In April 2020, ten people incarcerated in facilities in the Philadelphia Department of Prisons filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against the city and the department over the conditions of the city’s jails.

A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of people with psychiatric disabilities incarcerated in Allegheny County Jail (ACJ). The lawsuit alleges severe and systemic constitutional violations, as well as violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for the jail’s failure to provide adequate mental health care and its discriminatory and brutal treatment of people with psychiatric disabilities.

PILP and its legal partners filed a class action lawsuit alongside six incarcerated people challenging solitary confinement in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Each plaintiff has documented mental illness diagnoses that have significantly worsened throughout repeated and prolonged periods of solitary confinement.  The conditions are so harrowing that many in solitary confinement attempt suicide multiple times.  The plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief and damages.  

A lawsuit against George W. Hill Correctional Facility on behalf of a man who is being denied adequate treatment for his opioid use disorder (OUD)

In February 2020, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP) filed a motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of Eric S. McGill, Jr., a pretrial detainee at Lebanon County Correctional Facility (LCCF) who had been held in solitary confinement for over a year solely because he refused to cut off his dreadlocks. Lebanon County’s practice of punishing people who refuse to cut their dreadlocks, without allowing for religious exemptions, violates Mr. McGill’s rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).

The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender woman who says she is being denied vital healthcare, including gender affirmation surgery, by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC). The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiff, a 46-year-old transgender woman currently incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, has suffered extreme distress and suicidal ideation, including instances of self-harm, since receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in 1998.