In November 2022 the federal court for the Northern District of California shot down a suit by private prison giant CoreCivic which sought to weaponize anti-defamation law against one of the company’s more vocal critics.

As previously reported by PLN, CoreCivic took exception to remarks made by Morgan Simon in three articles she published in Forbes and sued her for defamation. [See: PLN, Sep. 2021, p.56.] In the articles, Simon said CoreCivic managed immigration detention centers “that have been at the heart of the controversy over the separation of families and incarceration of individuals for crossing the U.S. border.” She further wrote the company had “a long history of profiting from mass incarceration: they make money when beds are filled, justly or unjustly, which is why they’ve spent $25 M[illion] on lobbying over the past three decades to push for harsher criminal justice and immigration laws.”

CoreCivic shot back that it didn’t house any immigrant children separated from their parents. Simon updated two articles to include clarifications, but CoreCivic filed suit in March 2020 anyway, claiming she had intentionally made statements that were “demonstrably false.” In addition to Simon, it sued the company she co-founded, Candide Group LLC, an investment advisory ...

On March 22, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit revived a suit filed five years earlier by a Tennessee prisoner who is legally blind. In his March 2018 complaint, Corey Tarvin accused the state Department of Corrections (DOC) of failure to accommodate his visual disability, and he accused DOC contractor CoreCivic – the massive private prison operator formerly known as Corrections Corp. of America – of failure to protect him from being stabbed by other prisoners.

Due to his blindness, Tarvin informed the federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee that he had “difficulty participating in the litigation process,” so counsel was appointed to represent him. When he later asked to remove his appointed counsel due to “a lack of results and responsiveness,” his motion was granted; but no other attorney was appointed, thus forcing him to proceed pro se.

CoreCivic served discovery requests on Tarvin, including interrogatories and requests for admission, then claimed he failed to respond. The company filed a motion to compel responses, and a magistrate judge imposed a deadline for Tarvin to reply. Instead he sent several letters to the district court explaining that he was legally blind, that CoreCivic already ...

On March 1, 2023, prison financial services profiteer JPay hit a legal wall in a challenge to fee-laden debit cards issued to prisoners on release. As PLN has reported, former California state prisoner Adam Cain — represented by the Seattle law firm of Sirianni Youtz Spoonemore Hamburger PLLC, California attorney John Burton and the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN — filed a class-action lawsuit in September 2021 against JPay, a company that provides money transfer and other financial services at prisons and jails nationwide. [See: PLN, Oct. 2021, p.28].

Cain’s challenge involved one of those services: prepaid debit cards provided to prisoners at release that contain funds from their prison or jail accounts, plus any “gate money” they receive. The debit cards, which JPay contracts with prisons and jails to provide, include numerous fees that quickly reduce the card balances. When Cain was released from the Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, his debit card had a balance of $213.50, including $200 in “gate money” provided by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR); however, within months the balance had been reduced by fees to $4.87, without any money released to Cain.

The suit raised claims under the ...

by Matt Clarke

On December 5, 2022, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss insider trading charges against JPay founder Ryan Shapiro, 45. For a hefty fee, the firm provides financial and communications services to people incarcerated in jail and prisons. JPay was acquired by Securus Technologies in April 2015. Both are now subsidiaries of Dallas-based Aventiv Technologies.

Shapiro was charged with financial securities crimes in a Boston federal court in January 2022, along with his friend, founder and manager of the hedge fund Sakal Capital Management, Kris Bortnovsky, then 40, and David Schottenstein, then 38, whom the Miami Herald called “a member of one of America’s richest families.” [See: PLN, Mar. 2022, p.10.]

Schottenstein signed an affidavit swearing, under penalty of perjury, that he provided the other two men with insider information so they could illegally profit from the stock market. Schottenstein received the information from a relative, a member of the board of DSW and Green Growth Brands. The information included a pending merger not yet announced between Albertson’s and Rite-Aid, as well as a planned hostile takeover attempt by Green Growth Brands of marijuana distributor Aphria. Both the merger and takeover ultimately failed but not before their announcements briefly ...

by Keith Sanders

Over nine days in December 2015, during transport from Maryland to South Carolina to face charges he skipped child support payments, William Karn endured a grueling trek stretching more than 2,000 miles while shackled to a metal bench in a van owned and operated by Prisoner Transport Services (PTS) and Brevard Extraditions.

Karn, who was arrested in Maryland’s Montgomery County on a warrant out of Horry County, South Carolina, spent much of that time in handcuffs so tight that he was left with injuries to his wrists, he said. He also alleged deplorable conditions inside the van, with discarded refuse, human waste and flies.

The trip could have been completed in eight hours, but it lasted many times that long, meandering across five states to pick up and drop off other detainees along the way. During one infrequent bathroom stop, Karn fell out and injured his shoulder. But transporting guards refused him medical attention he said. When a fight erupted in the van, all the detainees were sprayed with a chemical agent and not allowed to wash it off afterwards.

On September 16, 2016, Karn filed a federal civil rights action in the U.S. District Court for ...

by Matt Clarke

Corizon Heath, Inc. has engaged in legal maneuvers over the course of the past year that are intended to limit how much it must pay on over $38 million in debt to companies that supplied it with staffing, medical supplies and real estate, as well as plaintiffs and attorneys who won lawsuits against the firm and government entities it had agreed to indemnify for lawsuit losses.

Corizon began the first step of the legal maneuvers known as the “Texas 2-step” in April 2022 when it converted to a Texas corporation. At the time, Corizon’s headquarters was in Tennessee, and it was not conducting any business in Texas. The sole reason it became a Texas corporation was to perform a “divisional merger,” a process permitted under Texas law in which a corporation divides into multiple successor corporations with assets and liabilities assigned to the successors as it sees fit under Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code, §§ 10.00l(a), 10.003.

In this case, Corizon survived and retained all of its expired contracts and their corresponding liabilities plus $1 million in cash, the right to collect on its insurance policies, and the right to collect up to $4 million under a “funding ...

by Chuck Sharman

A group of women who claimed they were raped by a physician’s assistant at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has now been screwed two more times. First, prosecutors apparently bungled the criminal case against their alleged assailant. Then a lawsuit the group filed was stayed by the federal court for the Southern District of New York on March 8, 2023, pending the outcome of bankruptcy proceedings filed by one of the defendants, former jail healthcare provider Corizon Health.

The group of 29 former detainees alleged that the City and Corizon Health should have stopped Sidney Wilson from abusing his role in the jail’s medical unit to ply them with gifts – including Popeye’s Chicken, a sex toy and prescription drugs – as he “repeatedly raped, sexually assaulted and abused” them between 2015 and 2017. [See: PLN, Nov. 2016, p.63.]

Wilson, now 66, was criminally charged. But the charges were dropped in June 2021. Bronx Senior Assistant District Attorney Nancy Strohmeyer admitted then that the case “could not be brought into compliance” with reform laws passed the year before, which set strict timelines for prosecutors to share discovery materials with defendants.

Though their alleged assailant ...

by Douglas Ankney

A review of court records by PLN has found repeated sanctions for discovery violations against private prison healthcare provider Wellpath in suits across the country blaming the firm’s dismal care for prisoner deaths – including four since 2020.

Washington – Benton County Jail

First, the firm was twice sanctioned in a suit alleging that the death of Marc Moreno at Washington’s Benton County Jail was caused by employees of a Wellpath corporate predecessor, Correctional Healthcare Companies (CHC).

Plaintiffs sought discovery in 2018 of documents related to prior complaints about healthcare at the jail, as well as audits of the jail’s medical services and electronically stored information (ESI). The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington granted a motion to compel discovery on April 9, 2019, giving Wellpath 14 days to comply. But months later, on January 8, 2020, the Court found CHC in contempt of its earlier order, and it levied a sanction for $7,290 in fees to pay Plaintiff’s attorneys from Budge & Heipt PLLC in Seattle and the Law Office of George Trejo in Yakima. CHC was also ordered to execute a search plan to locate the missing ESI, including emails of all ...

by Kevin W. Bliss

New Mexico’s Bernalillo County is terminating the contract with its jail’s private healthcare contractor effective July 25, 2023. County Manager Julie Morgas Baca sent word to YesCare – the corporate descendant of Corizon Health – on January 26, 2023, pulling the plug two years early on a $64.9 million four-year contract that began in September 2021.

It is the second contract canceled in two years with a healthcare contractor at the county’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Albuquerque. When county commissioners voted to hire YesCare, it was because previous provider Centurion Detention Health Services had quit in a firestorm that followed nine jail deaths in just one year.

Tennessee-based YesCare is the golem Corizon Health brought to life with much of the firm’s viable business when it successfully petitioned a Texas court to let it slough off its liabilities into another new corporation called Tehum Care Services. That firm then promptly declared bankruptcy. Known as the “Texas Two-Step,” the procedure is legal but ethically dubious; Tehum told the federal bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas in May 2023 that it had 30 unsecured creditors owed a total of $38,438,751. See: In Re: Tehum Care ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

Dexter Barry, 54, waited 12 years to receive a new heart. He even moved to Jacksonville to receive the life-saving transplant in 2020. In just two days in late November 2022, however, a stay in the Duval County Jail (DCJ) undid the miraculous $4-million surgery when Barry was denied the medication needed to keep his body from rejecting the new heart, and it failed.

Barry had argued with a disabled neighbor on November 18, 2022, over a shared wi-fi plan the neighbor was not paying for. The neighbor called police, claiming Barry verbally threatened him.  The respondin officer said, “I’m just going to separate you all for a cool-off period,” and he arrested Barry on a simple misdemeanor assault charge for threatening violence. During the arrest Barry told officers seven times about his heart transplant and the dire need to take the anti-transplant rejection drug. 

The next two days he spent in DCJ under the care of its private contracted healthcare provider, Armor Correctional Services. That turned into a death sentence that within a week left the soon-to-be grandfather dead from cardiac arrest. A pathologist hired by his family confirmed he died because his body rejected ...