Prison System Corruption News Articles

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Since 1973, at least 194 people have been freed from death row after evidence of innocence revealed that they had been wrongfully convicted. That's almost one person exonerated for every ten who've been executed. Wrongful convictions rob innocent people of decades of their lives, waste tax dollars, and re-traumatize the victim's family, while the people responsible remain unaccountable. Contrary to popular belief, the appeals process is not designed to catch cases of innocence. It is simply to determine whether the original trial was conducted properly. Most exonerations came only because of the extraordinary efforts of people working outside the system – pro bono lawyers, family members, even students. Wrongfully convicted people have spent up to 33 years on death row ... before the truth came to light. Any effort to streamline the death penalty process or cut appeals will only increase the risk that an innocent person is executed. Frank Lee Smith was sentenced to death in Florida on the testimony of a single witness. Four years later, the same witness saw a photo of a different man and realized she had made a mistake. DNA tests later confirmed that Smith was innocent, but it was too late. He had died in prison. Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting fire to his home, killing his three children. Experts now say that the arson theories used in the investigation are scientifically invalid. Willingham may very well have been executed for an accidental fire.

Note: Read more about the innocent people sentenced to death in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on judicial system corruption from reliable major media sources.

There are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison's commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. States and local governments spent $82 billion on corrections in 2019. To offset these costs, policymakers have justified legislation authorizing an ever-growing body of fees to be charged to the people (and, as a result, often their families) in prison and jail. Fees for room and board–yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic "boat" bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food–are typically charged at a "per diem rate for the length of incarceration." It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. Those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour.

Note: Read about a woman who only served 10 months in bars, yet now owes $127,000 for her original 7-year prison sentence. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Federal prison officials accused of misconduct, including sexual abuse, are more likely to escape sufficient punishment because of the agency's reluctance to rely on inmate testimony, a watchdog investigation found. This hesitancy ... "emboldens miscreant staff members" who believe they can "act without fear of disciplinary consequences," said a Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) report. The memo to Bureau of Prisons Director Colette S. Peters from Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said "the circumstances that gave rise to this memorandum and the BOP's conflicting response to it continue to raise significant concerns about the BOP's handling of disciplinary matters in cases where inmate testimony is necessary to sustain misconduct charges." "Staff throughout the Bureau know that they can abuse men and women in federal custody with impunity, as long as they don't admit it or do it on camera," said Deborah Golden, a D.C. lawyer who focuses on prisoner rights. Not handling internal investigations properly, she added, "is how the widespread abuse at FCI Dublin flourished." Five former employees of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., including a warden and a chaplain, have been charged with sexually abusing prisoners. Dublin is not an isolated case. During the six-month reporting period that ended March 31, the inspector general's office received 4,252 complaints involving the BOP, with force, abuse and rights violations among the most common allegations.

Note: In 2022, U.S. Department of Justice investigators had to open 14,361 cases of misconduct against 17,907 employees of the Bureau of Prisons, which is a bureau with 37,000 employees. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

The turnoff to Norways newest prison was marked by a modest sign. There were no signs warning against picking up hitchhikers, no visible fences. Halden Fengsel ... is often called the worlds most humane maximum-security prison. To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also ... the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness. The treatment of inmates at Halden is wholly focused on helping to prepare them for a life after they get out. Not only is there no death penalty in Norway; there are no life sentences. Norwegian Correctional Service ... works with other government agencies to secure a home, a job and access to a supportive social network for each inmate before release; Norways social safety net also provides health care, education and a pension to all citizens. If inmates are having problems with one another, an officer or prison chaplain brings them together for a mediation session that continues until they have agreed to maintain peace and have shaken hands. Even members of rival gangs agree not to fight inside.

Note: Watch a great, short video on this model prison.

For all the talk of curbing America’s appetite for mass incarceration and bipartisan support for reducing prison sentences, the number of people incarcerated in the United States declined only slightly in 2017, according to data released on Thursday by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The United States still has the largest known incarcerated population in the world. A drop in the federal prison population, due in large part to a 2014 decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to reduce sentences for drug crimes, accounts for a third of the year-over-year decline. And while some states have significantly reduced their prison populations in recent years, others continue to set records for the number of people they are keeping locked up. The size of the United States prison population has resulted from not only locking more people up, but also keeping them locked up longer. A record number of people are serving life sentences. In fact, while the United States accounts for about 4 percent of the world’s population, it has more than a third of the estimated number of people serving life sentences. As measures like parole and compassionate release have been curtailed, or even eliminated in some places, prisoners have become older and more costly. According to the report, more than one in 10 prison inmates in 2017 were 55 years or older. The racial disparity among men remains stark, with black men serving prison sentences at almost six times the rate of white men.

Note: The privatized prison-industrial complex brings huge profits to key individuals. And the media hardly mentions FBI statistics showing violent crime has dropped to 1/3 or less of what it was 25 years ago. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the incarceration industry.

Jayson Murphy lit the speck of paper and inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs as long as he could. His cellmate, John Jenkins, purchased the drug-soaked paper from another incarcerated man at Lebanon Correctional Institution, a state prison notorious for substance abuse and violence. The next morning, Jenkins set his dirty laundry outside the cell and tapped Murphy's leg. But Murphy, 50, didn't move. "Oh man, my cellie is dead," Jenkins recalled telling a corrections officer. A crime lab detected potent synthetic drugs that incarcerated users call K2 in the partially burnt paper found near Murphy's body. Authorities closed their criminal investigation the moment the coroner ruled the death an overdose, abandoning any effort to determine how the drug entered the prison. Drug-soaked paper, sold in confetti-sized hits, is now the most commonly found drug in Ohio prisons, fueling violence and accounting for more deaths than any other substance. The highly addictive drug is smuggled in by staff and visitors, tossed over fences and dropped in by drones. Wide-ranging and unpredictable side effects include vomiting, twitching, convulsing, aggression and psychosis. Jenkins said nearly all 150 men in his cellblock smoke paper. He described a scene from "The Walking Dead" – men passing out or shuffling around. Murphy was among at least 13 people incarcerated in Ohio who fatally overdosed on K2 in 2024, up from just three the year before.

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By early May 2024, multiple people had accused a teacher of dealing drugs and sexually preying on women at a state prison in Dayton. A hidden camera finally installed in August captured the teacher – who had previously served time for trafficking – passing drugs across his desk, shaking his genitals at students and rubbing up against a woman while dancing in class. One afternoon, he summoned a woman to his empty classroom and took her into his darkened office. The student later alleged that he digitally raped her. Despite video evidence supporting the woman's story, prosecutors declined to charge the teacher, calling it a "he said, she said case," according to an investigative file. Instead, prosecutors charged two incarcerated women with felony drug possession after they told investigators that the teacher, who simply lost his job, was their dealer. Workers suspected of smuggling drugs into Ohio prisons are seldom charged. Many often resign. Some, like the teacher, are fired, but most never face prosecution. Meanwhile ... corrupt staff and vendors are flooding the facilities with drugs. They can deliver larger quantities of drugs each day, hidden inside water bottles, lunch boxes, chip containers and backpacks. "We got inmates that go to prison who were straight arrows and clean, and when they leave prison, they're addicts," said state Rep. Mark Johnson, a ... Republican with two state prisons in his district.

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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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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.

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

US military veterans are significantly more likely than other Americans to be jailed at least once in their lives. Thanks to mass incarceration, the number of vets in prison doubled between the end of the Vietnam War and 9/11. How did [180,000 vets] end up in a US prison population now numbering more than 1.2 million? Overall, about one-third of all veterans, who number nineteen million, report having been arrested and booked into jail at least once in their lives, as compared to less than one-fifth of the rest of the population. When they end up incarcerated, veterans receive longer sentences than nonveterans, despite the good work of a national network of Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs). This "hybrid drug and mental health treatment system" offers access to counseling services, opportunities for housing, education and job employment, and disability benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). But the effectiveness of their "reparative justice" approach varies from state to state and is not available to vets charged with violent crimes, which disqualifies many defendants. More than 300,000 veterans, who served at home and abroad, since 9/11 also received less than "honorable" discharges. For the DOD, despite its ample $884 billion budget, getting rid of soldiers whose performance is adversely affected by PTSD, traumatic brain injuries (TBI), military sexual trauma (MST), drug or alcohol abuse is easier, quicker, and cheaper than treating them.

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

Guards are using prison work assignments at correctional facilities across the United States to lure and rape female inmates, a shocking investigation by the Associated Press has found. Many complaints follow a similar pattern: Accusers are retaliated against, while those accused face little or no punishment. In all 50 states, the AP found cases where staff allegedly used inmate work assignments to lure women to isolated spots, out of view of security cameras. The prisoners said they were attacked while doing jobs like kitchen or laundry duty inside correctional facilities or in work-release programs that placed them at private businesses like national fast-food restaurants and hotel chains. Things were so bad at FCI Dublin in California that prisoners and staff named it 'the rape club,' a 2022 AP investigation found. At least two men who pleaded guilty to sexual abuse were work supervisors: Nakie Nunley targeted at least five female prisoners who worked at the federal government's call center ... and Andrew Jones abused women who worked for him in the kitchen. A civil lawsuit filed in September said that officer Jose Figueroa-Lizarraga moved cameras in an Arizona state facility and raped a prisoner who was on a job assignment, forcing her inside the guard's control room. After reporting the incident, the woman was attacked again. She became pregnant and nearly died after hemorrhaging during childbirth.

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

Alex Fields had not spoken to his nephew in four years. Not since the killing. But when his nephew Donald Fields Jr finally appeared over Zoom from the county jail, Alex Fields was consumed by the moment. Don Jr was charged with the murder of his father, Donald Fields Sr, in 2016. Today was the first step in a long journey that would see a tragedy transformed into a pioneering case of compassion in America's punitive criminal justice system. It marked the first time that restorative justice – the act of resolving crimes through community reconciliation and accountability over traditional punishment – had been used in a homicide case in the state of North Carolina. And probably the first case of its kind in the US. The DA's office forged a new plea deal, which offered Don Jr the opportunity to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, which could see him sentenced to "time served". The family worked on a new repair agreement, which was 13 points long and had conditions facilitating Don Jr's release. There is increasing evidence that use of restorative justice lowers rates of recidivism. Those who are victims of violence are far more likely to become perpetrators of violent acts later on. "Just as we cannot incarcerate our way out of violence, we cannot reform our way out of mass incarceration without taking on the question of violence," [Danielle Sered] writes. "The context in which violence happens matters, as do the identities and experiences of those involved."

Note: Danielle Sered is the founder of a Brooklyn-based restorative justice organization Common Justice, which is the first alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts. For further reading, explore her book, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.

Though the people held at Sanganer open prison are technically incarcerated, they can leave the facility during the day and travel within the city limits. Almost immediately upon his arrival, Arjiram's sense of self-worth grew. "It didn't feel like I was in a prison," he says. "I could go out and work and come back, and the best thing was they trusted me." After being faceless and nameless for over a decade, he felt like a person again. According to the country's National Crime Records Bureau, there are about 88 open prisons in India, the largest share of which are in the state of Rajasthan, where the model is being pioneered. India's open prisons are defined by minimal security. They are run and maintained by the state, and those incarcerated within them are free to come and go as they please. At Sanganer, the prison is open for up to 12 hours each day. Every evening, prisoners must return to be counted at an end-of-day roll call. Designed to foster reform as opposed to punishment, the system is based on the premise that trust is contagious. It assumes – and encourages – self-discipline on the part of the prisoners. Letting incarcerated folks go to work also allows them to earn money for themselves and their families, build skills, and maintain contacts in the outside world that can help them once they're released. In addition to allowing inmates to support themselves, open prisons require far less staff, and their operating costs are a fraction of those in closed prisons.

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Dozens of adults and children, all clad in white, stood in a line. A holy man handed each a cup of ayahuasca, a muddy-looking hallucinogenic brew. Among those imbibing from the holy mans decanter were prison inmates, convicted of crimes such as murder, kidnapping and rape. Im finally realizing I was on the wrong path in this life, said Celmiro de Almeida, 36, who is serving a sentence for homicide. Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness, said Mr. de Almeida. The provision of a hallucinogen to inmates ... reflects a continuing quest for ways to ease pressure on Brazils prison system. The countrys inmate population has doubled since the start of the century ... straining underfunded prisons rife with human rights violations. Around [2002], Acuda, a pioneering prisoners rights group in Porto Velho, began offering inmates therapy sessions in yoga, meditation and Reiki. Two years ago, the volunteer therapists at Acuda had a new idea: Why not give the inmates ayahuasca as well? Acuda had trouble finding a place where the inmates could drink ayahuasca, but they were finally accepted by an offshoot here of Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion founded in the 1930s. Many people in Brazil believe that inmates must suffer, said Euza Beloti, 40, a psychologist with Acuda. This thinking bolsters a system where prisoners return to society more violent than when they entered prison. At Acuda, she said, we simply see inmates as human beings with the capacity to change.

Note: Read more about emerging research into ayahuasca in Brazil. Articles like this suggest that the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs are gaining mainstream credibility.

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.

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

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."

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

Elevatus, a Fort Wayne-based architecture firm ... has designed jails all over Indiana and in several other states. For counties that are considering expanding their current jail or building a new one, Elevatus produces feasibility studies that usually predict growing incarceration needs. In many cases, Elevatus also wins a contract to draw up the plans for the facility it recommended. That's what happened in Allen County. Four months after Elevatus released its study, the company was hired to design the new jail. If the county's elected officials approve the project, the firm's design fees – factored as a percentage of the project's total cost, as is standard for architecture firms – could be around $10 million. Elevatus is far from the only architecture firm creating feasibility studies and needs assessments that recommend substantially larger jails and then designing those buildings. Such blatant conflict of interest is occurring in counties all over the country. These studies rely on thin data to justify spending millions of dollars in public funds. The most significant consequence, though, is that more people wind up incarcerated. "Who's in jail is a product of the policies and practices of [the] criminal justice system," said David Bennett, a consultant for the National Institute of Corrections. "There's no correlation between crime and incarceration rates." Bennett [emphasizes] that the real way to reduce jail overcrowding is through policy, especially at the local level. Sheriffs have great discretion over how minor infractions are treated, who gets released on their own recognizance, and whether failure-to-appear warrants are called in. Changes like these were implemented during the pandemic, and jail populations dropped precipitously, with little downside.

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The greed of the prison industrial complex squeezing slave profits out of imprisoned people through the exploitation of the 13th amendment and the brutal system set up to limit opportunity usually leaves most who walk through the gates hopeless and abandoned. "At the point that I got to prison, I had never went into the liquor store and never pulled a tricker," [said former inmate Dorsey Nunn]. "I never did kill anybody. And I had never thought about killing anybody. We talked about the marriage of, of profit and you talk about the prison industrial complex, which is, essentially the practice of, marrying profit and punishment. One of the ugly realities in California under article one, section six, you still claim as a society to practice slavery, the right to practice slavery on the government level. They call it involuntary servitude. They mentioned it again in the 13th amendment. So people are still laboring without consent. The maximum amount of money that I was paid was 32 cents an hour. The maximum amount of money that I was paid for working a month. It's $32 a month, so at a certain point and the maximum amount of money that they gave me to start this fresh new life with was $200 gate money, and they've been giving that probably since the early seventies, no account for inflation, no account for anything. And they say, start your life over. People are rising up to do away with and challenge the notion of the 13th Amendment and the practice of slavery. Should we actually make a question of maintaining slavery, a question of morals, and do we actually want to actually profit off of slaves?"

Note: Dorsey Nunn wrote a book about his experiences advocating for the rights of former prison inmates titled, "What Kind of Bird Can't Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection." With about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire. For more, read about America's dystopian "pay-to-stay" incarceration system.

After poking and prodding [Doyle] Hamm with needles for almost 3 hours, prison officials gave up as Mr. Hamm lay strapped to a gurney in a pool of blood. They called off the execution because they were unsuccessful in gaining IV access to administer the lethal injection. This was a risk Mr. Hamm's attorney had predicted given Hamm's advanced cancer and long history of IV drug use. At the time, ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn did not provide details to reporters about what happened. "I wouldn't characterize what we had tonight as a problem," Dunn said. Hamm's attorney later released photos and examination notes showing that prison employees had punctured Hamm's bladder and an artery causing him to urinate blood. The state ... privately agreed to never try to execute Doyle Hamm again. Counternarratives about death row can be found in the 2023 book titled Ghosts Over the Boiler: Voices from Alabama's Death Row. The book is a collection of writings previously published by Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, or PHADP, the nation's only nonprofit formed on and operated from death row. The organization ... has a goal to educate the public about capital punishment and the features of inequality that define it, while advocating for an end to the death penalty. All of the featured writers have been convicted of murder, although based on the rate of death row exonerations, some are likely wrongly convicted.

Note: The current system often puts innocent people to death. Over half of all wrongful convictions are the result of government misconduct. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

When a detainee at a federal prison facility in Atlanta, Georgia, was found hanging from a ligature in his cell in November 2018, prison staff had to borrow a razor blade from another detainee in order to cut them down. The scene was one of several alarming accounts of conditions at U.S. Penitentiary Atlanta detailed Tuesday during a Senate subcommittee hearing. Public reporting has described several years' worth of security and health issues at the facility, including deaths, escapes, corruption, and a smuggling ring. According to congressional investigators who spoke at the hearing, senior officials at the federal prison complex and at the federal Bureau of Prisons were aware of the issues for years and failed to adequately address them, amounting to gross misconduct. The findings are part of an ongoing 10-month bipartisan congressional investigation into allegations of corruption and abuse at the Atlanta facility. Started last September by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the investigation has focused on the Atlanta complex to highlight broader issues in the federal prison system. The facility has the highest number of suicides by detainees at any federal prison over the last five years. Previous reporting has documented at least 13 suicides at the facility between 2012 and 2021, including five between October 2019 and June 2021. The hearing ... painted a damning picture of a bloated federal prison system run by well-informed and willfully inactive leaders.

Note: In 2022, U.S. Department of Justice investigators had to open 14,361 cases of misconduct against 17,907 employees of the Bureau of Prisons, which is a bureau with 37,000 employees. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

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