diet is very high in ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and salt, and very low in fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein, whole grains.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Every year millions of people cycle through America's prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America's prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes – like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government's data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn't meet the government's own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides – making it the third most common way people of all ages died.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional facility, Illinois' Pontiac Correctional Center and Albion Correctional Facility in New York State are the three U.S. prisons with the highest reported rates of sexual victimization. These are the findings of a new Department of Justice (DOJ) report about sexual victimization in state and federal prisons, as reported by inmates. The Justice Department carried out a National Inmate Survey in 177 federal prisons. The annual survey is required by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The survey of 27,541 state and federal inmates found that some 4.1 percent of adult prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in state and federal prisons during the prior 12 months. Furthermore, 2.3 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by another inmate while 2.2 percent reported sexual victimization by facility staff. Meanwhile, 17 prisons had rates defined as high compared to other facilities. The data pertains to prisons that participated in the survey so the data may not accurately capture those with the highest sexual victimization in America. The prison with the highest proportion of prison inmates reporting sexual victimization was Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a female prison in New York where 18.6 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization. Pontiac Correctional Center, a men's prison in Illinois was second, with 15.9 percent of inmates reporting sexual victimization.

Note: These numbers represent a small number of institutions that voluntarily provided survey data for this study. The actual incidence of sexual violence in correctional facilities may be much higher. To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Roderick Gadson, an Alabama prison guard, was questioned under oath about an incident in which he and other officers used such devastating force against a prisoner that the man had to be airlifted to hospital to treat his injuries. Gadson was shown a photograph of the man, Steven Davis. He was lying in an ICU bed breathing through a tube, his cadaverous face bruised and covered with blood, his eyes black and sunken. Gadson was asked whether he felt that the amount of force used had been appropriate, given the way Davis looked. He replied: "I don't feel like nothing. I just did my job." On 4 October 2019, Gadson and five other officers were called to respond to a security breach inside Donaldson correctional facility. Davis ... was lying prone and unresistant on the ground. Gadson took the lead. One of the witnesses said the officer hit Davis "with his metal stick in the head, picked him up, throwed him down. He stomped the dude with his size 15 boot. The guy's head bounced like a basketball." David died the following day. The cause of death was officially recorded as homicide caused by "blunt force injuries of head sustained in an assault". Despite evidence of a physical assault by Gadson and the other officers, they were all cleared after an internal investigation. Six months later, Gadson was promoted ... to sergeant. Then, in July 2021, he [was] promoted a second time, 21 months after a prisoner in his care had been beaten to death. Now he holds the exalted status of lieutenant.

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On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein ... saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. When Mark heard news about Jeffrey's death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body. At first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed. "I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail," Mark said. When he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn't call it a suicide because it "looked too much like a homicide." Fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey's neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: "Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did]." Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey's death looked more like a homicide than a suicide. The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, "pending further study." Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman's assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report.

Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. According to CBS News, nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Compared to other developed nations, the United States is an extreme outlier in the severity of its criminal legal system. Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries. The brunt of this aggressive penal regime is borne of course by poor Americans, particularly poor black Americans. Recently, all of the states in the US have begun to impose fees and charges and costs on offenders and their families: people now have to pay for staying in prison as if they're guests in a hotel. Or if they're on probation instead of being sent to jail, they have to pay for the probation supervision, or they have to pay for a urine test. In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser. In this country, particularly in the neoliberal era, the local state simply doesn't have the capacity or resources to invest in communities and provide housing, schools, jobs, income support, health care services, and so on. What it does have is police and jails, and states have prisons. The politics of the day ... mean that it's always going to be much more likely that the police and the punishment are the first resort, rather than long-term investments in communities, work, families, income support, and jobs.

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On Jan. 22, "The Alabama Solution" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Since 2019, roughly 1,380 incarcerated people have died or been killed while in custody of the state. The documentary – which features footage shot on cell phones by several incarcerated men – zooms out to explore why, despite federal inquiry and a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Justice Department, officers are still able to neglect, harm and kill incarcerated people with seeming impunity. Perhaps less familiar are the lengths Alabama officials go in the film to cover up the disorder and state lawmakers' callous disregard for incarcerated lives. Prisons are state institutions ... but it's the only institution that the public and the media have no access to. The men at the center of the film have spent a large share of their incarceration advocating for change from the inside out. They credit their activism to a self-directed course of study organized by prisoners who were active in freedom movements during the civil rights era. In the study groups, the men learned about their constitutional and legal rights. Eventually, they founded the Free Alabama Movement and began rallying family members to push for prison reforms from the outside. In 2016, the federal Justice Department ... began an official investigation. In 2020, the department filed a lawsuit alleging widespread constitutional violations, including rampant violence, homicide and sexual assault. The film explores the impetus for a 2022 work stoppage across all of Alabama's prisons [which] triggered a class-action lawsuit, alongside several labor unions, accusing the state and corporations of practicing modern-day slavery. The Associated Press traced nearly $200 million dollars in sales of agricultural products and livestock over a period of six years to prison labor across the country. The figure is likely an underestimate. Their investigation uncovered a sprawling shadow workforce of the incarcerated that produces goods and services sold by major corporations such as McDonald's and Walmart.

Note: Alabama's incarcerated workers produce $450 million in goods and services every year. The truth about US prisons is usually hidden from the public. If you want an honest look in to the broken system, this is the film to watch to deeply understand the humanitarian crisis and egregious human rights abuses perpetuated by mass incarceration. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring articles on prison system reform.

Staff at a Santa Barbara county jail heard screams coming from one of the cells. A 57-year-old inmate was moaning and hyperventilating. Rather than sending her to the ER, medical staff chalked her pain up to opioid withdrawal, since they had taken a prescription opioid away upon her arrival days before, a grand jury investigation later found. They placed the inmate – referred to as CF in the grand jury's report – on mental health observation. The grand jury determined that CF's stomach had perforated days before her excruciating death. CF would have had a 90% chance of survival if she had received immediate treatment. Wellpath, one of the nation's leading health providers to prisons and jails, was the contractor responsible for healthcare at Santa Barbara county's Northern Branch jail, where CF died. The grand jury's report is the latest in over a decade of government investigations into two behemoths in the prison health industry – Wellpath and Corizon – which are both backed by private equity investors. Both Corizon and Wellpath continued to contract with jails, prisons, immigration and juvenile detention centers around the country until they faced so much liability ... that both landed in bankruptcy court over the last two years. Both companies were still operating in some form while restructuring in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and had reorganization plans confirmed in bankruptcy court this year that allowed them to ... continue their prison contracts.

Note: According to this Guardian article, "More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the financial system.

Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric ... private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history. The industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities. Private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention. Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

In women's prisons across Texas, tear gas–which includes agents such as pepper spray–has become the go-to response for minor infractions. Guards deploy it at close range in enclosed spaces, against policy, against humanity. They gas entire housing units to punish one person's "noncompliance." What they don't tell you is how this chemical weapon–which is banned in warfare ... affects women's bodies differently than men's. Studies have found that women experience more serious reactions to tear gas exposure, particularly impacting reproductive health. In 2021, a study on the effects of tear gas on reproductive health found that nearly 900 people reported abnormal menstrual changes after exposure to tear gas. Other studies have linked tear gas exposure to miscarriage and fetal harm. Criminal justice advocates have decried the growing use of tear gas and pepper spray in prisons, saying that they should only be used as a last resort when there's a serious threat to safety. But I've seen guards deploy it for cursing, for walking too slowly, for asking too many questions. It's not about safety; it's about control, about breaking our spirits through chemical warfare. The solution isn't better ventilation or more careful deployment, though both would help. The solution is recognizing that the use of chemical weapons against the incarcerated–many of whom are trauma survivors–is inherently sadistic and unnecessary. Tear gas is even used in Texas juvenile facilities.

Note: This article was written by Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist from Detroit. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and non-lethal weapons.

Was George Floyd killed by a police officer? The official answer, according to a newly revealed set of federal government records, is no. Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, anyone who dies in law enforcement custody, like during an arrest, must be reported to the Department of Justice. If the death resulted from police use of force, as Floyd's did, it is labeled "use of force by a law enforcement or corrections officer." But, when an unredacted copy of four years of data was inadvertently posted on a government website late last year, Floyd's case was listed under a different category, "homicide" – which refers to deaths at the hands of another civilian, not law enforcement. The error shows how even one of the most notorious cases of police violence, one that led to a murder conviction for the officer, can be hidden in the official statistics. A Marshall Project review ... identified hundreds of people who died in custody but weren't listed, and entire states that failed to report almost any deaths in their prisons or in their jails. We found at least 681 deaths missing from the federal count – a number that would almost certainly rise if more complete data were available nationwide. More than 5,000 people likely died in state and federal prisons in 2021, over 1,000 in local jails in 2019 and over 1,000 in arrest-related interactions with police in 2024. The actual toll is unknown because no one, including the federal government, bothers keeping track.

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Each year, about 6,000 people die in prisons and jails, and another 2,000 during encounters with police, according to estimates by government agencies and nonprofit groups – numbers that experts believe are likely undercounts. Federal law has for 25 years required local agencies to report in-custody deaths, but the mandate is not enforced. In many places, there's no reliable public accounting of what happened or why. Families who lose loved ones in custody are often met with silence or conflicting accounts. The authorities tasked with finding the truth – from jail officials to medical examiners to state investigators – often operate slowly, without coordination, or behind closed doors. Late last year, the Justice Department published aggregated totals of deaths reported between 2019 and 2023. Due to a technical glitch, The Marshall Project was able to download the full dataset – a loophole that was quickly closed. (The department has not published unredacted death in custody datasets in the past because of privacy issues and concerns about data quality.) The records we reviewed showed widespread gaps: missing causes of death, vague entries and inconsistent details from jail to jail. Those gaps make it nearly impossible to hold institutions accountable, experts say. "You can't have that discussion without the data," said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and one of the law's original authors. "That's why we passed the law."

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Over the course of a week, officials from Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oklahoma toured four German prisons where inmates wore street clothes, maintained their right to vote, cooked their own meals, played in soccer leagues and learned skills like animal husbandry and carpentry. One, called the Open Prison, allowed residents to come and go for work, school and errands. [German] prisons must provide single-occupancy cells at least 10 square meters in size. Many have kitchens where residents may cook their own meals. In the United States, privacy, time outside of cells and family visits are considered risky, and "over-familiarity" between correction officers and inmates is prohibited. German prisons take the opposite approach, known as dynamic security. Correction officers are expected to develop relationships with inmates and know when problems may arise. Yvonne Gade, a correction officer in a ward that houses a small number of prisoners deemed particularly dangerous, shrugged off concerns about their access to a gym with free weights. "It would be a huge potential for violence if you locked them up all the time," she said. A growing number of American states are looking abroad for ideas that can be adapted to their state prison systems. California, Arizona and Oklahoma's prison systems have shifted their focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment. In 2022, Pennsylvania opened a unit known as Little Scandinavia, and last year Missouri began a similar transformation project in four prisons. Six other states have established European-style units for younger prisoners. The efforts are still small. Prison conditions are not a priority for voters. U.S. prisons are in crisis, struggling with severe staffing shortages, crumbling facilities and frequent violence. Inmates in U.S. prisons often endure extreme temperatures, vermin-infested food and years, or even decades, in solitary confinement. High-profile cases have brought attention to prolonged shackling, fatal beatings and sexual abuse.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring articles on prison system reform.

The United States Department of Justice this week released nearly 11 hours of what it described as "full raw" surveillance footage from a camera positioned near Jeffrey Epstein's prison cell the night before he was found dead. The release was intended to address conspiracy theories about Epstein's apparent suicide in federal custody. But instead of putting those suspicions to rest, it may fuel them further. Metadata embedded in the video ... shows that rather than being a direct export from the prison's surveillance system, the footage was modified. Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on digital forensics and misinformation, reviewed the metadata at WIRED's request. Farid is a recognized expert in the analysis of digital images. He has testified in numerous court cases involving digital evidence. "If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I'd say no. Go back to the source. Do it right," Farid says. "Do a direct export from the original system–no monkey business." The footage confirms that from the time Epstein was locked in his cell at approximately 8 pm on August 9, 2019. However, the recording includes a notable gap: Approximately one minute of footage is missing, from 11:58:58 pm to 12:00:00 am. The video resumes immediately afterward. It looks suspicious–but not as suspicious as the DOJ refusing to answer basic questions about it.

Note: Followup reporting by Wired indicated that almost 3 minutes were cut before this footage was released. Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.