A silly holiday photo op has a small amount of political value for Sanders, while allowing a sliver of grace and humanity to a man who the justice system failed decades ago does not.
"My goal was to get a college degree. What I got was a changed heart," said one of 18 students who graduated with bachelor's degrees in Christian Studies from The College at Mid-America program at the Varner prison unit in Grady Friday.
The state Correction Department issued a news release saying it was hopeful that new technology would allow jamming of cell phone signals from housing areas of the state prisons and thus end their use for bringing contraband.
A football tossed over the fence at the Grimes Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction in Newport was received by the correctional officers there, the ADC reports on its Facebook page. Inside the ball: two kinds of drugs and cellphones.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nonprofit that works against the entanglement of government with religion, has written the Arkansas Correction Department to question a new initiative to allow Varner inmates to earn a college degree in Christian studies to prepare to become ministers.
The state Correction Department, 60 years after the fact, will unveil a memorial on the grounds of its Wrightsville unit, the site March 5, 1959 of a fire that killed 21 boys locked inside the Negro Boys Industrial School.
KARK reports that the state Correction Department has temporarily stopped searching for midazolam, one of the drugs used in executions. That likely means no further executions until the law can be changed to provide more secrecy in the process.