Prison Health News

31/10/2025

"Our last conversation took place over the phone, three months before he died. ... Below is a transcript of our last conversation, lightly edited for clarity and chronology. Marcus died before he could review the final draft."

Months before his death, Ralph Marcus explained how a COVID-era leg injury led to a rare bone cancer that didn’t have to be fatal.

31/10/2025

"Covid is spreading, but incarcerated people are being told vaccines aren’t necessary."

Covid is spreading, but incarcerated people are being told vaccines aren’t necessary.

29/10/2025

"Almost 60% of people in prisons and 25% of those in local jails are confined in rural counties, which are home to 3,000 of the nation’s correctional facilities. Following massive cuts to Medicaid passed by Congress this year, many rural hospitals will be forced to scale back operations or close entirely. As a result, critical, lifesaving healthcare will be further out of reach for huge swaths of the incarcerated population and those who live and work nearby, making an already bad situation far, far worse."

The Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will result in the closure of many rural hospitals, leaving people in the surrounding communities — including ...

10/10/2025

"Healing Futures is Philadelphia’s first pre-charge restorative justice diversion program for youth, led by YASP and created in partnership with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. Instead of pushing young people deeper into the system, Healing Futures brings them and those they’ve harmed into a community-led process focused on accountability, repair, and healing. And the results speak volumes:

✨ 100% of participants, both youth who caused harm and those who were harmed, report satisfaction with the process and say they would recommend it to others.
✨ In over two years, only 1 out of 30 young people who completed the program was adjudicated for a new offense. That’s a recidivism rate of just 3%."

In early 2023, YASP was honored to receive the Stoneleigh Foundation Emerging Leaders Fellowship to support our Healing Futures Restorative Justice Diversion Program. This report highlights the first two years of Healing Futures, sharing key data and insights about its impact on Philadelphia’s you...

06/10/2025

"In the throes of the Covid pandemic, I used a contraband cellphone as a last-ditch effort to report Texas prison officials’ alarmingly inadequate response to the virus, which was causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of incarcerated individuals and staff members.

That video footage was incorporated into a local ABC News documentary called “No Way Out.” That reporting embarrassed prison officials so badly it compelled them to implement and follow the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those changes could not have happened without contraband cellphones."

Brendan Carr is advancing a plan to choke communications for people who use cellphones to expose abuses in prison.

24/08/2025

“My sister, Honesty, was a fighter who never gave up,” Latasha Monroe, Bishop’s sister and personal representative for the Estate of Honesty Jade Bishop, said in a statement by Lambda Legal, the MacArthur Justice Center and law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which filed the case on Bishop’s behalf.

Monroe added that her sister “endured years of cruel treatment because of her HIV status, but she never stopped believing that things could change. This settlement honors her memory and ensures that others won’t have to suffer what Honesty went through. Her courage in speaking out has created lasting changes.”

Honesty Bishop, a transgender woman with HIV, spent six years in solitary confinement after she was allegedly attacked by a cellmate.

10/08/2025

The Summer 2025 issue of Prison Health News is now online here:
https://prisonhealth.news/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/summer-2025_issue-61_draft-2.pdf

31/07/2025

"People incarcerated in BOP facilities are already feeling the effects, including through the increased use of lockdowns, during which entire units are confined to cells for hours or days on end. In recent weeks, many federal prisons have implemented new policies, such as full-day lockdowns once a week, or nightly lockdowns starting at 6, according to reports sent by incarcerated people to the advocacy group More Than Our Crimes. These incarcerated writers often report that staff blame the new lockdowns on insufficient staffing or overtime bans.

“We just came off of a two-week lockdown, supposedly to save on overtime costs,” an incarcerated person wrote in May from FCI Waseca, a low-security women’s facility in Minnesota. “Now we are being [told] we will be locked down one week each month. … No work crews will run, there will be no programming, and if rec [is] open it will only be in the p.m.”

The Trump administration has thrown the lives of incarcerated people into chaos.

31/07/2025

“When people are writing me letters begging me for treatment for health care needs it’s hard for me to just ignore it,” Ms. Currie continued. “When they need a liver transplant from untreated Hep C or begging me for help with untreated HIV. When they beg me for supplies because they make them reuse colostomy bags over and over that don’t fit, when they are bowel and bladder incontinent and they don’t provide diapers to them it is hard for me to hear that (MDOC) feels that they provide adequate care.”

Sick people in state prisons are suffering from medical neglect and mismanagement.

23/06/2025

"Under the restrictions, incarcerated people are forced to remain primarily in their cell or dormitory. All in-person visitation, programming, phone access and tablet communications has been suspended."

Incarcerated people at a California prison commenced a hunger strike to protest expansive restrictions the state handed down after reporting attacks on guards.

23/06/2025

"It would increase access to the courts. It would help strengthen relationships with loved ones. Re-entry preparations would be smoother. Incoming mail can’t arrive by FedEx or UPS, as those don’t deliver to PO boxes. You’d be hard-pressed to find another community that sends and receives a higher volume of letters per person. Which would only increase, once people realize they can count on it being delivered more than once a month."

Back before the COVID-19 pandemic when the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) still had corrections officers, the first shift would ...

19/06/2025

"Over the past century, prison labor has become deeply entrenched in the U.S. food system. A recent investigation by the Associated Press revealed a complex web of hundreds of popular food brands and retailers — from Cargill to Tyson Foods — sourcing agricultural products from prisons. These products can include fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and even specialty items. In fact, smaller businesses also rely on prison labor, often for artisanal or niche products like goat cheese. Ultimately, these foods produced with prison labor end up on supermarket shelves without clear labeling or consumer awareness."

No image draws a more obvious connection between chattel slavery and mass incarceration in the United States than that of Black men toiling in fields under the watch of armed overseers on horseback at Angola, an antebellum plantation turned plantation prison.