Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (https://kycir.org/tag/jailers/)
Elected Kentucky jailers have capitalized on the e-cigarette boom by forming companies that sell vaping products to inmates in other jails or by handing lucrative business in their own facilities to friends and family, KyCIR and ProPublica have found.
Several topics of our coverage merited debate in the most recent legislative session. Here’s an update on what became law and what didn’t pass through the statehouse.
A bill to hold Kentucky’s no-jail jailers accountable for their work passed through the legislature this week and is awaiting Gov. Matt Bevin’s approval.
Damon Hickman’s guilty plea marks the latest chapter in a long saga of abuse in a Kentucky jail, and underscores the costs of such misconduct.
The federal investigation into the Boyd County Detention Center is a rarity, only the third such investigation of a Kentucky jail or prison in the past 36 years.
Grant county officials have decided to keep its troubled jail open, abandoning a months-old plan to shutter the facility.
A federal judge says there is evidence that a doctor, a nurse and the Montgomery County jailer all demonstrated “deliberate indifference” to the needs of an inmate who died in the jail. The inmate was featured in a KyCIR series last year on jail health care woes.
WFPL’s Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting has received top industry honors from a national journalism organization.
A panel to review deaths and near-deaths in Kentucky’s correctional facilities would be created by legislation introduced in the state House of Representatives. The proposal was sparked by KyCIR’s investigations into jail deaths.
Kentucky jailers who don’t have a jail to run would have to file quarterly progress reports with their county fiscal courts under a bill that passed the state Senate on Tuesday. The bill follows KyCIR’s 2015 investigation into no-jail jailers.