Home

prison conditions

QUESTION: Federal Funding for Solitary Confinement

Submitted by Anonymooose on Tue, 08/24/2010 - 2:51pm
question / pregunta: 

I'm looking into the Pennyslvania Dept. of Corrections use of 'restricted housing units.' I am particularly interested in founding out where funding for them comes from, and if this includes founding from the Federal government. Publicly-available information doesn't seem to disaggregated founding sources, and there is less public-available specifics on the Dept. of Corrections Budget. So far most of my research has been from the 'state-side'

So, my questions is if there is a precedent for federal funding for 'restricted housing units' or solitary confinement coming from the Federal Government?

QUESTION: media coverage of 1991 riot at P4W (Prison for Women) in Canada?

Submitted by Anonymooose on Sun, 07/27/2008 - 1:15pm
question / pregunta: 

In 1991, women at P4W (or Prison for Women, Canada's only federal prison for women) rioted. Their riot was sparked by the 4th suicide of a Native woman within a 16-month time period. They barricaded themselves in the recreation room. The state responded by sending in prison guards with tear gas and attack dogs.

Where would I find media coverage (if any) of this event? (This is NOT the same as the 1994 P4W riots where a riot squad violently "extracted" sleeping women from their cells after a physical fight between the women and guards)

ANSWER: prison population statistics and health care costs

Submitted by jim miller on Wed, 04/02/2008 - 7:22pm
answer: 

Also, double check this Radical Reference site itself - we have had many questions on prison statistics - though I don't recall finding sources that would answer this specific question, for those that I helped answer. In our search box at upper right, try: prisons and statistics (6 hits); prisoners and statistics gets 11 hits besides the first answer to this question.

Pubmed.gov gets 278 hits for the search: prison inmates and health and age; 47 hits even if you click on the "Limits" tab just to lower left of the search box, and click on "Links to free full text". I get 2 full text ones for: prison and health care and costs and age (out of 6 total); the same 2 full text (out of 8) for: prison and health care and cost and age; 20 free fulltext (of 89) for prison and cost and age groups; and 14 (58) for: prison and costs and age groups. As you probably have guessed by these examples, Pubmed does not allow truncation; and I might add that Google gets inconsistent results using the asterisk to truncate words.

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu

Related Question
question: QUESTION: Prison Population statistics and health care costs

ANSWER: Hunger strike at FCI Talahassee in 1998

Submitted by jim miller on Sat, 03/29/2008 - 1:02pm
answer: 

It would be VERY difficult to prove this did not happen, but based on our searches of newspaper databases, we have to wonder if this may be an incident that happened elsewhere. Lexis Academic, as indicated in our earlier answer, gets nothing in major news sources. Even if we select "Florida News Sources", and search: tallahassee and federal correctional (dates Jan 1, 1997-Dec 31, 1999), we get 7 very unrelated articles. Even a VERY broad search: tallahassee and federal correctional and hunger and strike (all dates) gets 1 hit, with the prison in part of a news summary, and a widely separated news note on a hunger strike at Ft. Benning in 1990.

In Factiva, the search: tallahassee and "federal correctional" and hunger and strike (all dates) gets only 3 hits. The only connection to FCI Tallahassee is a mother who staged a hunger strike at a prison camp in Coleman, Florida, and got moved to FCI Tallahassee in January 2000.

So unless the person or source that gave you this information can give you more hints about it (possibly a different prison near Tallahassee?), your only recourse would be to do an investigation of potential sources of information (people) around the Tallahassee area. Possibly Florida prisoners' rights organizations could give you names of people to ask.

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu

Related Question
question: QUESTION: Where to find information about a hunger strike at FCI Tallahassee in 1998?
Syndicate content