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Call to Action on opposing the Hylton nomination!

On November 9, 2010, a coalition of organizations -- including the Alliance for Justice, Human Rights Defense Center, Private Corrections Working Group, Grassroots Leadership, National Lawyers Guild, International CURE, Detention Watch Network and Justice Policy Institute -- announced their opposition to Stacia A. Hylton, who has been nominated to head the U.S. Marshals Service.

The Marshals Service handles security for federal courthouses, apprehends federal fugitives, and also oversees the detention of federal prisoners awaiting trial or immigration proceedings.

The day after the opposition campaign was announced, the Judiciary Committee scheduled Hylton's nomination for a hearing on November 17 -- within one week. Apparently the administration wants to push her nomination through before the opposition campaign cranks up and creates more controversy.

The opposition campaign against Hylton's nomination focuses on conflicts of interest based on her acceptance of $112,500 in consulting fees from GEO Group, the nation's second-largest private prison company, which has contracts with the U.S. Marshals to house federal detainees, and which obtained multi-million dollar contracts during Hylton's tenure as the Federal Detention Trustee.

A month before she retired from her position as the Federal Detention Trustee in February ...

by Matt Clarke

In 2003 and 2004, Texas state Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr. (D) was a consultant for Management & Training Corporation, a private prison firm, and Corplan Corrections, a prison design and development company. Now his son, state Rep. Eddie Lucio III, (D) has signed on to be a Corplan consultant.

Corplan’s CEO, James Parkey, typically sells desperate towns on high-risk government-financed prisons, promising them jobs and economic growth. Corplan builds the prisons with local government financing, such as project revenue bonds, but leaves after the construction is complete. How to fill the prisons is up to local officials.

“James Parkey and Corplan are prison developers who get paid when a prison is built,” said Bob Libal, a Grassroots Leadership anti-private prison organizer in Texas. “It’s not necessarily in their interest to make sure the prison project is successful.”

Past Corplan projects include a scheme to build a prison in Hardin, Montana that cost $27 million to construct but has sat vacant for years because the city has been unable to find prisoners to fill it. [See: PLN, Dec. 2009, pp.1, 8].

Corplan, based in Argyle, Texas, was also part of a group of companies trying to build a ...

In the past few years an outcry has arisen over the involvement of military and CIA medical professionals and psychologists in torture, including psychologically destructive solitary confinement of “war on terror” detainees at the Guantánamo prison camp. Some critics have even suggested criminal prosecution of the medical staff involved or, at least, revocation of their professional licenses.

In Maine’s prison system, too, prisoners — many of them mentally ill — are kept in isolation for months or years in the state prison’s 132-cell Special Management Unit, its “supermax,” in Warren. Some Maine doctors are now looking closely at the state’s supermax, saying that solitary confinement constitutes torture, and asking if the medical professionals and psychologists involved with the facility are complicit in torture.

“I do believe they should look at the big picture,” says Janis Petzel, of Hallowell, president of the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians, talking specifically about doctors who do “peer reviews,” a type of quality review, of Maine’s prisoner psychiatric care. “Twenty years ahead I don’t want to look back and say we were like the Nazi doctors.” When physicians encounter solitary confinement, she says, they “have a duty to speak out.”

In the recent legislative debate ...

On July 2, 2009, the estate and family of a mentally ill Oregon man who died in police custody settled claims against Multnomah County, a former deputy sheriff and jail nurses for $925,000. The case remained pending against the City of Portland, American Medical Response (AMR) ambulance service and numerous ...

A seemingly good idea before the housing market collapsed, the 525-bed, $58 million Wapato Jail has sat empty in Portland, Oregon since construction was completed in 2004. County taxpayers are paying approximately $5 million annually on debt service for the facility plus $400,000 to maintain the empty building each year.

During his campaign in 2006, Multnomah County Commission Chairman Ted Wheeler vowed to open the Wapato Jail. Since then, however, county officials have repeatedly tried, but failed, to do so.

Most recently the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) rejected a county proposal to lease Wapato as a minimum-security alcohol and drug treatment facility. Citing declining prison population forecasts and unstable state funding, on February 10, 2010, ODOC Director and former state senator Max Williams testified before the legislature’s Ways and Means Committee that the state should postpone a decision about leasing the Wapato Jail. Williams acknowledged that the state expects significant prison growth by 2013, but recommended that officials wait until 2011 to reconsider options for increasing prison capacity.

ODOC officials claim they could complete construction on the department’s own stalled Junction City prison for about the cost of leasing Wapato. Additionally, at least $17 million in start-up costs, remodeling ...

On May 3, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court held that employees of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) may not be sued for constitutional violations under Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971).

While detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Francisco Castaneda requested medical treatment for an “irregular, raised lesion” on his penis that was growing in size, bleeding and causing pain. Despite being told by three specialists that Castaneda needed a biopsy of the lesion, Esther Hui, a PHS physician, disregarded those recommendations. Castaneda was instead given ibuprofen and antibiotics, plus an extra set of boxer shorts.

In January 2007, Castaneda was finally approved for a biopsy after a fourth specialist recommended the procedure. Instead of performing the biopsy, however, ICE released Castaneda from custody. A week later he had the biopsy at a local hospital and the lesion was determined to be cancerous. Castaneda had his penis amputated and underwent chemotherapy, but later died after treatment proved unsuccessful.

Castaneda’s estate filed suit against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), claiming medical negligence. His estate also sued Dr. Hui and other PHS staff claiming constitutional violations under Bivens.

The district ...

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an immigration detainee’s $642,398.57 attorney fee award, finding that “the District Court’s degree of success inquiry under § 1988 was based on an impermissible reconstruction of the jury verdict.”

Hawa Abdi Jama, a Somalian immigrant and a Muslim, was detained as an illegal immigrant at an Elizabeth, New Jersey detention center operated by Esmor Correctional Services, Inc. (Esmor) for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

In 1997, Jama and 19 other detainees sued Esmor, INS and numerous individual defendants over abusive treatment and deplorable conditions at the facility. All of the plaintiffs except Jama settled the class-action suit for $2.5 million. [See: PLN, Sept. 2006, p.26; Sept. 1995, p.17].

In 2007, a jury trial was held on Jama’s claims. The jury ruled in her favor on her claim that the defendants substantially burdened her ability to practice her religion, in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb et seq. The jury also ruled in her favor on a pendent state law claim that Esmor and other defendants had negligently hired, trained, supervised and/or retained guards at the privately-run facility. The jury awarded only nominal damages of $1 ...

A man who bilked almost $13 million from Cornell Corrections Corp. has been convicted of federal fraud and conspiracy charges, while two co-defendants pleaded guilty.
In February 2010, Robert B. Surles was convicted by a federal jury in Atlanta, Georgia of conspiracy and 15 counts of wire fraud as part of a construction scam.

Cornell hired Surles to build its Southern Peaks Regional Treatment Center in Colorado in 2003. The company transferred almost $13 million to an account where the funds were supposed to have been held in escrow, but Surles and his co-defendants gained control of the account and Surles spent $605,000 on himself. [See: PLN, April 2009, p.47].

“This defendant fraudulently induced a company to transfer approximately $13 million into an ‘escrow account’ that turned out to be nothing but a piggy bank for the defendant and his co-conspirators,” said U.S. Attorney Sally Q. Yates.

Surles’ co-defendants, Edgar J. Beaudreault, Jr. and Howard Sperling, took plea deals and testified against him. Surles was sentenced on June 22, 2010 to ten years in federal prison and three years’ supervised release. Beaudreault received a 37-month sentence plus three years’ supervised release, while Sperling was sentenced to almost 62 months and ...

The statute of limitations in a lawsuit claiming medical negligence by prison officials in delaying a prisoner’s surgery begins to accrue when the prisoner is first recommended for surgery by a specialist, the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey decided on February 19, 2009.

Cecil Fearon, incarcerated at the East Jersey State Prison, sued Correctional Medical Services and five physicians for excessive delay in providing him with needed neck surgery. On April 28, 2004, Fearon was seen by a prison doctor and recommended for a consult with a neurosurgeon.

Fearon was seen by the neurosurgeon on June 22, 2004 and recommended for a cervical discectomy and fusion. No surgery was scheduled, however. Fearon was seen by the neurosurgeon again in April 2005, some ten months later, and again recommended for surgery. The surgery still was not scheduled until January 2006. The procedure was finally performed in January, but the delay caused Fearon’s condition to worsen and compromised the results of the surgery.

The defendants were successful in having the suit dismissed on statute of limitations grounds in Superior Court, arguing that the limitations period began to run on April 28, 2004 when Fearon was first seen by ...

by David M. Reutter

Traditionally, the role of a chaplain in the correctional setting is to serve as a spiritual advisor to prisoners and help them meet the requirements of their religious faiths. Equally traditionally, chaplains have generally been from conservative mainstream Christian faiths and often proselytize among prisoners for those faiths.

There is some debate as to whether it is proper to have government-paid chaplains at prisons and jails, based on the premise that such arrangements violate the principle of separation of church and state. There is also dispute concerning whether chaplains – who are overwhelmingly Christian – can adequately address the religious needs of prisoners with many diverse faiths, including Islam, Judaism, Native American beliefs, Hinduism and Buddhism, among others, to say nothing of agnostics and atheists.

However, there is universal agreement that prison and jail chaplains should not abuse their role as spiritual leaders and use their positions of authority to fulfill their own deviant sexual desires. Such abuses do occur, albeit not with the frequency that other correctional staff victimize prisoners. [See, e.g.: PLN, May 2009, p.1].

While incidents involving sexual mis-conduct by chaplains are not common, they are indicative of a somber incongruity between the ...