Florida Institutional Legal Services

08/21/2022

The Florida Department of Corrections sent a directive to ban family members and loved ones of prisoners from wearing T-shirts that mention visitation over fear the shirts pose security threats.

06/07/2022

More bad news for those seeking postconviction relief with claims of ineffective trial and postconviction counsel.

The Supreme Court decided years ago that a federal habeas court could consider an ineffective assistance of trial counsel claim even if it hadn’t been fully presented to state courts, so long as it was the fault of state post-conviction counsel. But SCOTUS recently decided that a federal court gen...

04/22/2022

April is National Fair Housing Month, the month we celebrate the passage of the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968, and its ongoing effort to ameliorate the inequities caused by discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. April is also the month that President Biden proclaimed as S...

04/19/2022

Are you an attorney with federal litigation experience? Do you want to help us end solitary confinement of children and adults in Florida? We are hiring!

Florida Legal Services, Inc. is now hiring for the position of Prisoner Rights Impact Litigation Attorney in Orlando. Apply today.

04/18/2022

Check out this recap from the Alachua County Law Enforcement Accountability Coalition.

03/08/2022

"Leadership played down the danger and played up their capacity to deal with it"

Federal prisons saw a significant rise in deaths during the pandemic years, NPR found. Of those who died from COVID-19, nearly all were elderly or had health conditions, and many had tried to get out.

03/06/2022

"Three Florida Department of Corrections officers will get the inside view of a prison cell after their sentencing for the beating of a handcuffed inmate."

At the end of a three-man beating, a Florida prison guard kicked an inmate in the head and face 15 times, spat on him and called him the n-word at Hamilton Correctional Institution.

02/24/2022

02/05/2022

Fight clubs, solitary confinement and neglect make juveniles angrier and more violent.

01/05/2022

With our co- counsel from Florida Justice Institute and Southern Poverty Law Center we are continuing this fight to stop the solitary confinement of children in Florida.

A federal appeals court has rejected an attempt by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice to block a psychiatrist from talking to children without parental consent as part of a class-action lawsuit over solitary confinement in detention facilities. The department went to the 11th U. S. Circuit C...

12/16/2021

12/14/2021

Malcolm X writes in his autobiography of how he spent hours reading in the library at Norfolk Prison in Massachusetts. Now the cell that the human rights activist is believed to have occupied is set to be transformed into a library itself, thanks to the work of the poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts.

The first of 1,000 planned ‘Freedom Libraries’ opens in the Massachusetts prison where the campaigner was incarcerated in the 1940s