In an unpublished opinion, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict finding that a prison guard used excessive force against a prisoner and awarding $5,000 in damages.

Mississippi prisoner Thomas Unger sued Wackenhut (now Geo Corporation), various supervisory officials and guard Reginald Blanchard, alleging that he was ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

On March 22, 2005, a riot at a private prison run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) near Cushing, Oklahoma resulted in the death of one prisoner and injuries to fifteen others, one of them critically. No guards or other CCA employees were injured.

Adam Gene Lippert, 32, suffered a fatal stab wound to the chest during the riot at the Cimarron Correctional Facility (CCF). Lippert was serving a 10-year sentence for a drug-related crime. He allegedly bore tattoos identified with the Aryan Brotherhood. He arrived at CCF on December 2, 2004. He died at the Cushing Regional Hospital 90 minutes after the riot was quelled. He had been beaten and stabbed multiple times.

Lucky Miller--a police sergeant in Stroud, Oklahoma, who grew up with Lippert in Davenport, Oklahoma., and arrested him for the conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine charge that sent him to CCF--described Lippert as a good person whose life had spun out of control due to drugs and alcohol.

I've known Adam my whole life," said Miller. I liked Adam. Deep down he was a good person. Drugs and alcohol started controlling his life. I hate it that he got killed. He's got a ...

The Alabama Court of Appeals held that Alabama's Workers' Compensation Act is not an exclusive remedy for tort claims of employees alleging purely psychological injuries.

Three female employees of Correctional Medical Services, Inc. (CMS) brought suit against CMS employees of the Alabama Department of Corrections and others, for an incident that occurred on August 31, 2000, in the health-care unit at the Fountain Correctional Facility.
While working in the health-care unit, plaintiffs heard a guard scream. Shortly thereafter, one plaintiff was captured by one of several prison[ers]...and was led at knifepoint into an interior hallway[.] She was released later and was not physically harmed, while she was held hostage. The other two plaintiffs were able to avoid being captured by barricading themselves in a break room. They did not sustain any physical injuries during the incident.

Plaintiffs alleged that CMS had negligently, wantonly, recklessly and intentionally failed to formulate, implement and oversee policies and procedures for the protection of the [employees] from the wrongful conduct of the prison population' and that the employees had been terrorized' and caused to suffer severe and continuing mental anguish and emotional distress' as a proximate result of CMS's omissions.

The trial court granted summary ...

On August 12, 2004, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, now known as GEO Group, Inc., settled a suit alleging that inadequate medical care at a 640-bed Wackenhut-run jail caused a prisoner to give birth prematurely.

Melissa Villarreal, 32, a former prisoner at the Wackenhut-run jail in downtown San Antonio, was arrested for ...

By John E. Dannenberg

The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) settled a class action federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Limestone Correctional Facility AIDS-afflicted prisoners who had complained of unconstitutional conditions of medical treatment and confinement that resulted in excessive suffering and a high mortality rate. The settlement implicated performance failure of Limestone’s former contract medical provider, NaphCare, Inc. The instant settlement is in addition to earlier hepatitis-C and working-conditions settlements previously reported in PLN (Oct. 2003, pp.3, 5; Jan. 2003, p.12).

Antonio Leatherwood and four other Limestone prisoners sued Donald Campbell, Commissioner of ADOC, Ronald Cavanaugh, Director of Treatment of ADOC, Billy Mitchem, Limestone’s Warden and David Wise, Deputy Warden in a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 class action suit for injunctive relief for all AIDS-afflicted Limestone prisoners. The impetus of the suit was to end the years of pain and suffering and ensure that medical care would improve. U.S. District Magistrate Judge John Ott (U.S.D.C., N.D. Ala. (Western Div.) had found, “It is evident that lives were lost due to preventable lapses in the medical treatment. HIV prisoners died without necessary intervention by the Limestone medical staff or ADOC.”

Indeed, court-appointed mortality expert Dr. Stephen Tabet found that 42 ...

Five years after beginning its first flirtation with for-profit prisons, Michigan is learning an invaluable lesson: Despite the hype, private prisons are not cost-effective.

In the months following its 1999 opening, the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility (MYCF) was criticized over assaults, staff turnover, and suicide attempts. Now critics contend that MYCF, coarsely referred to as the punk prison," is gouging taxpayers for high security costs when the majority of its young prisoners could be housed more cheaply in lower security prisons. MYCF is operated by the Geo Group Inc., formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation [see PLN, June 2004, pg. 16].

Approved in 1996 during the height of the get tough on crime" craze, MYCF was part of a juvenile justice reform package that promised adult time for adult crime." The prison comes complete with two adult-sized gun towers and an armed perimeter patrol.

But when the hordes of young superpredators" propagandized in the 1990s never materialized, says Elizabeth Arnovits, executive director of the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency, the state simply decided to fill the prison with other kids. The numbers bear this out. In late March 2004, two-thirds of the prisoners were low security (levels 1 and ...

by Matthew T.Clarke

A federal district court in New York has held that Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) may be liable for retaining an employee at a CSC-run halfway house after his sexual abuse of female prisoners was reported to another CSC employee.

Yvette Adorno and Stephanie Womble, federal prisoners formerly confined at Le Marquis Community Correctional Center, a New York city halfway house for state and federal prisoners, filed suit against CSC in New York federal court, alleging CSC employee Miguel Correa sexually abused them at Le Marquis. Correa's job was Resident Advocate. He was responsible for protecting prisoners' rights in disciplinary actions.

On the evening of November 13, 1998, Correa allegedly picked up Adorno's shirt, touched her breasts, made various inappropriate sexual comments ..., kissed her and pushed his body up against her," only allowing her to leave his second-floor private office after she threatened to scream and promised not to report the incident." Adorno did not report the incident to any federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or CSC official because of threats by Facility Administrator Josette Nelson-Dabo to send prisoners who complained about conditions at Le Marquis back to prison. Adorno told another prisoner about the abuse the ...

by John E Dannenberg

An immigration detainee of seven years, who had unsuccessfully sued his jailer, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and its employees for severely beating him during a medical emergency transport, was granted a new trial with appointed counsel. The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held that the complexity of the case should have alerted the district court to grant the detainee's original motion for appointment of counsel, the lack of which reduced his chances of prevailing to virtually nil.

Emmanuel Agyeman, a native of Ghana deemed an illegal alien by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), had been detained" since February 4, 1997. He was found deportable on July 28, 1997, but the ruling was overturned on July 23, 2002, (Agyeman v. INS, 296 F.3d 871 (9th Cir. 2002)) and remanded for a full and fair hearing. Meanwhile, part of his unending federal detention was spent in facilities operated by private contractor CCA, where he claimed he was mistreated.

Agyeman complained that on October 11, 1998, while he was a pre-trial detainee at CCA's Central Arizona Detention Center, he was beaten by shift supervisor Captain Lopez, by Lt. Egber and by a Sgt. John Doe." Agyeman ...

by Michael Rigby


Prison Health Services (PHS) has killed another patient. According to a highly critical 10-page report released by the New York State Commission of Correction on June 23, 2004, the 2001 death of Brian Tetrault, a prisoner in the custody of the Schenectady County Jail, was the result of grossly inadequate and incompetent treatment of his Parkinson's disease. Health care at the jail was provided by PHS, a private, for-profit company based in Tennessee.

Tetrault, a long time sufferer of Parkinson's, was arrested for burglary, larceny, and harassment on November 10, 2001, and placed in the Schenectady County Jail. At the time of his imprisonment, Tetrault, 44, was taking a total of seven drugs to control the psychiatric and physical symptoms associated with the disease. Under the care of the Albany Medical College Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center (AMCH), the drugs had kept Tetrault alive for a decade.

But when Tetrault arrived at the jail, his medication regimen was drastically altered. Dr. W. Duke DeFresne, a PHS physician, discontinued all but one of Tetrault's medications, and even that was reduced. (Notably, none of the discontinued medications were found in the jail's pharmaceutical formulary.) Unthinkably, DeFresne made these ...

In a detailed 98 page report to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature, the California State Auditor criticized the California Department of Corrections' (CDC) lax management of contract outside-hospital medical services for CDC prisoners. The July 27, 2004 report observed that CDC's costs rose at a rate of 21% per year between 1999 and 2003, versus the national average hospital services consumer price index growth of 8% per year. The growth in in-patient hospital costs was attributed to the need for more expensive services, while the growth in out-patient costs was driven by both more expensive and more numerous hospital visits.

It should be noted that this report pre-dates any effect from the recent Plata v. Schwarzenegger settlement agreement to remedy CDC's constitutionally inadequate health care services statewide. Plata requires implementing more stringent (and expansive, e.g., HCV treatment ) standards for prisoner health care estimated to add hundreds of millions of dollars exposure per year. The report concludes with twelve recommendations to CDC [and reports CDC's invited response] on how better to manage procedures in contracting with outside healthcare facilities. But it does not even address the overriding cost driver: a rapidly aging population of over 30,000 condemned, lifer ...