by Matt Clarke

On October 24, 2012, a federal jury in Texas awarded $2.25 million to the estate and survivors of a prisoner who died at a facility operated by LCS Corrections Services (LCS), after finding the company was 100% at fault. The district court subsequently reversed its dismissal of § 1983 claims against LCS and granted a new trial as to those claims.

Mario A. Garcia was incarcerated at the Brooks County Detention Center (BCDC) in Falfurrias, Texas, owned and operated by LCS, when he died of a seizure on January 12, 2009. After Garcia was booked into BCDC, his wife delivered a supply of clonazepam, a prescription anti-anxiety medication he had been using for years, to the facility. BCDC officials received the medication but did not give it to Garcia because they allegedly had a policy of refusing to allow prisoners to take any controlled substances, even bona fide prescription medications.

Garcia began shaking badly later that day. He was taken to the emergency room, treated and returned to BCDC. The prison’s contract physician, Dr. Michael Pendleton, saw Garcia twice – the last time on January 8, 2009. After the second visit with Dr. Pendleton, Garcia’s condition deteriorated …

On March 19, 2014, a state district court in Travis County, Texas held that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison company, is considered a “governmental body” for purposes of the state’s Public Information Act and therefore subject to the Act’s “obligations to disclose public information.”

The court entered its ruling on a motion for summary judgment filed by Prison Legal News, which had brought suit against CCA in May 2013 after the company refused to produce records related to the now-closed Dawson State Jail in Dallas – including reports, investigations and audits regarding CCA’s operation of the facility. [See: PLN, June 2013, p.46]. Such records would have been made public had the jail been operated by a government agency.

“This is one of the many failings of private prisons,” said PLN managing editor Alex Friedmann. “By contracting with private companies, corrections officials interfere with the public’s right to know what is happening in prisons and jails, even though the contracts are funded with taxpayer money. This lack of transparency contributes to abuses and misconduct by for-profit companies like CCA, which prefer secrecy over public accountability.”

CCA currently operates nine facilities in Texas, including four that …

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals applied the harmless error test in finding that a district court’s late Rand summary judgment notice did not deprive a prisoner of substantial rights. Additionally, the appellate court held prison officials were not deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of violence by placing two rival gang members in the same cell.

This case involved the appeal of a Hawaii federal district court’s grant of summary judgment to Corrections Corporation of America and CCA guards at the Saguaro Correctional Center (SCC) in Arizona. The suit was brought by Hawaii state prisoner Keone Labatad, who was housed at SCC and assaulted by another prisoner on July 23, 2009.

Three days earlier, Labatad, a member of the La Familia gang, got into a fight with Howard Giddeons, a member of the USO Family gang. Both told guards that the fight was not gang-related and they had shook hands afterwards. Following procedure, both were placed in administrative segregation.

Labatad was put in a cell with Shane Mara, a USO Family gang member. On the day of the assault, Mara waited until Labatad was in hand restraints in preparation for leaving the cell; he then hit Labatad in …

A former Oregon jail guard was sentenced to probation for sexually abusing a female prisoner after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge; his defense attorney blamed the incarcerated victim while the prosecutor defended the light sentence. The guard, Eddie James Miller, 60, was later accused of sexually harassing a co-worker.

As previously reported in PLN, Miller’s 21-year career at the Inverness Jail in Portland, Oregon came to an end when he was accused of walking in on a 34-year-old female prisoner as she was using the bathroom in the jail’s medical unit and forcing her to perform oral sex on him on January 9, 2012 [See: PLN, April 2012, p.1].

The distraught prisoner immediately reported the incident to detectives, according to Mike Schults, a chief deputy with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities said the woman’s DNA was found on Miller, and she testified before a grand jury. On February 29, 2012, Miller was indicted on charges of official misconduct in the first degree and custodial sexual misconduct in the first degree.

The latter offense is a felony when an Oregon corrections employee or contractor engages in sexual intercourse with a prisoner; all other sexual contact constitutes the misdemeanor …

Corizon, the nation’s largest for-profit medical services provider for prisons, jails and other detention facilities, was formed in June 2011 through the merger of Prison Health Services (PHS) and Correctional Medical Services (CMS).

In April 2013, the debt-rating agency Moody’s downgraded Corizon’s nearly $360 million worth of debt to a rating of B2 – an indication the company’s debt is highly speculative and a high credit risk. According to Moody’s, the rating downgrade was due to an “expectation of earnings volatility following recent contract losses, margin declines from competitive pricing pressure on new and renewed contracts, and Moody’s belief that Valitás [Corizon’s parent corporation] will be unable to restore metrics to levels commensurate with the prior B1 rating over the near to intermediate term.”

Valitás Health Services is majority owned by Beecken Petty O’Keefe & Company, a Chicago-based private equity management firm. Beecken’s other holdings are primarily in the healthcare industry.

On September 23, 2013, Moody’s again downgraded Corizon’s debt rating and changed the company’s rating outlook from “stable” to “negative.” The following month Corizon announced that it had replaced CEO Rich Hallworth with Woodrow A. Myers, Jr., the former chief medical officer at WellPoint Health. Hallworth, who had …

Nicholas T. Christie, incarcerated at the Lee County jail in Ft. Myers, Florida, died on March 31, 2009 after being repeatedly pepper sprayed by deputies while strapped to a restraint chair. Following three years of litigation, Lee County officials agreed in May 2013 to pay a record settlement of $4 million to Christie’s estate.

The jail’s for-profit medical contractor, Prison Health Services (PHS), now known as Corizon, was named as a defendant in the federal lawsuit and included in the settlement agreement.

The § 1983 suit raised claims related to Christie’s death under the “Fourth, Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the laws of the United States, and the laws of the State of Florida.”

The complaint alleged that Christie was “restrained to a chair with a hood over his head and face for several hours in the custody of the Lee County Sheriff, while being detained on a misdemeanor trespass charge,” and that medical staff at the jail failed to provide him with adequate care after he showed signs of respiratory distress during and after that incident. Medical personnel, the lawsuit stated, “acted willfully, wantonly, maliciously, and with reckless and callous disregard for and deliberate indifference …

The Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) recently completed an evaluation of the effects of private prison confinement on offender recidivism. The evaluation assessed the impact of confinement at the Prairie Correctional Facility (PCF) in Appleton, Minnesota on recidivism among 3,532 offenders released between 2007 and 2009. The average follow-up period for the offenders in this study was 2.5 years.

Key Findings

• Private prison confinement was associated with a greater risk of recidivism in all 20 Cox regression models that were estimated. This association was statistically significant in 8 of the 20 models.

• All five private prison measures examined in this study significantly increased the risk of reconviction.

• Three private prison measures significantly increased the risk of rearrest.

• None of the private prison variables had an impact on either reincarceration measure (new offense and technical violation revocation).

• The findings suggest that the PCF produced slightly worse recidivism outcomes among the healthiest and best-behaved prisoners for the same amount of money. The recidivism results may be due to fewer visitation and rehabilitative programming opportunities for offenders confined at PCF.

Prior to 2010, when prison population growth created shortages in prison beds at state facilities, the DOC frequently …

There are moments when our longings for social justice cloud our vision, times when the way we want the world to be blocks our understanding of the way things really are. A good example of this is the notion of the United States’ prison system as totally driven by profit-hungry corporations that ruthlessly advance their bottom lines on the backs of the exploited.

This myth contains a modicum of truth: of course, the 1 percent and beyond do make money off of locking people up. Corporations like Kitchell Construction have done very well building more than 110,000 prison “beds.” At roughly $100,000 each, that comes to about $11 billion, which is pretty serious money. Despite the fields of money that have been reaped from the prison and jail boom, this economic aspect of prisons has spawned some myths that often get in the way of effectively opposing mass incarceration.

The first of these is the idea that private prison corporations are the main culprits. A wide spectrum of campaigns has focused on these corporate targets. Activists have opposed private prisons’ attempts to colonize new territory, blocking immigration detention center proposals in Illinois, halting a bill to privatize the entire prison …

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed the denial of qualified immunity to a psychiatrist in a lawsuit brought by a prisoner’s estate. The appellate court found the evidence could establish that the psychiatrist had “consciously exposed” the prisoner “to a substantial risk of death through his medical treatment without so much as a warning.” The case settled for $450,000 following remand.

When Scott Quigley, Jr., 23, was transferred from a Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) facility to the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center in February 2008, he came under the medical supervision and care of Correctional Medical Services, the MDOC’s private contractor.

The day after Quigley arrived at the guidance center, physician’s assistant Steven Garver conducted a physical exam and prescribed 50mg of Amitriptyline (brand name Elavil) once a day, which was double Quigley’s previous prescription. A few weeks later, on March 7, 2008, Dr. Tuong V. Thai, a psychiatrist, completed a comprehensive psychiatric assessment; Quigley’s current prescription was discussed, as was adding the medication Trazodone (brand name Desyrel).

Dr. Thai prescribed 100mg of Trazodone once a day for four weeks. Three days later, Quigley was found dead in his cell. Prison charts confirmed that he had …

On January 7, 2014, the Private Corrections Institute (PCI), a Florida-based non-profit citizen watchdog organization, issued its first annual awards for individual activism, organizational advocacy and excellence in news reporting related to the private prison industry. PCI opposes the privatization of correctional services, including the operation of prisons and jails by for-profit companies.

PCI’s first annual award for excellence in reporting on the private prison industry was awarded to journalist Beau Hodai, who publishes DBA Press (www.dbapress.com), for his investigative articles on issues related to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group – the nation’s two largest private prison firms.

Beau broke the news story about CCA’s involvement in highly controversial anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona known as SB 1070 – a story that was subsequently picked up by other media, including National Public Radio. He also reported on political connections between GEO Group and Florida lawmakers in connection with an FBI probe involving the GEO-operated Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Florida. Several of his articles have been reprinted in Prison Legal News.

“The individuals who comprise the Private Corrections Institute are amazingly knowledgeable, dedicated, skilled and resourceful. To know that this group has found my work worthy …