by David M. Reutter

Was Ohio’s attempt to sell off and privatize five of its state prisons in 2011 a race to the bottom? That’s the question raised and analyzed in a report titled Cells for Sale: Understanding Prison Costs & Savings, released by Policy Matters Ohio in April 2011.

Ohio is ten years into its prison privatization experiment, which state officials laud as having saved taxpayers more than $45 million over that time period. However, an in-depth examination of the calculations used for those seemingly robust savings found them “not only riddled with errors, oversights and omissions of significant data, but also potentially tainted by controversial accounting assumptions that many experts consider deeply flawed,” according to Policy Matters Ohio.

The calculations used to determine savings from prison privatization came under scrutiny after Governor John Kasich proposed in March 2011 to sell five of the state’s prisons to private companies for $200 million. The idea gained momentum with the need to close the state’s $8 billion budget gap.

At the time Ohio already had two privately-operated state prisons, the Lake Erie Correctional Institution (LECI) and the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility, both run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC). State ...

by David M. Reutter

An Indiana federal district court certified a class and allowed claims to proceed that challenged unsafe conditions, lack of medical privacy and an alleged incentive scheme that rewarded staff for providing less medical care to prisoners at the Marion County Jail #2 (MCJ) in Indianapolis. Four months later, however, the court granted summary judgment to the defendants, dismissing the class-action suit.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) operates MCJ under a contract with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. A lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged violations of state and federal law in areas such as conditions of confinement, mail policies, availability and handling of grievances, medical care, and privacy of medical information at the jail. The district court dismissed the claims related to grievances for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

In a July 2, 2010 ruling, the court entered an order on the defendants’ affirmative defense that the plaintiffs had failed to exhaust their administrative remedies before filing suit. At a hearing on that matter it became evident there was no reliable system in place for recording the details associated with the filing and resolution of prisoner complaints at MCJ.

As to some of the individual plaintiffs, the ...

by Matt Clarke and Alex Friedmann

In 2006, Prison Legal News published a cover story, Guards Rape of Prisoners Rampant, No Solution in Sight, that presented a compilation of news reports concerning the rape and sexual abuse of prisoners by prison and jail staff, police officers and other law enforcement officials. [See: PLN, Aug. 2006, p.1].

Three years later PLN ran another cover article, titled Sexual Abuse by Prison and Jail Staff Proves Persistent, Pandemic, which described dozens of reports involving prisoner rape and sexual assault in correctional facilities across the U.S. [See: PLN, May 2009, p.1].

Despite the enactment of the optimistically-named Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) by Congress, the criminalization of sex acts between prisoners and those who guard them, and the adoption of “zero tolerance” policies by many prison and jail systems, the situation has not greatly improved. This is partly because reducing prisoner rape and sexual abuse is simply not a priority for corrections officials. Indeed, rape and sexual assault are integral elements of American prison and jail management. How else to explain the prevalence, tolerance and acceptance if not encouragement of the practice?
Unfortunately, “rape camps” is a term only used to describe prisons in ...

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that an order withdrawing approval of a class action settlement does not qualify as a “final order” subject to appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. The appellate ruling declared that such an order “simply presses the reset button, vacates any prior final decision, and marks the case for renewed litigation.”

This case has a “long and complex” history that began in 1995, with two classes certified. The first class covered all prisoners who are presently, or will be, confined at New Mexico’s Bernalillo County Detention Center (BCDC). A sub-class included “persons with mental and/or developmental disabilities who are now, or in the future will be, detained at BCDC.” It was alleged that the conditions at BCDC were unconstitutional due in large part to overcrowding. [See: PLN, March 2003, p.38; Sept. 1999, p.18].

The parties reached a settlement in 1997. The settlement agreement was modified due to the opening of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in 2003. By their terms, the two new settlements, reached in 2005, governed conditions only at MDC. The county had signed an Inter-Governmental Agreement with the federal government that allowed federal detainees to be housed at BCDC, which ...

PLN’s February 2012 cover story described how the Florida legislature tried to privatize almost thirty state prisons, work camps and work release centers in 2011 by slipping proviso language into the state’s budget appropriations bill. That wholesale attempt at prison privatization was widely perceived as benefiting Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison firm.

The backdoor proviso attempt failed, however, after the Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which at the time represented Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) employees, filed suit challenging the prison privatization plan enacted as part of the budget bill. A circuit court judge ruled in the PBA’s favor in September 2011, finding the proviso language was “illegal without authority in violation of law.” The legislature’s appeal of that decision remains pending.

PLN’s February cover story concluded with the Republican-dominated Florida Senate considering two bills introduced in January 2012 – SB 2036 and SB 2038 – that would accomplish the same goal as the proviso language; i.e., privatizing 27 correctional facilities in South Florida, known as Region IV, that house approximately 16,000 state prisoners.

SB 2038 required the privatization of almost all FDOC Region IV facilities, with “actual cost savings to the state of at ...

A Tennessee federal court awarded $13,000 to Samuel Key for civil rights violations resulting from his false imprisonment.

The case began in 1987, when Key was convicted and sentenced to prison in Georgia. During that time, a phony escape charge was made against Key. He was paroled in 1994. Thereafter, ...

Thomas M. Wierdsma is the Senior Vice President for Project Development at The GEO Group, Inc., a Boca Raton, Florida-based company that, according to its 2010 annual report, operates “a broad range of correctional and detention facilities including ... prisons, immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers and mental health and residential treatment facilities.”

With respect to immigration detention, GEO manages 9 such detention centers in the United States plus other immigration facilities abroad, including the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In 2010, GEO Group received 53% of its domestic business from contracts with the federal government, including 20% from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – the federal agency responsible for overseeing the detention of immigrants awaiting deportation and asylum hearings.

Thus, it is accurate to say that GEO is heavily invested in providing immigration detention services for the federal government, and vice versa.

It is also accurate to say that Wierdsma is a top GEO Group executive. He was hired by GEO as a vice president in January 2007, and according to his employment agreement began working for the company at a base salary of $315,000 per year plus annual performance awards and additional benefits.

Along with ...

When PLN associate editor Alex Friedmann was released from prison in November 1999, he had served six of the ten years he spent behind bars at the South Central Correctional Center in Clifton, Tennessee, a private prison operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

Following his release he became a CCA shareholder, purchasing one share of stock so he could attend the company’s annual shareholder meetings and ask questions of CCA’s executives as a shareholder of record. [See: PLN, Sept. 2008, p.40].

Friedmann bought an additional 190 shares of CCA stock in 2010; by holding the shares for a year he was eligible to introduce a shareholder resolution, which he did in November 2011. His resolution called for CCA’s Board of Directors to produce bi-annual reports “on the Board’s oversight of the company’s efforts to reduce incidents of rape and sexual abuse of prisoners housed in facilities operated by the company. The reports should describe the Board’s oversight of the company’s response to incidents of rape and sexual abuse at the company’s facilities, including statistical data by facility regarding all such incidents during each reporting period.”

“The purpose of the resolution is twofold,” said Friedmann. “First, to ensure that shareholders ...

Electronic monitoring (EM) looms high on the list of alternatives to incarceration for corrections officials seeking solutions to overcrowded prisons and budget deficits. First used in 1983, today some 200,000 people in the United States wear some sort of electronic monitor, typically an ankle bracelet required as a condition of probation, parole, bail or house arrest.

For high-profile lawbreakers like Martha Stewart and Lindsay Lohan, the ankle bracelet is a badge of privilege – a high-tech mode of avoiding time behind bars. For those with more ordinary cases, release on electronic monitoring may offer offenders an opportunity to reunite with their family and find employment. Nonetheless, the introduction of EM on a broader scale raises a number of concerns.

The Legal Framework

The first issue is that in most cases electronic monitoring programs operate under questionable legal frameworks, typically excluding or minimizing any rights or entitlements for the people being monitored. For example, laws in Illinois, Rhode Island and North Carolina deal primarily with the technical minutiae of supervision, emphasizing guarantees of public safety and spelling out penalties for rule violations. A small section includes a list of activities which a person on electronic monitoring “may” be allowed to do. ...

On February 15, 2012, the family of Bronson Nunuha, a 26-year-old Hawaii prisoner who was brutally murdered at a Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) prison in Arizona in 2010, filed suit in circuit court in Honolulu against CCA and the State of Hawaii.

The lawsuit was based in part on CCA’s business model of understaffing its prisons and cutting corners to increase the company’s profit margin. Those systemic practices violated fundamental safety requirements and subjected Hawaii prisoners to rampant gang violence in understaffed housing units. Bronson Nunuha was just months away from being released when CCA placed him in a unit with violent, gang-affiliated prisoners.

“Bronson’s death was senseless and preventable. CCA and the State of Hawaii needlessly put him in danger,” said attorney Kenneth Walczak with the law firm of Rosen, Bien & Galvan, LLP, which, along with the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC – the parent organization of Prison Legal News) and the ACLU of Hawaii, represents the Nunuha family.

“Private prisons are known to have higher levels of violence due to understaffing and high staff turnover that result from their goal of generating ever-greater profits,” added HRDC director Paul Wright. “But prison companies are not allowed to ...