One down, two to go.

Today we’re happy to announce the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) has agreed to stop segregating prisoners with HIV. South Carolina and Alabama remain the only states that continue to segregate prisoners with HIV.

These segregation policies are a result of decades-old fear and hysteria and paranoia about HIV. As Rachel Maddow and the ACLU’s Margaret Winter pointed out last year,

[…]During a federal trial in the mid-1990s, an Alabama warden testified that the segregation policy was an essential security measure since people with HIV were as dangerous as rattlesnakes…A warden at the women’s prison in Alabama testified that it was too dangerous to allow prisoners with HIV to attend chapel because they might leap from their seats and bite someone to deliberately infect them with the disease.

But public and correctional health experts agree that this fear is totally unfounded, and there is no medical basis for segregating prisoners with HIV within correctional facilities. Regardless of this, since 1987, MDOC has performed mandatory HIV tests on all prisoners entering the state prison system, and has permanently housed all male prisoners with HIV in a segregated unit at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state’s highest security prison. So prisoners who would normally be housed in low-custody facilities were forced  to serve their sentences in more violent, more expensive prisons, because they have HIV.

This change in policy is just the latest success after years of advocacy by the ACLU’s National Prison Project and Human Rights Watch on behalf of prisoners with HIV. In 2001, MDOC ended its policy of excluding prisoners with HIV from in-prison vocational, educational and religious programs. And in 2004, as a result of a class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of all Mississippi prisoners with HIV, MDOC ended its policy of excluding prisoners with HIV from the state’s work release and community corrections programs.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that a new Pew Center report has found a slight decline in state prison populations, attributable, in part, to states looking to save money by incarcerating less people. This is done mostly by keeping parolees from landing back in prison, which is accomplished by providing the kinds of rehabilitative services that were once denied prisoners with HIV, such as education and work release programs.

So these reforms not only end discriminatory and unjust policies, but they’re grounded in good correctional and fiscal policy as well.

So Alabama and South Carolina, what are you waiting for?

The last signs of Snowpocalypse have long since disappeared, and the cherry blossoms are starting to peek through. Spring is making its triumphant return. But even though we’ve got an extra hour of daylight to look forward to, some folks in our nation’s capital seem determined to stay out of the sun.

Which is too bad — it is Sunshine Week, after all.

At best, you could say that President Obama’s promise of increased government transparency has had mixed results. On the one hand, the president took steps in the right direction when he issued a new government directive and an executive order to reduce secrecy. On the other hand, the government continues to withhold key information about everything from the prisoners at Bagram, to the use of predator drones to target and kill people, to deaths in immigration detention. And according to an Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reports filed by 17 government agencies, use of almost all of the FOIA’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public actually rose in fiscal year 2009.

And it just keeps coming. Just this week — Sunshine Week! — in response to a long-standing ACLU FOIA lawsuit for information related to the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas, the CIA actually blacked out a letter that was already public. Michael Isikoff has images and commentary over at Newsweek.

The American people need to know the extent of abuses that have taken place in their name. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we can’t sweep the abuses of the past under a rug. It’s time to do some spring cleaning, and bring the facts into the light.

But you’re just not playing by the rules. Today, the ACLU and North Carolina Justice Center filed a lawsuit against Captain Charlie’s Seafood, Inc., for unlawfully discriminating against female employees by restricting them to certain work solely because they’re women.

The phrase “equal pay for equal work” is a familiar refrain in the United States. But Captain Charlie’s recruited our three plaintiffs in Mexico, inviting them to process seafood in North Carolina as guestworkers under the H-2B visa program. Migrant workers like our Spanish-speaking plaintiffs tend to be linguistically isolated, housed in remote, rural areas, and unaware of U.S. labor laws and the resources available to underpaid workers. And women often face additional exploitation because employers believe they don’t need to earn as much money as men, or that they’re not capable of performing the same work. For these workers, sex discrimination is an everyday occurrence, whether it’s in the form of job restrictions, pregnancy discrimination, or sexual harassment on the job.

But our clients are speaking up. They knew when they arrived at Captain Charlie’s that it wasn’t fair they were only allowed to do “crab picking” work, which entails removing and cleaning the meat from the cooked crabs. The men they worked with were allowed to cook the crabs, carry them to the tables, and handle the crab traps—all jobs that the women were physically capable of doing too. There was more of the “men’s work” available, and the women sometimes had to sit around with nothing to do, passing up opportunities to earn money they had counted on making for their families and themselves. After several months of this discrimination, Captain Charlie’s laid off approximately 20 women.

To add insult to injury, Captain Charlie’s refused to reimburse the women for visa fees and the cost of travel from Mexico. (The company is required under the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover these fees and costs when workers’ expenses are high enough that their net earnings fall below the minimum wage.)

Today’s lawsuit charges that Captain Charlie’s discriminated against the women on the basis of sex by restricting them to certain work, in violation of North Carolina public policy, which prohibits such gender-based employment decisions. The lawsuit also charges that the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the North Carolina Wage and Hour Act (PDF) in underpaying workers and failing to reimburse them for travel and visa expenses. The women have also filed charges of unlawful discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that the gender-based job restrictions violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

We hope that our plaintiffs’ demand for equal pay and equal work will echo throughout North Carolina’s seafood processing industry, and beyond.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that Captain Charlie’s is required by the U.S. Department of Labor and the North Carolina Employment Security Commission to cover the cost to bring the women to North Carolina from Mexico. That was incorrect. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires the company to cover these fees and costs when workers’ expenses are high enough that their net earnings fall below the minimum wage.