Nebraska state prisons are in a state of chaos that is endangering the health, safety, and lives of prisoners and staff on a daily basis. For over twenty years, Nebraska prisons have been overcrowded, under-resourced, and understaffed. Prisoners are consistently deprived of adequate health care, including medical, dental, and mental health care, and denied accommodations for their disabilities. Nebraska state prisoners, including juveniles, suffer in harsh isolation units for excessive terms, sometimes lasting for years. These harms must end.

On July 24, U.S. District Court Chief Judge William Smith dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Rhode Island Training School for Youth, which challenged the deplorable conditions at the institution as violations of the Eighth Amendment. This landmark case is now closed at the behest of the ACLU and the state of Rhode Island because the institution has made the improvements in education, medical care, vocational training, the physical plant, meals, and other conditions required by the consent decree between the state and the plaintiffs.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the federal Bureau of Prisons for refusing to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to its officials’ visit in 2002 to a CIA detention site in Afghanistan, their positive assessment of the conditions, and the training they provided to the site’s administrators. Code-named COBALT and also called “the Salt Pit,” the site held people suspected of terrorism, and they were tortured there, according to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report that was declassified in 2014.

Despite a federal court order from 2008, the Maricopa County jails – overseen by Sheriff Joe Arpaio –continue to skirt their constitutional responsibility for detainees’ mental health. On April 1, 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona – which have represented the detainees at the Maricopa County jails for close to 20 years – filed a motion to enforce the 2008 order. Many detainees with mental illnesses were still suffering unnecessarily from the scarcity and poor quality of the jails’ care.

In June 2015, a federal court decided in favor of the ACLU position in Walnut Grove. With this federal court ruling, the Mississippi Department of Corrections will be held accountable to their Constitutional mandate to protect the prisoners of Walnut Grove from violence. A victory for prisoner’s rights, this decision marks a major blow to the for-profit industrial complex. In April 2015, in federal court, the ACLU National Prison Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and McDuff & Byrd are all participating in a hearing that seeks to prove that the Mississippi Department of Corrections is violating the Eighth Amendment rights of all prisoners at Walnut Grove Correctional Facility to protection from violence. The department contracts with a for-profit prison operator, Management and Training Corporation (MTC), to run Walnut Grove. Over the years it has been proven that MTC has failed to implement fundamental security measures to ensure prisoner safety, which resulted in two major riots in 2014 that left 25 prisoners seriously injured. Three years ago, the Mississippi Department of Corrections agreed to take specific measures to reduce the violence at Walnut Grove when it settled a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU National Prison Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The 2012 case decided that children under the supervision of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) would no longer be housed in a privately run prison or subjected to brutal solitary confinement. The lawsuit charged that conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, operated by GEO Group, Inc., were unconstitutional.