Leroy Holiday, Sr., 55, a regional warden for LaSalle Management Company, LLC (LMC), a private prison firm, was released on $5,000 bond after being arrested and booked into the LaSalle Parrish Jail in November 2008.

According to LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin, Holiday was charged with improperly using prisoners and employees at a minimum-security prison for personal purposes. Franklin said Holiday had been charged with only one count of malfeasance, but his office had enough evidence to charge him with 40 additional counts and the investigation was ongoing.

Holiday was the warden of the LaSalle Correctional Center (LCC) in Urania, Louisiana, where the malfeasance is al-leged to have occurred. He also oversaw LMC-managed facilities in Catahoula, Concordia and Ouachita parishes.

LCC is run in cooperation with the sheriff’s office, which retains the ability to hire and fire employees and commission them for law enforcement. However, Franklin said Holiday was an employee of LMC, and referred questions about his employment status to company officials. Franklin also noted that Holiday’s law enforcement commission had been re-voked and he would not be allowed back on LCC grounds.

Source: www.thetowntalk.com

On October 31, 2008, a Hawaiian state court awarded $3,000 each in damages to three Hawaiian prisoners who were bitten by dogs while incarcerated at a private prison in Oklahoma.
Jonathan K. Lum, John Daffron and Frank Frisbee are Hawaiian state prisoners who were incarcerated at the Diamond Back Correctional ...

On November 7, 2008, prison guard Geno Lewis Hawkins was arrested by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and the Inspector General’s Office of the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) on a charge of sexual battery.

In August 2008, FDLE and FDOC initiated a joint investigation of Hawkins, a 43-year-old Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) employee, for having a sexual relationship with a female prisoner at the Gadsden Correctional Facility.

Hawkins was charged with one count of sexual battery and booked into the Leon County Jail without bond. His prose-cution is still pending.

In an unrelated case, Oregon Department of Corrections groundskeeper Paul William Golden, 37, was arrested on January 16, 2009 for sexually abusing six female prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.

Golden worked as a landscaper at Coffee Creek from October 2004 until his April 2008 resignation, and supervised prisoner work crews. He was arraigned on 31 counts of custodial sexual misconduct, rape and supplying contraband, ac-cording to Lt. Gregg Hastings, a spokesman for the Oregon State Police. Golden has pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for June 23, 2009.

These are only two of numerous cases involving sexual abuse by prison staff nationwide, which ...

Cheney and Gonzales Indicted in Connection with Private Prison in Texas

by Matt Clarke

On November 17, 2008, a Texas grand jury returned an indictment against then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney and former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, charging Cheney with contributing to prisoner abuse in privately-run prisons and Gonzales with covering up the abuse by interfering with investigations.

The indictment named GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), CCA and Cornell Corrections as unindicted co-actors. It stated that Cheney and the companies, in a for-profit scheme, neglected federal prisoners by allowing them to be assaulted by other prisoners and denying them proper medical care, among other allegations.

Cheney’s ties with the private prison firms were twofold: (1) his $85 million investment in the Vanguard Group, which “appears on the top ten list of companies that house Federal detainees that are being rounded up by ICE officials,” and (2) his position as Vice President, through which he exerted “a tremendous influence on ICE and has a say in how much ICE will pay the said private prison per diem.”

The grand jurors stated it was “appalling to find that numerous elected officials from different levels of our government throughout our country to ...

Alaska prisoners may bring a third-party breach of contract claim against contract medical providers for medical negligence, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided August 28, 2007.

Joseph Miller, an Alaska prisoner, sued Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), asserting medical negligence and third-party breach of contract claims. The district court granted summary judgment for CCA on all claims. Miller appealed and the Ninth Circuit reversed.

In Rathke v. Corrections Corporation of America, 153 P.3d 303, 310 (Alaska 2007), the Alaska Supreme Court held that Alaska prisoners may sue CCA for breach of contract as they are the intended beneficiary of the state’s contract with CCA. In light of Rathke, the Ninth Circuit reversed the dismissal of Miller’s third-party breach of contract claim. See: Miller v. Corrections Corporation of America, 239 Fed. Appx. 396 (9th Cir. 2007).

Our cover story this month examines the travails of Geo Corporation, the second largest private prison company in the world in the state of Texas. We recently noted their pullout from the state of Pennsylvania. Also in this issue of PLN is the Texas court of appeals ruling upholding a $42 million wrongful death verdict against Geo. We are not singling Geo out. They are neither better nor worse than their colleagues in the private prison industry. Since its inception in 1990 PLN has opposed the private prison industry. In doing so we have never claimed or argued that government prisons were somehow “better” or a panacea of some sort. Rather the comparison is between rotten apples and rotten oranges.

But as the cover story illustrates, government prison officials are not hiring politicians and giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in “consulting fees” to push their “lock ‘em up agenda”. And when a prisoner dies because of short staffing, under trained guards or simple neglect, the warden at a government prison can’t expect to get a bonus for saving the company money. The most pernicious impact of the private prison industry has been its expansion of physical ...

Texas Court of Appeals Upholds $42.5 Million Award Against Wackenhut / GEO Group

by Matt Clarke

On April 2, 2009, a Texas Court of Appeals upheld a jury award of $22,000,000 in actual damages and $20,500,000 in punitive damages against Wackenhut Corrections (now known as GEO Group) in a lawsuit ...

Sexual assault, rape, indecency, deviance. These terms represent reprehensible behavior in our society. They also represent recurring themes in our nation’s prisons – not only by prisoners, but also by guards and other staff members.

PLN’s August 2006 cover story, Guards Rape of Prisoners Rampant, No Solution in Sight, profiled examples of sexual abuse by prison guards and other employees in 26 states. Since that time the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission has issued proposed standards to reduce sexual abuse behind bars, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics has released reports on sexual victimization in our nation’s prisons and jails. The latter reports found that over 60% of allegations of sexual abuse involved staff members rather than other prisoners.

What has not changed in the past several years is the continued rape and sexual exploitation of prisoners by prison and jail employees who are supposed to ensure their safety. All 50 states have enacted laws criminalizing sex between prisoners and prison staff; thus, employees who engage in sexual misconduct can no longer claim consent as a defense.

Due to the nature of prisons as “total institutions,” it is impossible for prisoners to voluntarily consent to sexual advances by staff members ...

On February 5, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reversed the dismissal of a suit against Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for failure to prove exhaustion of administrative remedies.

Wesley Purkey, a federal prisoner formerly housed at CCA’s facility in Hearenworth, Kansas, sued CCA and various CCA employees for alleged constitutional violations. The defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that Purkey failed to show that he exhausted his administrative remedies prior to filing suit. The district court granted the motion. Purkey appealed.

On Appeal, Purkey argued that it was not his burden to show exhaustion of administrative remedies. The Tenth Circuit agreed. In Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199 (2006), the Supreme Court held that exhaustion of administrative remedies is an affirmative defense that must be pleaded and proven by the defense. Accordingly, the Tenth Circuit reversed and remanded the matter to the district court for further proceedings. See: Purkey v. CCA Detention Center, 263 Fed. Appx. 723 (10th Cir. 2008).

The district court denied the defendants’ renewed motion for summary judgment on remand. Purkey had filed a grievance with the CCA facility but was transferred to another facility before receiving a denial. The court determined that ...

The short, sad lives of some detainees facing relatively minor charges end in jail. Here are three such cases.
By Rob Jordan

As she laid her head on her big sister's chest and listened to the heartbeats slow, Harolyn Frazier thought of opportunities lost. In the wake of a seizure, 38-year-old Lola Davis was brain dead, and Frazier had given hospital staff permission to turn off life support. A guard sat on a bench nearby. Outside the narrow window, evening light gave in to darkness.

Frazier sobbed quietly, thinking of the baby girl Davis had given birth to six months earlier. She thought of life without her sister, the only close family she had left. She thought about how their lives had taken such separate paths — Frazier had become an ordained minister and successful office manager, while her sister had been condemned to draw her last breath in a place where freedom is a hallucination. Then the heartbeats stopped.

Within minutes the guard had "secured the scene." As Frazier consoled two of Davis's daughters outside, a police officer arrived, followed by a homicide detective who dutifully recorded the details. "Deceased was an inmate at TGK [Turner Guilford Knight Correctional ...