by Matt Clarke

In May 2011, Oklahoma County approved a $1 million settlement in a civil rights lawsuit involving a prisoner who was first denied his anti-seizure medication and then fatally beaten by guards after he had a seizure at the Oklahoma County jail. Correctional Health Care Management of Oklahoma, ...

by David M. Reutter

When Florida lawmakers used a backdoor approach to try to privatize almost 30 state detention facilities in 2011, they likely did not anticipate the outcome. By the time the political dust had settled, the union representing prison employees had successfully sued to stop the privatization plan, the state’s top two corrections officials had resigned, and an ethics complaint had been filed against the governor for accepting campaign donations from companies that stood to benefit from privatizing state prisons.

But first some background.

Private Prisons in the Sunshine State

Florida’s Department of Corrections – the third largest in the nation – has been in a constant mode of expansion since a federal court began overseeing the state’s prison system due to a 1972 class-action lawsuit that challenged overcrowding and conditions of confinement. A prison population boom in the 1980s and a court-ordered limitation on the number of prisoners the system could hold created a dilemma.

At first prison officials erected tents to house prisoners at night, tore them down in the morning, and then put the prisoners on buses and shipped them around the state while court monitors inspected the prisons. This attempt to hide the true ...

Politics as Unusual: Florida Senate President Crosses the Line

by Randall C. Berg, Jr.

On February 1, Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos (R- Melbourne) removed Senator Mike Fasano (R-New Port Richey) from his position as chairman of the Budget Subcommittee on Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations. His transgression? Apparently an unforgivable sin: Senator Fasano refused to put the demands of the Senate leadership above the interests of the people in his district he was elected to represent.

In other words, Fasano voiced strong opposition to a pending bill, SB2038, that would privatize 27 state correctional facilities – an unprecedented expansion of prison privatization on a scale that has never been attempted in the United States.

But in removing Senator Fasano from his committee leadership position for refusing to toe the party line, Senator Haridopolos himself crossed the line – the line of decency. He violated the basic expectation that our elected officials will not face political retribution for doing what they believe is best for their constituents.

Senator Haridopolos’ actions might be justified if there were no controversy concerning prison privatization. But there is a great deal of legitimate disagreement about the benefits of privatizing prisons. There is no evidence ...

PLN Exclusive!

Exec with GEO Group, which Operates ICE Facilities, Informs Daughter-in-Law He will Report Her to Immigration Authorities

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 ...

Private corrections company The GEO Group celebrated the holiday season by opening a new 1,500-bed prison in Milledgeville, Georgia on December 12, 2011. The $80 million facility is expected to generate approximately $28 million in annual revenues.

Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut Corrections) is hardly a household name, it is a major player in the private corrections sector, combining a self-righteous amorality in profiting from human misery with a ruthless sense of just how to make a buck in this business. The GEO Group is so notorious that it was the target of an Occupy Washington D.C. action in early December. In addition, the United Methodist Church sold off more than $200,000 in stock in GEO Group over the holiday season, judging that holding those shares was “incompatible with Bible teaching.” [Editor’s Note: But playing the stock market apparently is compatible with Biblical teaching.]

While such actions may irritate a few within the company’s ranks, the GEO Group is thick-skinned. Over the years journalists have exposed a long history of violence, abuse and corruption in the company’s facilities. Such scandals would have driven most firms out of business, but GEO has always managed to find the way back to prosperity. While ...

Seven years ago prisoners at a private prison in southeastern Colorado went on an all-night rampage, chasing the shorthanded staff from the premises, attacking suspected snitches, setting fires and causing millions of dollars in damages. Now documents filed in a long-running legal battle confirm what many prisoners have been saying all along – that prison officials received ample warning of impending trouble but failed to take action in time.

The 2004 riot at the Crowley County Correctional Facility, operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), has emerged as a kind of case study in the multiple ways things can go wrong in a for-profit prison. The night of the incident, the prison had only 47 employees on duty, including eight trainees, to supervise 1,122 prisoners. There had been growing tension at the facility for weeks over issues ranging from food and rec privileges to the presence of numerous disgruntled prisoners recently shipped in from Washington and Wyoming to fill beds. [See: PLN, Jan. 2005, p.26].

The Colorado Department of Corrections’ after-action report would later blast CCA officials for inadequate training and emergency response procedures – but the DOC’s own monitoring of the prison up to the night of the ...

An audit by the Florida Department of State found that the GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s second-largest private prison company, had been violating Florida law by making contributions to politicians from GEO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) in excess of the $500 limit.

In a letter to state election officials, GEO said it was operating as a federal committee and was not aware that by filing reports with state agencies it was bound by Florida contribution limits, which are lower than those allowed under federal law.

GEO Group disbanded its state-level PAC on May 18, 2011, but not before it had disbursed contributions to a number of Florida politicians. The PAC gave $500 to state Rep. Eseban Bovo’s successful bid to become a Miami-Dade Commissioner. It also gave $2,500 to Republican congressman Ander Crenshaw’s reelection campaign, but that donation was returned.

In the first quarter of 2011, the PAC gave money to U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and the U.S. Senate campaign committee of current Florida state Senate President Mike Haridopolos. Reports from GEO’s PAC also show contributions to politicians around the country, including Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Such donations to lawmakers do not go unrewarded – see this issue’s cover story ...

A bill introduced in the Kentucky legislature proposed removing approximately 3,500 Class D state prisoners currently held in county jails and transferring them to private prisons owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Opponents claimed the bill made no fiscal sense. The state pays the counties $31.34 per prisoner per day to house Class D state prisoners (plus $9.00 per diem for jails that provide substance abuse treatment programs). CCA charges from $37.99 to $47.98 per prisoner per day.

Losing the Class D prisoners “would be devastating,” stated Grayson County Detention Center employee Darwin Dennison. “We count on the money generated by the Class D program to operate our jail and the female facility. If that money were to dry up, it could cost jobs. The jail annex houses nothing but Class D inmates.”

The counties would also lose the prisoners’ labor, which has been used in work release programs to perform maintenance and clean-up at parks and government buildings.

“The best thing about having a Class D program is that we are able to save the cities and county government a lot of money by providing inmates to work,” said Dennison. “This proposal could eliminate that program ...

On October 28, 2010, a 26-year-old prisoner named Terrell Griswold was found slumped over and unresponsive in his cell at the Bent County Correctional Facility, a private prison in southeastern Colorado. The official cause of death was listed as cardiac hypertrophy, or an enlarged heart. But Lagalia Afola says the circumstances of her son’s death are more complicated than that.

When it comes to the mysteries of prison health care, they usually are.
Griswold was serving a three-year sentence for burglary. Although she lives in Kansas City, Afola spoke with him often by phone. Terrell didn’t complain a lot, didn’t volunteer much about his health, she stated. She knew he was taking blood pressure medication but considered him in very good shape, and she was stunned when officials told her that he’d died of a heart condition that couldn’t have been foreseen.

“Initially, they just told me that he died of an enlarged heart,” Afola said. But over the past year she has tracked down medical records held by the private prison operator, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and the Colorado Department of Corrections; she’s pored over the official autopsy report and pointed out inaccuracies to the medical examiner; and ...

Guards at a private prison in Idaho looked on, but did not intervene, as a prisoner was beaten into a coma. Video footage of the January 2010 incident has sparked an FBI investigation into civil rights violations at the facility.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, operates the Idaho Correctional Center (ICC), which has long been condemned for high levels of violence.

In 34 years of suing more than 100 prisons and jails, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Stephen Pevar said ICC was the most violent prison he had ever seen.

Critics claim that ICC guards use prisoner-on-prisoner violence to force prisoners to snitch on their cellmates to avoid being transferred to extremely violent units. Prisoners have called ICC a “gladiator school” due to its reputation for violence.

Hanni Elabed, 24, knows all too well just how violent ICC is. He was serving a sentence of two to 12 years for robbery when he snitched on drug trafficking by ICC prisoners and guards, according to a subsequent lawsuit. He was placed in solitary confinement for his own protection when he complained that he was being threatened. Elabed was later returned to his original housing unit, ...