South Carolina Department of Corrections

South Carolina now has the lowest rate of released inmates returning to prison within three years in the country thanks to an in-depth and expanding program of job and life skills, the state prison director said.

Federal regulators are giving state prisons across the country more technological options to combat contraband cellphones, which prison officials — including South Carolina Corrections Director Bryan Stirling — have long said represent the greatest security threat behind bars.

Death penalty opponents in South Carolina are renewing calls for the state to toss out its capital punishment statute as two execution dates loom this month. The new group, South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, has asked Gov. Henry McMaster and members of the General Assembly on Wednesday to halt the two upcoming electrocutions and repeal the state's death penalty law. State prisons officials are set on Friday to electrocute Brad Sigmon. He was convicted in 2002 of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents with a baseball bat. Another inmate, Freddie Owens, is set to be executed later this month.

A federal judge in South Carolina is considering a bid to block the upcoming electrocutions of two prisoners under the state's recently revised capital punishment law. U.S. District Judge Bryan Harwell heard arguments Wednesday on whether he should halt the executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens later this month.

A South Carolina judge is considering whether to temporarily halt a new law effectively forcing death row prisoners to choose to die by either electric chair or firing squad. Attorneys for two men set to die later this month say the law is unconstitutional because their clients were sentenced under the old law that made lethal injection the default execution method.

Manning Reentry/Work Release Center used to have another name. Until 2016, this nearly 60-year-old prison on the outskirts of Columbia was called Manning…