NEWS
April 26, 1996 | From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Alabama's prison system is preparing to snap shackles around the ankles of female prisoners, creating female chain gangs in the state that revived male leg-iron crews last year. Prison officials said the female chain gangs would help resolve lawsuits from male inmates challenging the exclusively male work units. Stephen Dees, the warden at Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women near Montgomery, Ala., is developing the chain-gang policy. Women could be working in leg irons as early as June.
NEWS
August 24, 1991 | From Associated Press
Prison officials reported some progress Friday in talks with Cuban inmates, two days after the prisoners grabbed a high-security unit and took 10 hostages on the eve of being deported to their homeland. Prescription medication was delivered Thursday night for two hostages and two prisoners through a grille that covers an entry in the high-security unit at Talladega Federal Correctional Institution. Warden Roger Scott said the medication was for "non-life-threatening" conditions.
NEWS
June 21, 1996 | From Associated Press
A year after becoming the first state to bring back chain gangs, Alabama has yielded to pressure and permanently banned the practice. "They realized that chaining them together was inefficient, that it was unsafe," said attorney Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose lawsuit challenged chain gangs as cruel punishment.