Prison, Inmate | featured news

Inmates pay to get narcotics and other contraband through deputies. Baca says guards' financial hardships are usually involved. Los Angeles County jail inmates have used corrupt guards to penetrate tight security at lockups, helping fuel a lucrative drug trade behind bars, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Times.

Texas prison officials say they’re stopping the practice of special last meals for inmates facing execution, after a state senator complained about an extensive request from a man involved in a notorious dragging death. Sen. John Whitmire said Thursday he wanted the “ridiculous” and “inappropriate” practice ended or he’d seek a state statute banning it. Prisons director Brad Livingston agreed and said the practice was ending immediately. He said condemned inmates will get the same meal as other offenders.

Lyralisa Stevens, who was born male but lives as a female, had asked the state to pay for the removal of her male genitalia.A transgender California inmate has lost a legal bid for a sex-change operation at taxpayer expense.

Hundreds of thousands of people are rallying to support Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis. They not only oppose capital punishment but they also believe the state could put an innocent man to death. The case is packed with drama: the murder of an off-duty police officer; conflicting eyewitness testimony; last-minute court decisions sparing a condemned man's life and global dignitaries who say they fear an innocent man could die.

A sharply divided Supreme Court Monday affirmed a controversial prisoner reduction plan forced on California prison administrators that requires the state to reduce its inmate population by tens-of-thousands to ease overcrowding.

At least 141 inmates escaped Friday from a prison in Mexico's northeast border city of Nuevo Laredo, Notimex reported, citing an official.

The United States apologized for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which government medical researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan inmates with syphilis.

A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is "tantamount to torture."

Police are searching for a man who is accused of escaping a Rhode Island state prison after impersonating someone else, MyFoxBoston.com reported.

In a landmark ruling a Kenya court rules that prisoners will be allowed to vote in the referendum on a new constitution.