by Douglas Ankney
"When mom told staff something was wrong, they said to her ‘you’re fine, you’re fine’ even though there was fluid literally coming out of her belly button,” said Evangelina Perez, describing her incarcerated mother’s condition after missing another dialysis treatment. Evangelina Perez lost count of the number of times her mother, Martha Perez, called her, gasping for breath because of missed dialysis treatments for kidney failure.
The 59-year-old Martha suffered from kidney failure, diabetes, and congestive heart failure. Incarcerated at various facilities within the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) since 2005 on money laundering and drug convictions, she was sent to the Federal Medical Center Carswell (“Carswell”) in 2018.
Located in Fort Worth, Texas, Carswell is the nation’s only federal medical prison for women and houses some of the sickest women in the BOP’s custody. It is also the only female BOP facility that provides in-patient dialysis—a critical and life-sustaining treatment for kidney failure. But according to lawyers, medical experts and former BOP officials, along with court and medical records, Carswell fails to provide adequate dialysis care.
The statements and records describe missed dialysis treatments, ill-informed patients, dialysis machines that break down …
by Michael Dean Thompson
Centurion of Delaware, a former prison healthcare contractor for the state, is the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit that has been joined by the state’s Attorney General, Kathy Jennings (D). The lawsuit alleges that Centurion of Delaware profited from fraud as it was paid hundreds of millions of dollars for healthcare and drug treatment. Furthermore, the care they provided was so deficient as to cause undue suffering, which included maiming and neglect.
But the state also failed to notice the suffering of those in its charge until it was too late. Delaware’s Division of Legislative Services (DLS) was tasked with looking into the state’s oversight committee to understand how such problems might be unearthed or missed altogether. The May 2026 Staff Report provided by DLS determined, “Delaware lacks a health care oversight system with the independence, structure, and data-driven processes needed to identify systemic issues and support meaningful improvement.” The report shows that the committee has all but abdicated its oversight responsibilities.
The Adult Correction Healthcare Review Committee (ACHRC) was created in 2008 with the goal of ensuring “prisoners receive quality care while recognizing that untreated diseases could have outsized impacts both …
by Chuck Sharman
Under a settlement reached in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston County agreed to pay $280,000 to resolve claims filed by the Estate of Julian Jenkins, a detainee who died six days after his incarceration in the County’s Al Cannon Detention Center (ACDC) in March 2023.
Jenkins, 50, had been picked up on a three-year old warrant for theft of a $97 vacuum cleaner. Found to be in extremely poor health—he was not only on dialysis for late-stage kidney failure but also suffering congestive heart failure, hypertension and hypothyroidism—he was placed in the jail infirmary under the care of its contracted private healthcare provider, Wellpath LLC. Its staffers noted in Jenkins’ chart on March 10, the day after his arrest, that his condition was unstable and recommended sending him to a hospital emergency room.
But that didn’t happen. Nor did it happen three days later, when the weekend ended and the staffers returned to work at the infirmary, repeating their recommendation. Jenkins was found unresponsive in his cell the following morning and pronounced dead. An autopsy blamed the death on “natural causes,” specifically “congestive heart failure and chronic …
by Chuck Sharman
New detention standards published by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on August 10, 2026, make several changes reportedly requested by The GEO Group to boost the private prison operator’s defense against lawsuits alleging it cheats immigrant detainees out of a fair wage for their labor.
Since former GEO Group executive David Venturella assumed the helm at ICE in early June, the move is but the latest that suggests “ICE enforcement priorities are being driven by the financial interests of politically connected detention contractors,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to Venturella.
As PLN reported, GEO Group first faced a legal challenge in Washington from immigrant detainees accusing the firm of violating the law by paying them just $1 a day for their labor while held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. GEO Group called the work “voluntary,” but a federal jury didn’t buy it and in October 2021 ordered the firm to pay some 10,000 current and former detainees a total of $17.3 million in back wages—the difference between the $1-per-day payments and the state’s then-minimum wage of $13.69 per hour. GEO Group was also ordered to …
by Michael Dean Thompson
Investigative reports filed by the Citrus County, Florida Sheriff’s Office, which includes the City of Inverness, paint a disturbing picture of an oversized drug problem at the CoreCivic-run county jail. As of June 2026, the Sheriff’s Office identified 11 overdose-related calls, in contrast to just eight in all of 2025. According to Citrus County Sheriff David Vincent, they have had six incidents in only one week.
Yet, CoreCivic’s jail contract monitor reported just over six overdose incidents so far this year and none for last year. Local reporting on the overdose problem led Citrus County Fire Rescue to review their own responses to medical emergencies at the jail. CoreCivic says that on three separate incidents in 2025 and 11 through mid-June of 2026, the jail staff administered Narcan. The emergencies had been called in, however, as “cardiac arrest,” “breathing problem,” or “unconscious with abnormal breathing.” Yet, even that likely underreports the number of overdoses as onsite medical staff may handle problems that are never reported.
The Sheriff’s Office is not responsible for CoreCivic’s reporting. Vincent told the Citrus County Chronicle, “Unless it’s someone requiring CPR and resuscitation, I don’t know that I …
by Chuck Sharman
The GEO Group, Inc., paid over $104,000 in May 2026 to settle charges by the California Department of Industrial Relations Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) that workplace safety rules were violated at Golden State Annex in McFarland, where the firm incarcerates detainees pursuant to a contract with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The following month, GEO Group’s commitment to detainee safety was again in question when a report by Capital & Main revealed that McFarland police were refusing to respond to crime reports from the lockup, citing an agreement to let GEO Group investigate itself.
The settlement resolved charges filed in December 2022, accusing GEO Group of failing to maintain workplace safety to Cal/OSHA standards during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the first time that California had treated the firm and its detainee workers as employer and employees; previously, the state accepted GEO Group’s assertion that the work program was voluntary. That’s also the company’s justification for paying detainees just $1 per day for their labor, but GEO Group has so far been successfully sued for violating minimum wage laws in Washington and Colorado—prompting officials to get ICE to amend its …
by Chuck Sharman
The Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) has yet to ink another long-term contract for prisoner healthcare since backing out of a 10-year, $4 billion agreement with Wexford Health Sources in July 2025. Instead, a series of 90-day emergency contracts were given to rival Centurion Health before a one-year deal that was signed in January 2026 for $507 million.
From interviews with prisoners and their families, the Chicago Sun Times reported in July 2026 that “critically understaffed facilities struggle to deliver proper correctional medicine to the tens of thousands of incarcerated people in their care.” As the news outlet also reported, that prompted independent prison monitor John Howard Association Executive Director Jennifer Vollen Katz to wonder, “What in God’s name are we paying for?”
Not much, according to the Monitor appointed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a long-running class-action challenge to the DOC’s shoddy healthcare. As PLN reported, the Monitor’s January 2026 report criticized the prison agency for making some policy changes but few if any of the other improvements promised in a consent decree in the case, including hiring more staff, creating a medical record system …
by Chuck Sharman
San Diego County attorneys agreed to a $3 million settlement on June 30, 2026, resolving claims filed by the Estate of Keith Bach, 63, who died of diabetic ketoacidosis at the Men’s Central Jail in September 2023, after his insulin pump ran dry and its alarm went ignored by jailers and medical staff with NaphCare, the County’s contracted jail healthcare provider. The settlement resolved only the claims against the County, and those against NaphCare were settled separately for a confidential amount, the Estate’s attorney, John H. Gomez, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Deaths in County jails have fallen sharply since 2022, when the detainee mortality rate topped that of all other large California counties, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.1.] But that was of little consolation to Cecilia Bach, who represented her dead husband’s Estate in the suit that Gomez and fellow lawyers with Gomez Trial Attorneys in San Deigo filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
A heating and air conditioning technician, Bach was arrested by Chula Vista police on suspicion of vandalism and making a threat on September 25, 2023. Bach, a Type 1 …
by Jo Ellen Knott
On August 4, 2026, private prison giant CoreCivic announced a lucrative five-year, $75 million annual contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen Prairie Correctional Facility in rural Appleton, Minnesota. Vacant since 2010, the 1,600-bed facility is set to house immigrant detainees starting in late 2026, advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to expand ICE detention capacity nationwide.
The deal has drawn fierce opposition from civil rights advocates, labor organizations and state lawmakers who condemn the expansion of the private prison industry. State Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-Hennepin County), chair of the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, denounced the plan as an affront to state values, highlighting documented human rights abuses inside private detention centers. Latz pointed to Minnesota’s 2023 statutory ban on private, for-profit prisons, pledging that state officials will explore all available avenues to block the facility from operating.
Community and labor groups have similarly mobilized against the reopening. CURE, a rural advocacy organization, reported that local Appleton residents have been organizing regular demonstrations to resist turning the shuttered prison into a corporate detention hub. The public workers union AFSCME issued a scathing condemnation, asserting that private corporations should not …
by Daniel A. Rosen
My most vivid memory of Aramark’s food service inside jails and prisons came early on in my incarceration: I watched a man at the D.C. Jail dig into the entrée on his evening meal tray and uncover half a dead mouse. Those of us around him struggled with our own gag reflexes while he lost his composure, yelling about the lawsuit he was going to file, and for a guard to come document the evidence. It was traumatic, for him and for everyone close enough to see it happen. That incident was the single most disturbing episode from my time eating inside—but probably had less long-term health impact than the cumulative effect of years of eating inedible, unnutritious, poor-quality meals.
I spent about six years eating both Aramark-prepared meals in jails and state-prepared trays in prisons. If there’s one thing both systems taught me, it’s that “self-operated” and “privatized” food service are really just two different flavors of contempt. There’s a difference though between neglect funded by the public payroll and the for-profit variety that comes with a shareholder base and C-suite salaries. A new report released this spring finally puts details and …
