Prison System Corruption News Articles

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Just weeks after he entered the Texas prison system at age 19, Kerry Max Cook says he was gang-raped by fellow inmates. It was the beginning of what he describes as two decades of torture. More than 200,000 men are raped behind bars each year, according to the group Stop Prisoner Rape. While rape under any circumstances is a violation, human rights advocates say rape in prison is also torture. Cook, 46, now released from prison, says the first attack came not long after he ended up behind bars. "They made me take my clothes off," says Cook. "They bent me over a concrete embankment that used to sit outside in the yard." Before it was over, the inmates had carved obscenities into Cook's backside. Over the next two years, he says, he was repeatedly assaulted and even locked up with his attackers. The American prison system has been described as a "sexual jungle," where there are predators and prey. Experts say some prison officials quietly permit rape as a way to control the population. "Where the predators – the more violent, powerful inmates – are in effect being given a bribe or a reward to cooperate with the prison authorities," says Harvard University criminologist Dr. James Gilligan. "As long as they cooperate, the prison authorities will permit them to have their victims." This may be why inmates such as Matthew Rolen say their cries of rape are simply ignored by prison officials. "They told me flat out: we don't care," says Rolen, 36, who is thin and nonviolent, which makes him a target. Rolen says he filed a series of complaints to Texas prison officials. They didn't intervene, he says, until an attacker beat him unconscious in a crowded dayroom.

Note: To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this 2001 Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states.

Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents obtained by The Grayzone under Freedom of Information laws raise extremely serious questions about whether Jeffrey Epstein's alleged first suicide attempt on July 23, 2019 in fact happened, and suggest the Bureau distorted evidence to attribute his death to suicide before his autopsy had even been completed. Officially, Epstein was found to have died in his cell at New York City's Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10, 2019, with a medical examiner ruling at the time that he had taken his own life by hanging. The ruling was aggressively contested by Epstein's associates and widely disbelieved. Epstein's legal team publicly declared available evidence on his death was "far more consistent" with murder. On August 9 ... regular checks on [Epstein] ceased. Three CCTV cameras nearby apparently malfunctioned. Two on-duty guards fabricated records to hide how they allegedly flouted their legal duties to surf the internet. And the next day, the prison's most infamous inmate was dead. In the immediate wake of Epstein's death ... BOP suicide prevention coordinator Robert Nagle visited the Metropolitan Correctional Center to initiate a "psychological reconstruction" of Epstein's last moments. His resultant report recorded that a video of the "significant incident" was confiscated by the FBI before his review began. He was also prohibited from conducting formal interviews with prison staff.

Note: Many questions remain unanswered regarding Epstein's death. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein and prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Several industries have become notorious for the millions they spend on influencing legislation. But one has managed to quickly build influence with comparatively little scrutiny: Private prisons. The two largest for-profit prison companies in the United States – GEO and Corrections Corporation of America – and their associates have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, these private companies have seen their revenue and market share soar. They now rake in a combined $3.3 billion in annual revenue and the private federal prison population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010. A report by the Justice Policy Institute ... identified the private-prison industry’s three-pronged approach to increase profits through political influence: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships and networks. Private-prison companies have indirectly supported policies that put more Americans and immigrants behind bars ... by donating to politicians who support them. With the growing influence of the prison lobby, the nation is, in effect, commoditizing human bodies for an industry in militant pursuit of profit. For instance, privatization created the atmosphere that made the “Kids For Cash” scandal possible, in which two Pennsylvania judges received $2.6 million in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to the facilities and with unusually long sentences.

Note: The "Cash for Kids" scandal mentioned in the article above resulted in the unlawful incarceration of thousands of kids. Few are aware that violent crime rates have dropped to 1/3 of what they were in 1993, yet prison spending continues to skyrocket. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the prison industry.

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions. The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the threats to civil liberties posed by government corruption from reliable major media sources.

Swedish prisons have long had a reputation around the world as being liberal and progressive. The head of Sweden's prison and probation service, Nils Oberg, announced in November that four Swedish prisons are to be closed due to an "out of the ordinary" decline in prisoner numbers. Although there has been no fall in crime rates, between 2011 and 2012 there was a 6% drop in Sweden's prisoner population, now a little over 4,500. A similar decrease is expected this year and the next. The Swedes [have] managed to maintain a broadly humane approach to sentencing, even of the most serious offenders: jail terms rarely exceed 10 years; those who receive life imprisonment can still apply to the courts after a decade to have the sentence commuted to a fixed term, usually in the region of 18 to 25 years. Sweden was the first country in Europe to introduce the electronic tagging of convicted criminals and continues to strive to minimise short-term prison sentences wherever possible by using community-based measures proven to be more effective at reducing reoffending. The overall reoffending rate in Sweden stands at between 30 and 40% over three years around half that in the UK. One likely factor that has kept reoffending down and the rate of incarceration in Sweden below 70 per 100,000 head of population less than half the figure for England and Wales is that the age of criminal responsibility is set at 15. Unlike the UK, where a life sentence can be handed down to a 10-year-old, in Sweden no young person under the age of 21 can be sentenced to life and every effort is made to ensure that as few juvenile offenders as possible end up in prison.

Note: For a Time magazine article showing how Norway's prisons actually rehabilitate prisoners so that they can more easily fit back in society, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.

[Timothy] Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159. Jackson, 53, is one of 3,281 prisoners in America serving life sentences with no chance of parole for non-violent crimes. Some, like him, were given the most extreme punishment short of execution for shoplifting; one was condemned to die in prison for siphoning petrol from a truck; another for stealing tools. “It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its new report on life without parole for non-violent offenders. The ACLU's report, A Living Death, chronicles the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by the modern phenomenon of sentencing people to die behind bars for non-violent offences. Most of those ... inmates held on life without parole sentences were given their punishments by the federal government. More than 2,000 of the 3,281 individuals tracked down on these sentences by the ACLU are being held in the federal system. Taxpayers pay an additional $1.8bn to keep the prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives. About 65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. Of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offences nationwide, the ACLU estimates that almost 80% were for drug-related crimes.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on judicial system corruption from reliable major media sources.

The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded. So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons? One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees. But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. One thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. And ... despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” A corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage [is] undermining government across much of our nation.

Note: Few are aware that violent crime rates have dropped to 1/3 of what they were in 1993, yet prison spending continues to skyrocket. Is something wrong with this picture? For key major media new articles exposing more on corruption within the "prison-industrial complex," click here.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation. The United States ... has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.) The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate. "Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote.

Note: Many people are not aware that violent crime in the US has dropped by over 50% in the last 15 years. Yet the prison population continues to grow rapidly at the same time. For more on this, click here.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. They are among America's most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. The goods ... prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. It's completely legal. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime. With about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire. Almost all of the country's state and federal adult prisons have some sort of work program, employing around 800,000 people. Altogether, labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021. "Slavery has not been abolished," said Curtis Davis, who spent more than 25 years at [Louisiana's Angola] penitentiary. "It is still operating in present tense," he said. "Nothing has changed."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in prisons and in the food system from reliable major media sources.

When Joe Biden took office ... he promised an overhaul of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Biden inherited Michael Carvajal as BOP director. Carvajal ... began as an entry-level prison guard, worked his way up into administration, became a warden, and finally made his way to BOP headquarters. Carvajal resigned in 2022 after more than 100 BOP officers were arrested for, or convicted of, serious crimes during his short tenure, including smuggling drugs and cell phones into prisons to sell to prisoners, theft from prison commissaries, committing violence against prisoners, and even one warden running a "rape club," where he and other officials, including the prison chaplain, raped female prisoners at will. Carvajal finally resigned after Congress learned of the "rape club" and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded that he leave. Carvajal's problem was obvious from the beginning. He brought literally no outside expertise to the job. He had never worked anywhere in his adult life other than the BOP. There would be no bold, new programs, no new ideas for reducing recidivism, no move to train prisoners to lead productive lives. According to Peter Mosques, a criminal justice professor of John Jay College, the BOP is ... an employment agency for otherwise unemployable white men with no education and no outside job experience, many of whom washed out of the military or the local police academy.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Look at the case of Lucas Bellamy. He had been arrested in Minnesota. Immediately before the arrest, he ate a bag of drugs in an effort to fool police into thinking that he didn't have any. But he immediately began feeling sick. Jail officers took him to a local hospital, where he was treated. The doctors there told the jailers to return him to the hospital if he became ill again. He began vomiting as soon as he got back to his cell. By evening he was refusing food and crawling around his cell as a guard and nurse stood and watched him. By noon the next day, he was dead on the floor. The case of Brandon Clay Dodson is even worse. Dodson was arrested on a burglary charge and was being held in the local jail in Clayton, Alabama. He told a guard that several other prisoners had been beating him, and he asked to be moved into segregated housing for his own protection. He later told the guards in solitary that he wasn't feeling well, but they ignored him. And a day after that, the 43-year-old was found dead in his bed. In a 104-page ruling, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled against the administrators of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, [highlighting] just a few of the untold number of medical horrors that prisoners suffer all the time there, including "a man denied medical attention four times during a stroke, leaving him blind and paralyzed; a man denied access to a specialist for four years while his throat cancer advanced; even a blind man denied a cane for 16 years."

Note: John Kiriakou is a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2015, investigations in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, and New York uncovered escalating inmate deaths related to the use of for-profit medical services in prisons. A New York Times article about this was published but it quickly disappeared. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

At least 33 U.S. state prison systems and the majority of federal medium-, high- and maximum-security prisons have placed general population ("gen pop") adults under nondisciplinary lockdown at least once (but more often repeatedly or for a prolonged period) from 2016-2023. While most lockdowns are intermittent (lasting from a few days to several weeks), an increasing number of state and federal prisons keep prisoners locked down for most or even all of the year. In addition, many prisons make people suffer through constant lockdown "cycles," where prisoners get a very brief return to normal "gen pop" status before they are once again subject to several days or weeks of lockdown. Prisoners have no routines or any real rights whatsoever under lockdown. There is no guarantee of exercise, showers are irregular at best, and access to phone, email or visitation are nonexistent. Education, religious activities, rehabilitative programs, psychiatric intervention to crises, access to commissary ... are typically denied or are nearly impossible to get. Meetings with attorneys come to a halt or are hard to obtain. People under lockdown are often not even given basic hygiene materials such as soap or toothpaste. Modern prison lockdowns can ... be traced back to 2016, in a decidedly repressive, politicized reaction to nationwide prison strikes. Entire prisons were and are still punished for the relatively minor actions of a few, including ... something as simple as a shouting match.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Kesha Jackson was preparing for her husband, John, to be home in a few weeks. But then Jackson got a concerning call from other inmates. Her husband, in the special housing unit, was going in and out of consciousness. He died soon after. And as she waited for some explanation, Jackson was surprised to learn what prison officials pronounced as the manner of death: "natural." By deeming the death natural, prison authorities were not required to conduct an autopsy for Jackson's death. It's how they characterize at least three-quarters of all federal prison deaths since 2009. "When his medical records came home after he passed away, I saw that it was MRSA," Jackson said. "Saying that it's a natural death can sometimes be misleading because I believe that having the proper medical treatment could have possibly saved his life," Jackson said. The CDC says natural deaths happen either solely or almost entirely because of disease or old age. Yet 70% of the inmates who died in federal prison the last 13 years were under the age of 65. NPR found that potential issues such as medical neglect, poor prison conditions and a lack of health care resources were left unexplained once a "natural" death designation ended hopes of an investigation. Meanwhile, family members were left with little information about their loved one's death. Homer Venters, a federal court monitor of jail and prison health care, calls deaths like Jackson's "jail attributable."

Note: Private companies like Corizon are often responsible for inmate medical care. In 2015, investigations in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, and New York uncovered escalating inmate deaths related to Corizon's for-profit medical services. A New York Times article about this was published but it quickly disappeared. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

A detainee held in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay who was used as a human guinea pig in the CIA's post-9/11 torture program has produced the most comprehensive and detailed account yet seen of the brutal techniques to which he was subjected. Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history. The drawings, which Zubaydah has annotated with his own words, depict gruesome acts of violence, sexual and religious humiliation, and prolonged psychological terror committed against him and other detainees. Zubaydah's sketches provide a unique visual record of the US government's use of torture in the wake of 9/11. Videotapes of Zubaydah being tortured were filmed by the CIA but then destroyed in violation of a court order, while a 6,700-page torture report by the Senate intelligence committee remains secret almost a decade after it was completed. Though the full Senate report has never been made public, its conclusion is known: that the abuse of Zubaydah and other detainees failed to elicit any new intelligence. In other words, torture does not work. The US initially claimed [Zubaydah] was a top al-Qaida operative but was forced to concede he was not even a member of the terror group.

Note: Read the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

"We have a system that forces people to work and not only forces them to work but does not give them an adequate living wage," said [prison reformer Johnny] Perez. "Slavery by any name is wrong. Slavery in any shape or form is wrong." Perez is now part of a nationwide movement that hopes to reform what some have called the "slavery loophole" that allows incarcerated people to be paid tiny sums for jobs that – if they refuse to do them – can have dire consequences. The 13th amendment of the US constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. But it contained an exception for "a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". This exception clause has been used to exploit prisoners in the US as workers, paying them nothing to a few dollars a day to perform jobs ranging from prison services to manufacturing or working for private employers where the majority of their pay is deducted for room and board and other expenses. A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union in June 2022 found about 800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work, generating a conservative estimate of $11bn annually in goods and services while average wages range from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour. Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay. The report concluded that the labor conditions of US prisoners violate fundamental human rights to life and dignity.

Note: The #EndTheException coalition is working to end slavery. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

When we think about people who are behind bars for crimes simple or heinous, our minds take us to a place of judgment. We may view inmates as less than: less intelligent, less successful, less worthy of love and support. We may see them as "other." The reality is, we may all be a few experiences away from potentially committing a crime. A video that poignantly highlights the dynamics that could lead to incarceration is called Step Inside the Circle. It begins with a group of 235 men in blue uniforms in a yard of a maximum-security prison. Barbed wire and guards surround them. They tower over a petite blond woman wearing a black and white t-shirt that says There Is No Shame. She carries a megaphone through which she invites them to step inside the circle if they have experienced verbal or physical abuse and neglect, if they lived in a home without feeling loved, if they had given up on themselves. One by one and then in multitudes, they join Fritzi Horstman as together they chant "There is no shame," over and over. A group of them move indoors and sit in a circle of chairs with Horstman admitting her own wounds that led to criminal activity. That opened the door for the participants to describe the wounds they have carried for much of their lives. [The] men were visibly moved, some wiping their eyes, some providing brotherly support and admitted that they were breaking the code by being vulnerable. They discovered that it was a unifying experience and they felt less isolated as a result.

Note: Two short, incredibly inspiring documentaries show how these inmates' lives have been transformed. Don't miss "Step Inside the Circle" (7 min) and "Honor Yard" (8 min).

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over. [The] spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. Critics say with fewer inmates, the costs should be falling. New York is ... second in overall costs at about $69,000.

Note: Could it be that the privatization of prisons is driving up prison costs? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The prison phone business is a wildly complex, fiercely secretive and enormously lucrative industry. Over the last decade, [this] business has become a scandalous industry, characterized by lawsuits, exorbitant fees, high phone rates and monopolistic relationships between public jails and private companies that openly offer kickbacks to local sheriffs. "This is about shifting the cost of the police state onto the backs of the poor people being policed," says Paul Wright, executive director of Human Rights Defense Center. [There are] an estimated 2.2 million inmates currently behind bars in America. If you've ever tried to call an inmate, there's a good chance you've heard of Securus, or its main competitor, Global Tel*Link (GTL). The two companies reportedly make up about 80 percent of the prison phone business, which drives about $1.2 billion per year in revenues. In the last few years, Securus, especially, has emerged into one of the largest, if not most secretive, prison technology companies in the business. The company employs 1,000 associates in 46 states, contracts with 2,600 jails and prisons across North America, and provides service to more than 1 million inmates and their families. Securus earned $114.6 million in profits 2014, on revenues of about $404 million. When companies like Securus send proposals to jails and prisons around the country, they offer a percentage of the call rate back to the sheriff's office. It's typical for commissions to range anywhere from 40 percent and 80 percent.

Note: Read more in this Huffington Post article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prisons corruption from reliable major media sources.

TIME: Your book Just Mercy is about getting legal help for poor people in Alabama. What are the biggest impediments? BRYAN STEVENSON (Lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative): We have a criminal-justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. I don’t believe that America’s system is shaped by culpability. I think it’s shaped by wealth. TIME: 1 in 3 black men in the U.S. under 30 is in jail, on probation or on parole. Is this the scariest stat? STEVENSON: That 1 in 3 black males born in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison during their lifetimes is more astonishing because it’s about the future. And 1 in 6 Latino boys. That wasn’t true in the 20th century. TIME: What do you say to people who say, “It’s easy to not go to jail–don’t commit a crime”? STEVENSON: In this country we have a presumption of guilt that follows young kids of color. I’ve represented 10-year-olds being prosecuted as adults. They are put in an adult jail. It’s so unnecessary–we have juvenile facilities. No one defends it, and yet we still have 10,000 children in an adult jail or prison. TIME: What’s the role of the corporations that build prisons? STEVENSON: Corporations have really corrupted American criminal justice by creating these perverse incentives where they actually pay legislators to create new crimes so that we can maintain these record-high-level rates of imprisonment. These companies spend millions of dollars a year on lobbying. Prison spending has gone from $6 billion in 1980 to $80 billion today.

Note: For more details about Stevenson's uphill battle as a legal advocate for the poor, read the full article of the Time interview at the link above. For more along these lines, see these excellent, concise summaries of prison corruption news stories from major media sources.

In late September 1983, an 11-year-old girl named Sabrina Buie was found murdered in a soybean field in Robeson County. She had been raped, beaten with sticks and suffocated with her own underwear. Within days, police got confessions from two local teenagers, Henry Lee McCollum, 19 at the time, and his half brother, Leon Brown, who was 15. Both were convicted and sentenced to death. On [September 2], a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing. Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct. No physical evidence linked either man to the crime, so their false confessions, given under duress, were the heart of the case the prosecutors mounted against them. Both men’s confessions were handwritten by police after hours of intense questioning without a lawyer or parent present. Neither was recorded, and both men have maintained their innocence ever since. Equally disturbing, Mr. Artis was a suspect from the start. Three days before the murder trial began, police requested that a fingerprint from the crime scene be tested for a match with Mr. Artis, who had a long history of sexual assaults against women. The test was never done, and prosecutors never revealed the request to the defense.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.