Category: Updates on Prisons
Cal Matters
California’s largest law enforcement union is urging voters to oust a state Supreme Court justice who it argues is moving to reopen criminal cases that it believes should stay closed.
The messaging in the Peace Officers Research Association of California’s campaign against Justice Kelli Evans echoes the only time in state history that voters booted California Supreme Court justices in a retention election. That happened in 1986 when voters swept out three justices over their rulings in death penalty cases. All three were appointed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who was philosophically opposed to the death penalty but did not take an official action to overturn it.
PORAC leaders acknowledge that this effort likely will not persuade enough voters to reject Evans, who Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed to the court in 2022. She is on the ballot for a retention election that would allow her to serve a 12-year-term.
Read the full story from CAL Matters here.
The Associated Press
Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection, has been moved back to prison, according to a statement released by her attorneys.
Pike, 50, was discharged from the hospital and is back at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, the women’s prison where she was housed for 30 years, her attorneys said in a statement.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery,” her attorneys said in a statement released Saturday.
Read the full Story from CBC here.
October 2, 2026
By Staff
This story was originally reported by Candice Norwood of The 19th. Meet Candice and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
For most of Kwaneta Harris’ life, menopause was not something she heard people talk about.
She didn’t learn about much beyond hot flashes, night sweats and irregular periods in her nursing school training, or at any point during her decade-long career in the medical field. Her mom never passed along tips about that particular stage of life — just as her grandmother never shared any menopause wisdom with her mom.
This legacy of silence meant that Harris’ crash course in menopause came in her late 40s, while she was incarcerated at a Texas state prison. For three years, Harris experienced a litany of confusing ailments: shoulder pain, memory loss, heart palpitations, thinning hair and mood swings. She saw specialist after specialist, each visit costing $13.55 — a substantial amount for a person with no income — and typically requiring an hours-long bus ride to a medical facility in Galveston. None of these visits resolved the fears spiraling in her mind.
Read the full story from WMNF here.
October 14, 2026
By Wendy Sawyer and Brian Nam-Sonenstein
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experiences with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? Why are they there? How are their experiences different from men’s? These are important questions, but finding the answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal legal systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly limited data that’s broken down by gender.
This report provides a detailed view of the 198,800 women and girls incarcerated in the United States and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. We pull together data from a number of government agencies and break down the number of women and girls held by each correctional system, by specific offense, in 446 state prisons, 27 federal prisons, 2,765 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 65 Indian country jails, and 148 immigration detention facilities, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. We also go beyond the numbers, including rare self-reported data from a national survey of people in prison to offer new insights about incarcerated women’s backgrounds, families, health, and experiences in prison. This report answers the questions of why and where women are locked up — and much more:
Read the full report from PPI here.