Results tagged “prisoners”

Plaxico Burress Has a Rough Start in Jail

If Plaxico Burress fans want an up-to-date jersey of the Super Bowl hero wide receiver, they're going to have to ditch those #17 duds in favor of his new number, 09-R-3260. The former Giant star left court and headed to Ulster Correctional Facility where he was given a shave and a haircut and strip searched out of the jeans he was wearing. Burress neglected to arrive at prison in the notorious sweatpants that sent him there.

Cops Warned About Cell Phones Used As Weapons

An unofficial memo is circulating through NYPD precincts warning officers to be on guard against perpetrators who conceal blades in their cell phones and other hand-held devices. The handout shows how you can easily hide a razor blade in the battery compartment of a T-Mobile Sidekick, and also reminds officers about the recent arrest of a suspect in Harlem who converted his cell phone into a stun gun. A police source tells amNY that the improvised weapon "was unlikely to cause much harm, as the jolt was described as low-level." And then there are the hospital meal trays you've got to watch out for! Cops assigned to guard hospitalized prisoners are being warned that meal trays have a vanity mirror that can easily be fashioned into a makeshift shiv. The vanity mirror is in a second-level compartment and that "can pop up for easy use by a patient." Of course, one way to eliminate that threat would be to serve the prisoners' meals on regular trays, but then officers would be forced to guard prisoners with food stuck between their teeth, and we don't pay them enough for that.

Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris was on hand last night for a Tribeca Film Festival screening of his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, a nuanced exploration of the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those familiar with Morris’s innovative oeuvre won’t be surprised to hear that, far from a tendentious indictment of the perpetrators, his film is a circumspect consideration of some of the factors that contributed to those infamous photographs of humiliation. [Today, the NY Times' movie critic Manohla Dargis calls it a "blockbuster of a documentary."]

One of the NJ prisoners who escaped from a Union County jail by chiseling through cement blocks (hiding their progress by taping posters over the growing hole) three weeks ago was captured last night. Thanks to a tip, police found Jose Espinosa in an apartment just a few blocks away from the jail.

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