Prison | featured news

A shipyard worker who set fire to rags aboard a nuclear submarine because he wanted to go home was sentenced to a little more than 17 years in federal prison Friday for the blaze that transformed the vessel into a fiery furnace, injured seven people and caused $450 million in damage.

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

A sharp decline in incarceration rates for African-Americans from 2000 to 2009 marks a significant shift in the racial makeup of America’s prisons, according to a report released Wednesday.

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.

A former bookkeeper for a cash-strapped Illinois town, who admitted embezzling $53 million to finance a lavish lifestyle centered on prize-winning horses, was sentenced Thursday to almost 20 years in prison.

Samuel Mullet Sr. was sentenced along with 15 followers for a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks on other Ohio Amish that drew national attention.

Nancy Gonzalez, a corrections officer at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was arrested this morning at her home in Huntington, N.Y., on charges that she allegedly carried on a sexual relationship with a man convicted of killing two NYPD detectives.

The former city leader is given a 1-year sentence, plus probation, community service and must pay $17,000 in restitution... A former Cudahy mayor was sentenced Monday to a year in federal prison for his part in taking $17,000 in bribes from a man who wanted to open a medical marijuana dispensary in the city in southeast Los Angeles County.

David Headley, an American who admitted scouting targets for the 2008 Islamic militant raid on Mumbai and later agreed to testify against the plotters to avoid the death penalty, was sentenced on Thursday to 35 years in prison.

In one of his first acts as commander in chief, President Obama in 2009 signed an executive order to close the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was part of a campaign promise the president made, to close the camp and "determine how to deal with those who have been held there." But four years on, the controversial prison remains open.