In a case with enormous implications for Oklahoma jail detainees, the state Supreme Court ruled on March 11, 2025, that a jail’s subcontracted medical providers are “employees” for the purposes of the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act (GTCA), O.S.Supp.2014, §152(7)(b)(7), and are therefore immune from liability.

That ruling ended an attempt by the Estate of Brenda Jean Sanders to hold officials liable for her death at the Creek County Jail in November 2016. The suit that Sanders’ Estate filed was initially dismissed by a state trial court which found that the jail’s contracted medical provider, Turn Key Health Clinics, LLC, was immune under GTCA. The state Court of Civil Appeals, Division II, reversed that decision, and Defendants appealed. The state Supreme Court then vacated the appellate ruling.

First, the Court found that the trial court’s dismissal was not a final appealable order because the Estate could have amended its complaint, though it did not do so. That made the appeal untimely. The governing state statute, 12 O.S. §2012(G), provides an exception for untimely appeals only “in cases of excusable neglect,” the Supreme Court noted, “but no exception expressly exists in §2012(G) for an interlocutory order ripening into a ‘final judgment ...

When government agencies—including corrections departments—enter contracts with private companies, they typically go through a competitive bidding process, beginning with a Request for Proposals (RFP). This ensures that taxpayers have access to information used to award government contracts, providing a level of fiscal responsibility. However, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC), under the leadership of Burl Cain, has entered into four no-bid emergency contracts since 2020 worth nearly $300 million—all with the same healthcare contractor, VitalCore Health Strategies.

In July 2020, after the DOC’s former contractor, Centurion Health, opted to terminate its contract to provide healthcare services to the state’s prison population, Cain declared an emergency under the Public Procurement Review Board’s rules and regulations. That then allowed him to sign a no-bid, $56 million contract with VitalCore on August 12, 2020.

By the time that contract expired in October 2021, it might be assumed that the emergency had ended and the competitive bidding process would resume. It didn’t. Another one-year emergency contract was issued to VitalCore, again bypassing the competitive bidding process. That contract was valued at $66 million, based on its per diem rate of $8.90 for each of the DOC’s 20,300 prisoners.

When that contract ended in 2022, ...

uring a hearing on April 9, 2025, Florida lawmakers pieced together an elaborate money trail from the former owner of prison and jail medical giant Centurion Health, which pumped $10 million into an ultimately successful effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to tank a 2024 ballot initiative legalizing marijuana use and possession.

Centene Corp. was Centurion’s owner from 2018 to 2023, overlapping the period from 2016 to 2021 when it was accused of overbilling Florida for providing managed care services under the state Medicaid program. Centene also owned Centurion Health which had a contract worth $1.639 billion to provide health care to Florida state prisoners. To settle the overbilling charges, Centene agreed in September 2024 to a $67,048,611 payment—$10 million of which Shevaun Harris, Secretary of the state Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), directed the company to pay directly to Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit run by DeSantis’ wife, Casey DeSantis.

The foundation’s stated mission is to help low-income Floridians meet medical expenses. But Hope Florida then wrote two $5 million checks the following month to political action committees allied with the Governor’s effort to beat back Proposition 3, the proposed constitutional amendment that would have expanded legal ...

In a lawsuit filed by a former Florida prisoner who was released to die from prostate cancer that private prison healthcare giant Centurion allegedly ignored, officials with the company agreed to an undisclosed settlement and claims were dismissed on March 27, 2025. That left claims by Elmer Williams against other defendants from the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Williams, 56, was 32 when sentenced to DOC custody for a nonviolent burglary conviction. He was treated for prostate cancer, which was in remission, when tests alerted medical staff to a possible recurrence in September 2021. They wrote an “urgent” referral for consultation with a urologist. But that didn’t happen. By the time of his transfer to Suwannee Correctional Institution in November 2021, Williams was having so much trouble walking that he fell while trying to get out of his bunk, injuring his hip, neck and back.

But guard Sgt. Savonia Richardson-Graham allegedly berated him, saying: “I’m not calling a stretcher for you, you can forget that!” She had two other prisoners wheel him in someone else’s chair to Centurion Nurse Jason Howell. Williams then reported the earlier test results that had alarmed medical staffers. But Howell offered nothing more than a ...

by Douglas Ankney

Private prison and jail medical provider Wellpath, LLC has announced a plan to exit bankruptcy proceedings, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.56.] The plan offers some relief to prisoners or their survivors who have successfully sued Wellpath for causing their injuries or deaths. However, it does not address serial discovery violations in other suits, which had the disturbing effect of delaying their resolution until the firm’s bankruptcy was in place.

As PLN reported, the firm was sanctioned twice in the past two years by the federal court for the District of Oregon. One sanction followed deletion of Nurse Patricia Sauerbry’s emails, a purge then hidden for two years from the Estate of Rocky Stewart, which was suing Wellpath over his death at the Coos County Jail in December 2017. That prompted an undisclosed settlement of the suit in May 2024. A similar purge of employee emails was also hidden from the Estate of Janelle Marie Butterfield, who committed suicide at the Josephine County Jail when Wellpath staffers allegedly discontinued her psych meds “without explanation.” Wellpath was sanctioned for that with a liability judgment, and the case is proceeding toward a damages trial. ...

The South County Correctional Entity, a jail shared by six cities in Washington’s King County and located in the Seattle suburb of Des Moines, recorded its sixth death in 11 months on February 1, 2025. Known locally as SCORE, the lockup was slammed for inadequate healthcare by a former nurse with its contracted medical provider, Wellpath.

“It was the most unprofessional place I’ve ever worked in my life,” said RN Lisa Rogers.

She was the only medical provider on duty, she said, assisted by two lower-level nurses who handed out medication. Her complaints to supervisors were repeatedly rebuffed, she added, until she was abruptly let go for sleeping on the job in October 2024—one day after she mentioned feeling drowsy to a guard sergeant. Wellpath filed for bankruptcy the following month, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.31.]

The jail’s most recent death was that of Patricia Ryden, 64, but no cause has yet been determined by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office (KCMEO). Before that, Dwight D. Benson, died at a hospital on January 27, 2025, one day after release from SCORE. He had a long history of DUI violations; no cause of death has been determined for ...

Prison healthcare giant Wellpath took a step closer toward exiting bankruptcy proceedings on April 15, 2025, when it announced a settlement reached with a group a notch below those senior creditors first in line for repayment. That group of junior creditors includes prisoners and their survivors who have successfully sued the firm for causing their injuries or deaths at the 420 prisons and jails where it holds the contract to provide healthcare.

Saddled with $644 million in debt, Wellpath entered bankruptcy in November 2024, setting off a wave of judicial orders staying pending litigation that rippled through courts across the country. The firm spun off its behavioral health unit, Wellpath Recovery Solutions, to a group of lenders in exchange for $375 million of that debt.

Meanwhile those who had won a verdict or secured a settlement which the firm had not yet paid waited on the creditors’ committee appointed by the federal bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas to negotiate a settlement.

The agreement that was reached provides those junior creditors a total of $15.5 million in cash, plus a 33.3% ownership in the reorganized company, Wellpath attorneys told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Alfredo Perez. The creditor’s committee agreed ...

Reports surfaced in October 2024 that low-level medical professionals in multiple Washington jails were making decisions about detainee healthcare that they were not trained or licensed to make. That was due to an absence of higher-level medical staffers, which was in turn attributed to cost-saving measures by their privately contracted provider, NaphCare, Inc.

One detainee at the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma lost his leg in 2018 after NaphCare staffers allegedly missed a blod clot that led to an infection, ultimately requiring amputation of the limb. It wasn’t until a guard noticed that Javier Tapia’s toes had turned black that the 42-year-old finally saw a doctor. At that point, it was too late to save his leg.

With the aid of attorneys from Galanda Broadman PLLC in Seattle, Tapia filed suit against Pierce County and NaphCare in 2022. Defendants moved to dismiss the claims, but the federal court for the Western District of Washington largely denied their motion on May 23, 2023. They argued that they couldn’t be liable for the injury before they noticed it. “But that is the very point,” the Court replied; despite repeated interactions with Defendant staffers over the first three months of Tapia’s incarceration, “no ...

On March 5, 2025, private prison operator CoreCivic, Inc. announced a new contract with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen its South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.

The massive 2,400-bed prison was used to detain migrant families with children during the first administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) in 2017. That ended after the inauguration of former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) in 2021. But now that Trump has returned to office, CoreCivic spokesman Steve Owen said it was the firm’s “understanding that this will be housing families again.”

“It’s a family residential center,” he said.

That benign-sounding phrase obfuscates the harsh reality of holding families with children in cells for the “crime” of seeking asylum in the country. The President’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, said that families would be held together so that they could be deported together. However, children cannot legally be detained over 20 days, creating an enormous logistical problem just moving so many families in and out of detention—a large part of the reason why the Biden administration began to fast-track families for deportation without detaining them, sending 67,000 parents and children back to their home countries in 2023 and ...

On February 26, 2025, then-acting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Caleb Vitello announced a 15-year contract with The GEO Group, Inc. to reopen and expand its Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, which will house up to 1,000 migrants that ICE expects to detain while awaiting deportation. The price tag announced for the deal: an eye-popping $1 billion.

GEO Group also provides electronic monitoring of migrants on ICE’s non-detained docket. The Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) currently monitors about 184,000 migrants, but that number could pass 300,000, GEO Group founder and Executive Chairman George Zoley said. That is a business opportunity on top of ICE’s detention needs, which Zoley estimated would mushroom from 41,500 current beds to more than 60,000 as the new administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) seeks to make good on his campaign promise to conduct mass deportations.

To take advantage of those opportunities, GEO Group plans to spend $38 million renovating idled detention space in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina, as well as the New Jersey site, which will be the largest ICE detention center on the U.S. east coast. Not willing to miss out on caging migrants, the company’s largest ...