Judge rules Indiana prison rules don't follow an inmate to Alaska

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit from an Indiana prisoner held in Seward who argued that Indiana's prison conditions, including email on a tablet, should apply to him.

Josiah Lumumba Boyd is serving a 35-year Indiana sentence for attempted murder but is doing his time at Spring Creek Correctional Center "by special agreement," according to a 2023 federal order in Indiana. States can send prisoners to each other's prisons under interstate corrections compacts.

Representing himself, Boyd sued Spring Creek Superintendent James Milburn and Michael Bryant in January. He argued that Indiana's compact law entitled him to tablet email and other items Indiana inmates are allowed to have.

U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason disagreed. "Plaintiff is incorrect that Indiana's conditions of confinement apply to Plaintiff when he is incarcerated in Alaska," she wrote.

Indiana's own law, she noted, says a transferred inmate "shall be treated equally with such similar inmates of the receiving state as may be confined in the same institution." Here, that means Alaska inmates at Spring Creek, and Boyd didn't claim he was treated any differently than they are. Alaska's compact law says the same.

Gleason also pointed to a 1998 federal appeals court ruling that the compact can't be the basis for the kind of civil rights lawsuit Boyd filed. She adopted a magistrate judge's recommendation in full and dismissed the case without letting Boyd amend it again.

The dismissal counts as a strike against Boyd. Under federal law, a prisoner with three strikes can't file a civil lawsuit without paying the filing fee up front unless he's in "imminent danger of serious physical injury," as Gleason put it in an October order in another case. Wednesday's order doesn't say how many strikes Boyd has.