Inmate | featured news

Stephen Slevin's 22 months in solitary left him traumatized and weak, but he'll soon be a multimillionaire for his suffering.

The first clue that things are done very differently on Bastoy prison island, which lies a couple of miles off the coast in the Oslo fjord, 46 miles south-east of Norway's capital, comes shortly after I board the prison ferry. I'm taken aback slightly when the ferry operative who welcomed me aboard just minutes earlier, and with whom I'm exchanging small talk about the weather, suddenly reveals he is a serving prisoner – doing 14 years for drug smuggling. He notes my surprise, smiles, and takes off a thick glove before offering me his hand. "I'm Petter," he says.

Gov. Jerry Brown has begun aggressively challenging federal court oversight of California's prison system by highlighting what he says is a costly conflict of interest: The private law firms representing inmates and the judges' own hand-picked authorities benefit financially by keeping the cases alive....

Faced with the daunting task of evaluating more than 34,000 drug cases handled by a Massachusetts chemist accused of misconduct, prosecutors and defense attorneys are starting with 1,140 cases of people who are already serving prison sentences based on potentially tainted evidence.

The attorney for an Ohio death-row inmate set for execution says the condemned man is sorry for killing two strangers 23 years ago and wants to give their families justice.

Attorneys for a 486-pound Ohio death row inmate claim that the execution procedure "simply will not work" on their client and will cause him a "torturous and lingering death." Ronald Post, 53, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the shooting death of Helen Vantz, a desk clerk at a motel in Elyria, Ohio.

The United States handed control of the controversial giant Bagram jail and its 3,000 suspected Taliban inmates to Afghan authorities on Monday, amid concerns the transfer could leave prisoners vulnerable to further rights abuses.

Just hearing the word Unicor is enough to make Kurt Wilson see red. Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates -- at wages as low as 23 cents an hour -- to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies. With some exceptions, Unicor gets first dibs on federal contracts over private companies as long as its bid is comparable in price, quantity and delivery. In other words: If Unicor wants a contract, it gets it.

After 49 years behind bars, the nation's longest-serving female inmate is free. Betty Smithey, 69, whose prison term began following her conviction for the murder of a 15-month-old Phoenix girl in 1963, appeared at a parole hearing Monday morning and by that afternoon walked, with the aid of a cane, out of the gates of the Perryville state prison.

At least 382 people died in the fire in central Honduras and there are new questions about exactly what happened that night in the overcrowded prison... Outrage over the fire increased after the president of the country's supreme court admitted that only 40% of the inmates in the prison had been convicted. The majority were awaiting trial or waiting for charges to be filed against them.