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.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of three formerly incarcerated women with disabilities, who claim they were brutally assaulted by Sergeant John Raible at the Allegheny County Jail. The complaint describes numerous assaults by Raible against people with disabilities involving the overuse of pepper spray, tasers and placing people with disabilities in a restraint chair for hours without food, water, medicine, or breaks to relieve themselves.

The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP) filed a civil rights complaint on behalf of a man who says that a misdiagnosis nearly led to his death. The lawsuit alleges that Federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) employees incorrectly identified Edward Kavanaugh, 39, as a Type II Diabetic in 2011, rather than acknowledging his previous diagnosis of Type I Diabetes.

E.D. is a Honduran woman who, after fleeing violence and sexual assault, was detained at Berks County Residential Center which Berks County operates under a contract with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) while seeking asylum with her three-year-old son. While detained, E.D., who was 19 at the time, was sexually abused by 40-year-old immigration staff member Daniel Sharkey. Sharkey was ultimately convicted of the institutional sexual assault. Other employees at the immigration detention center failed to intervene or protect E.D., and when Sharkey’s behavior came to light, staff members retaliated against E.D. The case is against Daniel Sharkey, as well as other Berks County employees.