Featured Cases
In April 2020, ten people incarcerated in facilities in the Philadelphia Department of Prisons filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against the city and the department over the conditions of the city’s jails.
PILP and its legal partners filed a class action lawsuit alongside six incarcerated people challenging solitary confinement in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Each plaintiff has documented mental illness diagnoses that have significantly worsened throughout repeated and prolonged periods of solitary confinement. The conditions are so harrowing that many in solitary confinement attempt suicide multiple times. The plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief and damages.
A lawsuit against George W. Hill Correctional Facility on behalf of a man who is being denied adequate treatment for his opioid use disorder (OUD)
A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of people with psychiatric disabilities incarcerated in Allegheny County Jail (ACJ). The lawsuit alleges severe and systemic constitutional violations, as well as violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for the jail’s failure to provide adequate mental health care and its discriminatory and brutal treatment of people with psychiatric disabilities.
In February 2020, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP) filed a motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of Eric S. McGill, Jr., a pretrial detainee at Lebanon County Correctional Facility (LCCF) who had been held in solitary confinement for over a year solely because he refused to cut off his dreadlocks. Lebanon County’s practice of punishing people who refuse to cut their dreadlocks, without allowing for religious exemptions, violates Mr. McGill’s rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).
The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender woman who says she is being denied vital healthcare, including gender affirmation surgery, by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC). The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiff, a 46-year-old transgender woman currently incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, has suffered extreme distress and suicidal ideation, including instances of self-harm, since receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in 1998.
View other cases here.
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE
The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project is monitoring the response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) in Pennsylvania prisons and jails. If you feel that an incarcerated person’s rights are being violated as a result of any new procedures or conditions at an institution, please contact us.
Please also note that due to public health restrictions at this time, PILP has very limited in-office staff. Therefore, the intake process may be delayed, but we will continue to do the best we can under these unique circumstances.
PILP’S LATEST ACTIONS RE: CORONAVIRUS IN PA PRISONS AND JAILS
After months of advocating for relief from the deplorable conditions in the Philadelphia jails in the case Remick v. Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP), Kairys Rudovsky Messing Feinberg and Lin, Abolitionist Law Center, and Dechert LLP announce that the Philadelphia prisons will resume some in-person friend and family visits with incarcerated people starting next week.
In an unprecedented settlement agreement, the City of Philadelphia (“City”) has agreed to make a one-time payment of $125,000 to the Philadelphia Bail Fund and the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund, to resolve violations of Court Orders requiring out-of-cell time for people incarcerated in Philadelphia Department of Prisons facilities.
The Allegheny County Jail has agreed to begin administering COVID-19 tests to everyone admitted to the jail before they are moved into general population housing in response to demands from lawyers representing incarcerated persons in a class action lawsuit challenging the jail’s failure to protect them from COVID-19.
Some Current Issues we are addressing
Restrictive visitation policies
Placement of mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement in the Special Management Unit at United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg
Prolonged shackling of inmates in the Special Management Unit at United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg
COVID-19
Excessive use of force
Sexual assault of inmates within institutions
Prison overcrowding
Freedom of Religion
Unlawful shackling of women during childbirth
*Learn more about our legal impact here
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