On June 24, 2025, Florida’s Seventh Judicial Circuit Court for Putnam County ruled that Centurion of Florida, LLC was acting as the functional equivalent of a state agency when it contracted with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide healthcare to prisoners; therefore, it was obligated under the state’s public records law to provide a copy of a settlement agreement reached with a dead prisoner’s estate to the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News.

HRDC filed its request in June 2022, two months after Centurion settled with the Estate of Curtis Dettmann. The 31-year-old prisoner died in January 2018, days after arriving at DOC’s Reception and Medical Center (RMC) in Lake Butler. Centurion staffers providing medical care at the prison allegedly ignored his infective colitis as he quickly vomited away nearly 30 pounds and died, according to the complaint later filed on his behalf under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. See: McCrimmon v. Centurion of Fla., USDC (M.D. Fla.), Case No. 3:20-cv-00036.

Centurion refused HRDC’s request, arguing that it was a private entity not subject to the requirements of Florida’s Public Records Act (PRA), ch.119 § 01, et seq., Fla. Stats. ...

On February 17, 2025, Paul Wright, Executive Director of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), signed an agreement accepting a $480,000 payment to resolve claims for records made in a suit filed in state court against Centurion of New Mexico LLC, the contracted medical provider to the state Corrections Department (NMCD).

HRDC, the nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, won a massive trove of records from Centurion in a state court in 2024, after the medical contractor fought hard to keep them secret. As PLN reported, those documents revealed that Centurion had made almost $8.4 million in payouts to settle 47 suits filed over substandard medical care to NMCD prisoners—including 13 cases that resulted in prisoner deaths. All of that botched care was delivered during a relatively short period, too; Centurion won the contract at NMCD in June 2016 and held it just 40 months. 

HRDC then moved for sanctions, and the state court agreed that Centurion was liable under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), NM Stat § 14-2-1 (2023), for wrongfully withholding the documents—doing so long enough to owe $148,000 plus legal fees and costs. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.1; and p.19.] ...

In April 2025, the Tennessee General Assembly passed SB 1115, legislation that imposes penalties on privately-operated prisons if they have death rates twice as high as the rate at an “equivalent state-operated facility.” The bill was signed into law by Governor Bill Lee (R) on May 9, 2025.

The only private prisons in the state are managed by CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), and include the South Central Correctional Facility, Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, Hardeman County Correctional Facility and Whiteville Correctional Facility. Numerous news reports and state audits have found high levels of violence, staff turnover, and other problems at privately run prisons in Tennessee, particularly at Trousdale Turner which is currently the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

Pursuant to the newly-enacted law, if private prisons have mortality rates twice as high as equivalent state facilities, the state Department of Correction (DOC) “shall reduce the population at such facility by ten percent (10%),” and “the reduction in population must continue until the [DOC] determines that the conditions leading to the reduction have been corrected.” Since for-profit prison operators like CoreCivic are paid on a per-diem basis according to the number of prisoners they ...

An obscure consulting firm in Jacksonville, Florida was awarded a $78 million contract in early July 2025 to provide a range of critical services at a hastily built immigrant detention center in the Everglades, dubbed by state officials as “Alligator Alcatraz.” The firm, Critical Response Strategies LLC (CRS), employed staffers who were visible at the facility, which was constructed on environmentally threatened land seized by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) through invoking an immigration “state of emergency” issued in 2023. 

As Jacksonville-based news outlet The Tributary reported, the state of emergency had also suspended many requirements for state contracts and permits, allowing for an increase of no-bid contracts with little oversite. CRS has reportedly been tapped to handle staffing, training, and security for the so-called Alligator Alcatraz. While the firm was found to have been once linked to one of DeSantis’s largest financial supporters, parts of CRS’s website—as well as a copy of its contract with the state—appear to have been taken off the internet. 

Since opening on July 3, Alligator Alcatraz has faced intense criticism from Democrats, environmentalists, Indigenous activists (the Miccosukee and Seminole Nations both claim the area as ancestral lands), and immigrant rights groups. Within the ...

On July 4, 2025,President Donald Trump (R) signed into law a budget reconciliation bill (H.R. 1) that drastically increased funding for immigration enforcement and policing. Originally titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the megabill awarded a whopping $170 billion over the next decade to bolster an already sprawling border security and deportation infrastructure. According to the American Immigration Council, $75 billion of these funds was allocated to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it by far the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. 

Nearly $30 billion of ICE’s new budget will go toward hiring a target of 10,000 deportation officers, modernizing its fleet of planes, and handing out bonuses to retain current staff. The remaining $45 billion is expected to be spent on building or reopening immigration detention centers, an effort that could result in the daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens–a number that is roughly double the agency’s current capacity. Most of the new detention facilities will likely be run and operated by ICE contractors, such as CoreCivic and The GEO Group, both of which were significant donors to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. 

Beyond granting a major boon to private prison ...

As of 2016, CoreCivic—formerly Corrections Corp. of America—contracted with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to operate five facilities. In August of that year, a report by the Inspector General for the Dept. of Justice found the company’s prisons “had more inmate violence (by 35%), inmate-on-inmate assaults (by 64%), sexual assaults by inmates on staff (by 750%), and suicide attempts and self-mutilations (by 37.5%) than did prisons run by the Bureau itself.” The Deputy Attorney General subsequently issued a memo stating such poor performance justified reducing the use of private, for-profit prisons. CoreCivic’s stock “plummeted,” and shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

During that litigation the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee entered a protective order that allowed the parties to designate discovery materials as “confidential” and file them under seal. Hundreds of documents and pleadings were sealed before the case settled in November 2021—for a massive $56 million, as PLN reported [See: PLN, October 2021, p.52]—with CoreCivic claiming confidentiality for records ranging from its “use of subcontractors” to its “staffing policies and the financial incentives for making certain staffing decisions.”

In November 2023, The Nashville Banner, a local newspaper, intervened and moved ...

Alabama: On Sunday, June 15, 2025, state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Airika Dorsey was arrested for allegedly smuggling food to a prisoner at St. Clair Correctional Facility, according to WABM in Birmingham. The DOC confirmed that Dorsey was caught in the act and subsequently booked into the St. Clair County Jail in Pell City. She faces third-degree charges of promoting prison contraband. Dorsey immediately resigned from her post and bonded out of jail. The DOC said that its investigation was ongoing, and further charges could be filed.

Alabama: James C. Burden, a Barbour County Jail guard, was arrested on May 30, 2025, and charged with two counts of promoting prison contraband. Burden worked as a jailer at the same Clayton lockup where he was being held on a $5,500 bond, according to WRBL in nearby Columbus, Georgia. No other details were available, but in a post to his Facebook page, Sheriff Tyrone Smith warned that contraband smuggling “is not and never will be tolerated and there will be consequences!”

Alabama: WAFF in Huntsville reported that former Morgan County jailer Kimberly Woodruff was accused of using jail trustees to pass notes and a vape pen to her brother, who is ...

In 2020, the Arizona chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and two state prisoners filed a federal class-action suit, challenging the state’s use of privately-operated prisons on a variety of constitutional grounds. The district court dismissed the case for failure to state a claim in January 2022. Plaintiffs appealed, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision on May 21, 2024, rejecting each of the Plaintiffs’ claims.

After first determining that the NAACP had organizational standing to sue, the appellate court summarized the arguments raised in the complaint: “That private prisons are inferior to state-run prisons because they are motivated by profit, leading them to cut costs and resulting in diminished safety and security as well as reduced programing and services.” The profit motive also provided a financial incentive “to keep prisoners incarcerated longer … by manipulating disciplinary proceedings.” 

Around 20% of Arizona state prisoners are held in privatized facilities, but the appellate Court found that the Plaintiffs had not “plausibly alleged” that incarceration in private prisons violates their due process rights. Serving time in for-profit facilities did not constitute an “atypical and significant hardship” ...

Under a limited writ of mandamus issued by the Supreme Court of Ohio on October 17, 2024, the Columbiana County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) must obtain records from the private contractor operating the county jail and disclose them pursuant to a public records request. Sheriff Brian McLaughlin had argued that the records were in the custody of Correctional Solutions Group (CSG), which as a private firm is not subject to such a request. But the high Court called foul on that feint and ordered him to get the records and disclose them to the requester, now-state prisoner Terry Brown, or else certify within 21 days that no responsive records exist.

In August 2023, Brown submitted two public records requests to the CCSO, in care of Sheriff McLaughlin. His first request listed 10 items seeking “[e]mployees’ names and positions held while working at the Columbiana County Jail during the time period of January 1, 2017, through July 1, 2018.” Brown’s second request listed another 15 items pertaining to current “[p]olicy information on Inmate Intake/Booking and Retention of records,” to include the “booking of inmates showing signs of intoxication, impairment, injury, or psychological problems.” In both requests, Brown also sought “related records-retention policies.” ...

Before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) took office, his “border czar” Tom Homan worked as a consultant for GEO Group, Inc., one of the largest operators of immigrant detention facilities in the country. 

The revelation, as the Washington Post reported, raises questions about the influence that private sector companies could wield as the administration rolls out its crackdown on immigration. According to the report, Homan received more than $5,000—although his pay could have been much higher—for work conducted in connection with GEO Care, a division of the company that monitors releases and offers rehabilitation services for prisoners. 

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to deport up to 20 million people from the country—nearly double the estimated population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Since his inauguration, Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with the rate of arrests and deportations conducted by federal immigration authorities. 

In an effort to ramp up deportations, the administration set an aggressive new goal in May 2025 of 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests per day. To keep up that pace of detentions, federal authorities have turned to already overcrowded federal prisons and local jails to imprison people targeted by immigration raids—and ...