After two years of advocating for relief from the deplorable conditions of confinement in the Philadelphia jails in the case Remick v. Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP), Kairys Rudovsky Messing Feinberg and Lin, Abolitionist Law Center, and Dechert LLP announce that they have reached a class action settlement with the City of Philadelphia designed to immediately address and improve those conditions for people incarcerated in the Philadelphia Department of Prisons. Today, U.S. District Court Judge Berle M. Schiller, the federal judge who overseeing the Remick case, issued an order granting preliminary approval of the global settlement agreement.

In June of 2021, lawyers bringing a class action lawsuit against the Philadelphia jails reached a then-unprecedented settlement agreement with the City of Philadelphia, resulting in the payment of $125,000 to two nonprofit bail funds. This week, this same legal team has reached another agreement that will see the City duplicating that payment.

The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP) is pleased to announce that a settlement agreement has been reached in the case of three Black men placed in solitary confinement at the Lebanon County Correctional Facility for refusing to cut their hair. The men, who were being held at the jail pretrial, were placed in solitary confinement pursuant to a jail policy that prohibited braids, cornrows, and dreadlocks but permitted other forms of long hair. The three men are all Rastafarian and wore their hair in deadlocks in accordance with their religious beliefs.