by Ed Lyon

Regardless of what people without first-hand knowledge of prisons or detention centers believe, prisoners are generally not the blood-thirsty, brutal animals depicted in the media. In fact, especially in the face of SWAT-styled rapid response teams used within institutions, prisoners are mostly hopeless, helpless, often powerless individuals.

Even the most benign, traditionally-recognized form of protest used by prisoners to bring attention to and hopefully effect positive change for deplorable prison conditions—the hunger strike—is attacked by detention officials, courts and government agencies.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is charged with receiving, processing and detaining asylum seekers entering the country while their cases are reviewed. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE does not own, staff and operate the majority of the detention facilities asylum seekers are housed in. Generally, private for-profit prison corporations build and staff these facilities and enter into contracts with ICE to house the detainees, supposedly within the policies, standards and rules set forth by ICE. Many local jails also house immigration detainees on a contract basis with ICE as well.

Hunger strikes have been occurring across the nation at these facilities since at least 2012, according to a June 2021 report by ...

In a landmark case, a federal jury decided against the GEO Group for paying $1 dollar a day wages to immigrant detainees at its privately-operated prison in Washington.

The facility in question is the Northwest ICE Processing Center (formerly the Northwest Detention Center) in Tacoma located on a toxic waste Superfund site and a lava flood zone. The 1,575-bed facility is run by GEO and holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the United States, although its population has dropped to about 400 since the pandemic.

On October 27, 2021, the jury found GEO was responsible to pay $17.3 million in back wages to more than 10,000 detainees who deserved a minimum wage, now $13.69 an hour. Additionally, U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan ordered GEO to return profits to Washington state in the amount of $5,950,340, and end its “voluntary” work program.

The lawsuit against GEO for what is essentially slave labor has been working its way through the federal courts for four years.

Detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center filed a lawsuit against GEO in 2017, with the assistance of the Seattle law firm of Schroeter ...

by Keith Sanders

On August 31, 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division released a report detailing its investigation concerning the conditions inside San Luis Obispo County Jail.

The findings of the report, conducted pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), 42, U.S.C. § 1997, Title II of the American Disabilities Act (ADA), and 42 U.S.C. § 12132, established reasonable cause that the California jail violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and the ADA. The United States District Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California advised Wade Horton, San Luis Obispo County Administration Officer, and Sheriff Ian Parkinson that the Attorney General could file suit under CRIPA against them within 49 days to remedy the alleged conditions inside the jail.

The investigation was initiated in October 2018 to examine the jail’s treatment of disabled prisoners and the level of medical and mental health care it provided. A relatively high percentage of prisoners in the county jail, roughly 40%, suffer from mental illness at any given time, most of whom are taking psychotropic medications. The jail estimated, according to the report, that over “90% of prisoners have substance abuse issues,” with many of them temporarily ...

by Keith Sanders

Dr. Garrett Felber, a history professor at the University of Mississippi (UM), has distinguished himself over the years as a vocal critic of America’s racist criminological and penological institutions. At conferences and public speaking engagements, he has decried mass incarceration, called for the abolition of prisons, and exposed brutal police tactics that have become the norm in law enforcement. Dr. Felber’s activism, however, is not confined to the country’s prisons and police departments. He also lambasted the University of Mississippi for its connection to slavery and criticized a colleague’s financial involvement with CoreCivic, a private-prison company.

Charles Overby is a celebrated instructor of journalism at UM. Among these other accolades, Overby served as the executive editor of the Jackson, MS newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger, and the chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum, a non-profit advocate for the freedom of press. In 2001, the Freedom Forum donated $5 million to construct the Overby Center for the Study of Southern Journalism and Politics on UM’s campus. In the same year, Mr. Overby also became the director of the board of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), later rebranded as CoreCivic. During a Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration (MUMI) Conference ...

by Ed Lyon

Prison populations exploded in every state across the country during the 1980s and ‘90s. It was during that massive expansion that the modern private prison industry was born as a “way to ease the burden on taxpayers by reducing public spending on government-run facilities,” as touted by the for-profit incarcerators. In reality it has become another way to transfer public wealth in the form of tax dollars into the coffers of private corporations and their shareholders.

The American Bar Association (ABA) foresaw what was ahead, and in a 1990 resolution numbered 115B, sternly advised “governments to proceed with caution before entering into contracts with private prison companies.”

In a January 16, 2021 Executive Order, President Joe Biden issued an order barring the Justice Department from renewing contracts with private prisons, while excluding immigration detention contracts. The Justice Department’s Inspector General had already found in 2016 that private prisons “do not maintain the same levels of safety and security for people in the federal criminal justice system or correctional staff.”

In March 2021, the Sentencing Project released a report on private prisons. The report stated 115,428 prisoners were held in private prisons as of 2019 and the private ...

by David M. Reutter

On June 17, 2021, Southern Health Partners paid $750,000 to resolve a lawsuit alleging it failed to take proper steps in caring for a pretrial detainee who entered South Carolina’s Marlboro County Jail with a prescription drug addiction.

Roy Locklear, 30, had a history of drug ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 8, 2020, Corizon Health, Inc. agreed to pay $20,000 to settle its part of a federal lawsuit brought by an Arizona prisoner who suffered a partial foot amputation after Corizon delayed effective medical treatment.

Arizona state prisoner Edmund V. Powers fell 60 to 80 feet, ...

by Chuck Sharman

In an order and settlement agreement released on October 19, 2021, by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), prison financial giant JPay, LLC agreed to pay $6 million in fines and restitution, after its prepaid debit cards were found to have taken unfair advantage of some ...

by David M. Reutter

The Vermont Supreme Court concluded that under the Public Records Act (PRA) when “the state contracts with a private entity to discharge the entirety of a fundamental and uniquely governmental obligation owed to its citizens, that entity acts as an ‘instrumentality’ of the State.” That conclusion led the Court to find that Wellpath was required under the PRA to release “any records relating to legal actions and settlements arising” from the care it provided to Vermont prisoners.

The Court’s September 3, 2021 order was issued in an appeal by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the publisher of PLN. From 2010 to 2015, Correct Care Solutions, now known as Wellpath LLC, held a contract with the Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide medical care to every person in DOC’s custody. The contract paid Wellpath over $91 million.

In 2015, HRDC sent Wellpath a PRA request seeking public records relating to all payouts for claims, lawsuits, or contracts arising from Wellpath’s provision of services under that contract. Wellpath declined to provide the requested documents, asserting that as a private entity it was not subject to the PRA. HRDC sent another request for those documents in ...

Jessica “The Madam” Burnett is set to plead guilty to a series of charges which included conspiracy to distribute methamphetamines and marijuana as part of a major drug trafficking investigation covering several southern Georgia counties and correctional facilities.

Burnett was a sergeant at the Core­Civic-run private prison, the Coffee County Correctional Facility. At 41 years of age, charges stated that Burnett smuggled drugs, cell phones, and other items into the prison for gang members.

She and 47 other defendants were caught up in Operation Sandy Bottom begun in 2018 when the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office asked for assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Coastal Georgia Violent Gang Task Force to address the growing drug problem in the Sandy Ridge neighborhood of Douglas, Georgia. The indictment was unsealed January 2021 and alleged 129 total charges against the defendants.

Police stated that the drug ring was run by the Gangster Disciples, expanded across Coffee, Bacon, Emmanuel, Jeff Davis, Pierce, and Wheeler counties in Georgia and was coordinated by members of the gang in the state prison system.

Burnett faces up to 20 years in prison for her crimes. She and a second guard, Idalis Harrell, both are pleading guilty ...