prisons

The policy comes more than a year after the Missouri Department of Corrections banned people from receiving paper mail in prison.

The Prison Policy Initiative put Missouri and Kansas on a list of “famously hot states” that lack universal air conditioning in prisons. During excessively hot summer days, inmates say that it can feel like a "pizza oven" inside — and the state isn't doing enough to fix the issue.

A Missouri inmate serving life without parole on a gun crime says young inmates don’t seem to care if they come and go from prison. Plus: A growing legal movement to grant natural entities like rivers and forests legal rights is having a moment in the US. Now environmentalists are setting their sights on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

As Kansas City sees increasing rates of gun violence, some local officials and activists are looking for ways to help the formerly incarcerated reenter the work force, clean their record, and find a way out of "a cycle of violent crime.”

The Missouri legislature stumbled its way to the end of this year’s legislative session. Catch up on the biggest things lawmakers did and what was left unaddressed. Plus: Inmates at a state prison in Lansing, Kansas, rioted three years ago but nobody has been charged yet.

An amendment proposed by Republican state Rep. Ben Baker of Neosho added adults into the “Missouri Child and Adolescent Protection Act," a House bill originally designed to bar minors from accessing puberty blockers, hormones and gender-affirming surgeries.

Christopher Dunn has spent more than 30 years in prison for a 1990 murder in St. Louis, but a Missouri judge says no jury today would convict him. Why is he still in prison?

Michael Rogers was hospitalized after being violently attacked by members of the Aryan Brotherhood in retaliation for cooperating with prosecutors. His lawsuit accused the Kansas Department of Corrections of placing him in the general population at El Dorado Correctional Facility despite known threats to his safety.

A prison nurse said she felt trapped between two corrections officers as one described plans to kidnap, drug and rape her. Her attorney said there were “daily ‘rape jokes’ from other corrections officers and retaliation by the warden and other jail personnel.”

The court concluded that Missouri refused to allow paycheck deductions to starve the corrections workers’ union during negotiations — violating the “fundamental right” to collective bargaining guaranteed by the Missouri Constitution, and freedom of speech and association rights protected by the state and federal constitutions.

Six of the seven Kansas Supreme Court Justices will be on the November ballot to keep their jobs. While retention elections usually fly under the radar, the fight over abortion could raise the stakes on Nov. 8. Plus, Kansas inmates say medical care is so bad, they're suffering for years without relief.

The bill directs the Missouri Department of Corrections to establish a nursery within a women’s correctional facility by July 2025, and allow incarcerated women to stay with their newborns for their first 18 months.