Prison, Jail | featured news

Former jet-setting Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford, whose financial empire once spanned the Americas, was sentenced Thursday to 110 years in prison for bilking investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

Two men charged with murder escaped from an Arkansas jail Monday by using a hacksaw to cut through metal bars, KSLA-TV reported.

There is no reason Marissa Alexander should spend the next 20 years in prison. If you are the most hardened law-and-order person in the world, even you should have some compassion for Alexander, the Jacksonville, Florida, woman who has been struck by the ridiculous Florida law known as 10-20-life.

Luigi “Louie” Manocchio, the 84-year-old former boss of the Mafia in New England, was sentenced today in federal court to 5½ years in prison for extorting protection payments from strip clubs.

The former Los Angeles police detective convicted of murdering her ex-lover's wife in 1986 was sentenced Friday to 27 years to life in prison.

The Lubbock City Council is scheduled to vote on a resolution backing a fountain to commemorate a man who died in prison before he was cleared by DNA testing of the crime that sent him there.

Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi could face more than 10 years in prison following his conviction Friday for hate crimes, invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence, and a host of other charges related to his spying on his gay college roommate, Tyler Clementi, whose subsequent suicide sparked a national debate on bullying of gay youth.

The nation's largest private prison company made an enticing offer to 48 states that went something like this: We will buy your prison now if you agree to keep it mostly full and promise to pay us for running it over the next two decades. Despite a need for cash, several states immediately slammed the door on the offer, a sign that privatizing prisons might not be as popular as it once was....

A Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman said the riot broke out in a high-security section of a prison in the city of Apodaca.

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.