by Matt Clarke

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is considering whether to grant or loan $5 million to Webb County, Texas to build a new county jail. The USDA has already given Jim Hogg County, Texas $5 million to expand its jail – 25% as a loan and 75% as a grant.

Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said the county needs a new jail because they are losing out on the opportunity to earn about $500,000 a year by housing federal prisoners.
The federal government often contracts with local jails to house prisoners, particularly immigration detainees, and some counties use contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service as a reliable source of income.

One complication in Sheriff Cuellar’s plan is the Rio Grande Detention Center, a 1,500-bed private prison in Laredo owned and operated by the GEO Group, a Florida-based company formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections. The Rio Grande facility opened in October 2008 following controversy over GEO’s record of alleged human rights abuses at some of the company’s other Texas prisons. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) operates the 480-bed Webb County Detention Center near Lardeo, too, which houses U.S. Marshals detainees and is another source of competition.

Funding for ...

A federal district court has awarded $850,000 to the family of a Delaware prisoner who hanged himself, after entering default judgment against First Correctional Medical, Inc. (FCM). In other Delaware news, the state’s prison system did not renew its contract with Correctional Medical Services (CMS).

In 1997, Christopher Barkes was ...

by Matt Clarke

On November 12, 2009, Pennsylvania state representative John M. Perzel was charged with 82 counts of theft, conflict of interest, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and hindering apprehension or prosecution as a result of Attorney General Tom Corbett’s long-running investigation into political corruption, nicknamed “Bonusgate.” Perzel, a Republican and former Speaker of the House, had for years been a member of the board of directors of GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison firm.

Perzel, his brother-in-law, a nephew, two former chiefs of Perzel’s staff and five other people with ties to the Pennsylvania House GOP caucus (including two former district attorneys) were charged with spending around $10 million in state funds to develop advanced computer programs that were used by Republicans to give them an advantage during elections.

According to William Tomaselli, a state-paid special projects coordinator who was granted immunity by prosecutors, Perzel was aware that the programs were utilized to benefit GOP candidates. “The goal was to win elections. It was a campaign piece,” Tomaselli alleged.

Perzel has denied any criminal conduct and claims the charges are “political opportunism” by Corbett, a fellow Republican who is running for governor. Corbett countered that Perzel was the ...

The next lot in our auction is the Arizona prison system. Do I hear $100,000,000? What, no bidders? None? You, sir, Corrections Corporation of America, you must be interested. No? Okay. How about you, GEO Group? No, not interested either?

Prison privatization is not a new concept but efforts to privatize an entire prison system are rare – having been previously considered in only one state, Tennessee, more than a decade ago. [See: PLN, Sept. 1998, p.16]. However, last year Arizona lawmakers attempted to privatize most of that state’s prison system as they tried to close a whopping $4 billion budget deficit.

HB 2010, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on September 3, 2009, permitted the unprecedented sale of almost all of Arizona’s prisons. Under HB 2010, state prison officials were required to solicit bids for the operation of “one or more prison complexes” by private companies in return for an upfront payment of $100 million. The state would then lease the prisons back from the companies over a 20-year period, paying them to manage the facilities. The prison complex at Yuma was not subject to the law; it had been exempted at the insistence of a Yuma legislator. ...

by Matt Clarke

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison company, already spends a significant amount of money courting federal agencies and members of Congress. CCA employs three lobbying firms in Washington D.C., spent about $1 million in lobbying on the federal level in 2009, and has its own Political Action Committee. CCA executives and employees have made over $135,000 in campaign donations to federal political candidates in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles.

Recently, though, Talking Points Memo, a news organization that specializes in reporting on government and political issues, found another way that CCA influences federal officials: Three former and current Congressional staffers with ties to U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, run an event-planning business that has accepted money from CCA to plan events honoring Thompson.

Dena Graziano, Rep. Thompson’s communication director since 2006, co-founded Chic Productions along with Michone Johnson, chief counsel for a House Judiciary subcommittee, and Michelle Persaud, a former House Judiciary Committee staffer. According to Chic’s website the company provides “high style events with simple elegance,” and congressional events make up about 90 percent of its business.

Lobbyist disclosure statements that reveal these types ...

by Matt Clarke

On May 20, 2010, a $2.9 million settlement was reached in a Pennsylvania federal civil rights lawsuit against GEO Group for performing suspicionless strip searches of people arrested for minor, non-violent, non-drug offenses.

Penny Allison inadvertently missed a scheduled court appointment finalizing her probation program in a ...

On January 7, 2010, GEO Group settled a lawsuit over the beating death of a prisoner in Willacy County, Texas that had already resulted in a jury verdict of $47.5 million – one of the largest prisoner wrongful death awards in the nation.

Gregorio de la Rosa, Jr., 33, was ...

by David M. Reutter

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a jury’s $4.3 million award to the estate of a pretrial detainee. The jurors found that guards at the jail in Cook County, Illinois were deliberately indifferent to the detainee’s serious medical needs, resulting in his death.

Less ...

On June 30, 2009, a former employee at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, a privately-operated jail near Providence, Rhode Island, pleaded guilty to lying to federal officials about sexual misconduct involving an immigration detainee, marking yet another embarrassing problem in a string of scandals to hit the facility.

Glenn Rivera-Barnes, formerly a medical technician at the 746-bed Wyatt jail, admitted he had lied to federal investi-gators, telling them that the male detainee had sexually assaulted him when in fact he had initiated the unwanted sexual encounter. Rivera-Barnes’ involvement in the incident was confirmed by DNA evidence.

Rivera-Barnes had been fired in January 2009; he was previously employed by Cornell Companies, which operated the Wyatt facility until 2007. It is now run by the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation. Rivera-Barnes was sentenced on December 21, 2009 to two years’ probation plus 480 hours of community service and participation in a mental health program. See: United States v. Rivera-Barnes, U.S.D.C. (D. RI), Case No. 1:09-cr-00106-S-LDA.

On February 11, 2010, Wyatt’s warden, Wayne T. Salisbury, Jr., and Chief Financial Officer, Tammy L. Novo, were fired following an eight-week audit of the facility’s operations. They had been suspended in December 2009. The 55-page ...

On April 28, 2003, Davont Pindle settled his negligence claim against Aramark Corporation and the District of Columbia for $2,000. Pindle claimed that on June 5, 2000, while eating in the dining hall at the Lorton Maximum Security Prison, he bit down on a piece of glass or other hard ...