9,901 articles
Prison rape in the United States
Prison rape in the United States covers sexual victimization of incarcerated people by inmates or staff. PREA (2003) mandates BJS statistics; surveys report 2.0-4.5% prevalence, allegations rising from 7,575 (2012) to 18,884 (2018).
Prison reform
Prison reform: efforts to change how prisons are built, run, and used, from John Howard's 1774 reforms and the 1779 Penitentiary Act to modern rehabilitation, solitary confinement limits, and alternatives to incarceration.
Prison sexuality
Prison sexuality covers sexual relationships, identities, coercion, and regulation among incarcerated people, including Sykes's deprivation framework, gay-for-the-stay behavior, PREA, conjugal visits, and LGBTQ+ incarceration disparities.
Prison ship
Prison ships, or prison hulks, are decommissioned vessels moored as floating prisons. Britain's convict hulks began with the 1776 Act and Duncan Campbell's Justitia, held prisoners awaiting transportation, and lasted about 80 years in England.
Prison slang
Prison slang is the informal vocabulary of incarcerated people, spanning slang, jargon, argot, and cant. It varies by institution and region, marks in-group status, and has been documented since Vaux's 1819 flash-language dictionary.
Prison uniform
Prison uniform: standardized clothing issued to incarcerated people for identification, escape prevention, and control. Includes Australian convict 'magpie' uniforms, 1820s New York stripes, Nazi camp striped uniforms, and Mandela Rules standards.
Prison warden
Prison warden: the chief executive officer of a prison, also called superintendent, institutional head, or prison manager. Holds final authority over custody, security, staff, and budget; role shifted from rehabilitation overseer to complex manager since 1975.
Prison–industrial complex
Prison-industrial complex (PIC): term for the network of government, private corporations, and institutions with interests in incarceration, in use since the 1970s. Includes private prisons holding about 8% of US prisoners, prison labor, and abolitionist critiques.
Prisoner
Prisoner: a person deprived of liberty and held in custody, also called inmate, detainee, or incarcerated person. Covers legal definitions, prisoners' rights, prison culture research, and prison slang.
Prisoner security categories in the United Kingdom
Prisoner security categories in the UK (A, B, C, D for adult men in England and Wales) classify prisoners by escape risk, harm if they escaped, and threat to prison control, after the 1966 Mountbatten Report following the George Blake escape.
Prisons in North Korea
Prisons in North Korea: kuryujang pretrial detention, kyohwaso labor prisons, and denied kwanliso political camps holding an estimated 80,000-200,000 people under documented torture and forced labor.
Prisons in Russia
Prisons in Russia: FSIN-administered system of remand prisons and correctional colonies descending from the Gulag; about 282,000 prisoners by 2026, mass wartime recruitment of convicts, chronic overcrowding and disease.
Privacy laws of the United States
Privacy laws of the United States: sectoral federal statutes (Privacy Act of 1974, HIPAA, GLBA, FCRA, COPPA), constitutional and common-law privacy protections, and the growing patchwork of state comprehensive laws including the CCPA, with no single federal privacy statute.
Private company limited by shares
Private company limited by shares (Ltd): the dominant UK company form under the Companies Act 2006, with member liability capped at unpaid share amounts, no public share offers, and over 90% of registered companies.
Private investigator
A private investigator (private detective, PI) gathers and reports information on legal or personal matters for clients. Most U.S. states license the occupation; median pay was $51,220 in May 2025; the field traces to Allan Pinkerton's 1850 agency.
Private prison
Private prison: a correctional facility run by a for-profit company (CoreCivic, formerly CCA; GEO Group) under government contract. Revived in the 1980s US amid overcrowding; holds about 8% of US incarcerated people; measured cost savings about 1%.
Private property
Private property: legally enforceable bundle of rights (use, exclusion, transfer) held by non-state actors over things; rooted in Roman dominium, split into civil-law ownership and common-law estates traditions, limited by expropriation and regulation.
Privity of contract
Privity of contract: common law rule that only parties to a contract can enforce it or be bound by it, criticized from Tweddle v Atkinson and Dunlop v Selfridge and reformed in England by the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
Priya Chaudhry
Priya Chaudhry, American criminal defense lawyer, founding partner of ChaudhryLaw PLLC in New York; represented Jonathan Majors, Jen Shah, Paul Haggis, and acquitted Adam Foss; Chambers Band 3 white-collar defense.
Priya Jhingan
Priya Jhingan (प्रिया झिंगन), Lady Cadet No. 1, first woman commissioned into the Indian Army's non-medical branch; 1989 letter to General Rodrigues, joined OTA Chennai 1992, JAG Branch officer, retired as Major.
Prizzi's Honor
Prizzi's Honor is a 1985 American black comedy crime drama directed by John Huston, starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, and Anjelica Huston, about two hitmen who fall in love.
Pro bono
Pro bono (from Latin pro bono publico, for the public good) is voluntary, unpaid professional work, chiefly free legal services. Distinguished by ABA Model Rule 6.1's 50-hour aspiration, 2013 ABA Standards, and mandatory California reporting from 2026.
Pro forma
Pro forma (Latin, "for the sake of form") means done as a formality, describes advance documents like the pro forma invoice, and labels hypothetical financial statements projecting transactions under stated assumptions.
Pro se legal representation in the United States
Pro se legal representation in the United States means appearing in court without a lawyer, also called self-representation, guaranteed federally by 28 U.S.C. § 1654. Common in prisoner petitions, family, and civil rights cases; pro se litigants fare far worse than represented ones.
Probable cause
Probable cause is the Fourth Amendment standard, undefined in the Constitution's text, that must generally be met before US police arrest, search, or obtain a warrant; governed by the Illinois v. Gates totality-of-the-circumstances test.
Probate
Probate is the court process of proving a will and administering a deceased person's estate. Rooted in English ecclesiastical courts before the 1857 Court of Probate Act, it varies widely across US states and now runs largely online in England and Wales.
Probate court
Probate court: tribunal with jurisdiction over probate of wills and administration of decedents' estates, also called surrogate, orphans', or ordinary courts; descended from English ecclesiastical and chancery courts, structurally diverse across US states, and increasingly consolidated or digitized.
Probate research
Probate research: investigating court records created after death to validate wills and distribute estates. Also heir hunting; uses wills, administrations, inventories; records held at county/surrogate courts (US) or probate registries (UK, Ireland).
Probation
Probation, from Latin probare (to test), is a court sentence served in the community under conditions and a probation officer instead of jail; founded by John Augustus in Boston in 1841, first codified in Massachusetts in 1878.
Procedure before international arbitral tribunals
Procedure before international arbitral tribunals is the set of rules governing how an arbitration between sovereign States is conducted, from tribunal constitution to the award.