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. …

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 …

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 …

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, …

Historically, prisons and jails have been loathe to give prisoners access to technology. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) didn’t even allow prisoners regular access to telephone calls until 2009. Access to internet-based services, which the non-incarcerated take for granted, is also forbidden by prison officials who cite vaguely-expressed “security concerns.” In recent years, however, electronic tablets that include a variety of programs and ­services have proliferated behind bars.

What has caused this shift in the Luddite mentality of prison officials? Money, mainly. Corrections agencies almost always receive “commission” kickbacks from the revenue generated by fee-based content offered by tablet providers, which ranges from e-messaging and video calls to music downloads and games. The two primary tablet vendors are GTL/ViaPath Technologies, headquartered in Virginia, and Dallas-based Securus Technologies. They are also the nation’s leading prison and jail phone service providers.

Both are owned by private equity firms and have long histories of price-gouging prisoners and their families. Other companies that supply tablets and e-content include Edovo, Inmate Calling Solutions (ICSolutions) and Keefe Commissary Network.

In the business model they all use, corrections officials can select the programs and features available on tablets that are usually …

Transgender Idaho state prisoner Adree Edmo filed suit in 2017 seeking gender-confirming surgery. She suffered from an extreme case of gender dysphoria—a recognized medical condition—and had repeatedly attempted self-castration. As PLN reported, the litigation was successful, and Edmo received the surgery shortly before her release in July 2020. The federal court for the District of Idaho later awarded $2.63 million in attorney fees and costs. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.56.]

Edmo alleged violations of the Affordable Care Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment civil rights violations and a state-law negligence claim. Following an evidentiary hearing, the district court granted a preliminary injunction that required Defendants—state prison officials and their private medical contractor, Corizon Health—to provide her adequate healthcare, including gender-affirming surgery.

Defendants appealed and the case was remanded by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On remand, the district court again ordered the surgery for Edmo, and the decision was then affirmed by the appellate court, which also refused to hold a rehearing of the case before the entire Ninth Circuit en banc. The Supreme Court of the U.S. declined to issue a writ of …

Pointing to “reports of staffing shortages, physical and sexual assaults, murders and a 188% turnover rate among prison guards just last year,” the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on August 20, 2024, that it was launching a civil rights investigation into Tennessee’s troubled Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), which is operated for the state Department of Corrections (DOC) under contract by private prison profiteer CoreCivic, Inc.

“Publicly available information suggests that Trousdale Turner has been plagued by serious problems since it first opened its doors” in 2016, declared U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis—something PLN reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2018, p.46.] DOC temporarily suspended prisoner transfers shortly after the opening, forcing CoreCivic to import employees from other prisons and hire another private firm, G4S, to provide rent-a-guards.

Prisoners held at the lockup today confirmed to PLN that it is largely run by gangs and rife with violence, resulting in frequent lockdowns. Yet the state showed no signs it was ready to part ways with the firm, even after wrapping up a five-year $276 million contract in August 2024. The facility, which is owned by a Trousdale County agency that contracts separately with CoreCivic, houses the prisoners.

Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) issued an executive order reversing one from his predecessor that barred the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) from contracting with private prisons.

That order from former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) affected only people detained by DOJ, including about 14,000 of nearly 150,000 prisoners then held by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). It did not extend to the United States Department of Homeland Security, leaving most of nearly 40,000 people detained by its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in private lockups, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.16.]

Biden also granted numerous extensions to the ban to the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS)—which also developed workarounds by contracting to place detainees with counties which then contracted detention space from private prison firms, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2022, p.48.]

All of which means that two presidents have now issued bans and reversals of bans on private prisons with much fanfare, without meaningfully affecting the use of privately contracted detention in the country. Indeed, GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two largest private prison firms, saw their stock prices soar in …

A former West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) guard supervisor was found guilty on January 27, 2025, on charges related to the fatal beating of pretrial detainee Quantez Burks, 37, at Southern Regional Jail in March 2022. Former Lt. Chad Lester, 35, was convicted by a jury in federal court for the Southern District of West Virginia of making false statements to investigators, tampering with a witness and conspiracy to violate the witness tampering statue.

As PLN reported, fellow guards Andrew Fleshman, 21, and Steven Nicholas Wimmer, 24, pleaded guilty in November 2023 to charges that they conspired to violate Burks’ civil rights. Lester and three other guards were indicted that same month. The other three—former guards Mark Holdren, 39; Cory Snyder, 29; and Johnathan Walters, 35—pleaded guilty in November 2024 to the same charge, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, May 2024, p.22; and Jan. 2025, p.62.]

Charges were filed against two more guards, Jacob Boothe and Ashley Toney, who agreed to plead guilty in July 2024. But they apparently cut a deal with federal prosecutors to testify against Lester and the other three guards who were still facing charges; charges against Boothe and …

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry (DCRR) has faced bitter criticism for the healthcare provided to state prisoners, which a federal judge in 2022 called “plainly, grossly inadequate,” as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p.1.] So it wasn’t surprising when its early response to the COVID-19 pandemic drew a 2020 warning from prisoner advocates in 11 faith groups that DCRR officials were sleepwalking through the pandemic and “not recognizing this reality nor addressing the asymptomatic nature of this virus.”

Yet the magnitude of the prison system’s failure—which, unlike the virus, was entirely within its own control—is only now coming to light. In a series of reports published on October 1, 2024, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said that prisoners reported being given “fake” health checks—where no vital signs were taken—along with “do not resuscitate” orders that they never requested and were powerless to rescind.

Predictably, the DCRR’s response to criticism during the pandemic was to point the finger at private healthcare contractor Centurion Health, to which it paid $4,028,900 for COVID-19 tests in December 2020. But it was prison officials who then failed to strictly follow quarantine policies—signing off …