Wilkes County, Georgia and Integrative Detention Health Services, Inc. (IDHS) paid $500,000.00 for settlement of a wrongful death suit alleging negligent medical care, deliberate indifference to serious medical needs, and wrongly allowing a paramedic to practice medicine.

Wilkes County is a small, rural Georgia community of 4,000 citizens. The average ...

America Service Group, the parent company of Prison Health Services, has fired two high level employees in connection with billing improprieties by its prison pharmacy division.

ASG fired Trey Hartman, president and chief operating officer of Prison Health Services, on December 7, 2005. Grant Bryson, president and CEO of Secure Pharmacy Plus (SPP), was fired on December 9. Hartman formerly ran SPP, which provides pharmaceuticals to prisons and jails. The two men were fired for cause, according to the company.

In October 2004, ASG launched an investigation to determine whether SPP overcharged its clients for drugs and ignored generally accepted accounting principles. The audit was expected to cover all periods since ASG acquired SPP in September 2000. A recently resigned SPP controller had identified the issues under investigation, according to the company.

In November 2005 the NASDAQ stock exchange warned ASG it was subject to delisting because it had not made timely financial filings with the Securities Exchange Commission. ASG delayed its third quarter reports pending conclusion of the SPP audit. In a January 10, 2006, letter the stock exchange notified the company it would continue to be listed if its third quarter report was filed by March 15. ASG ...

Scandal, Suicides, Corruption and Abuse Abound at New York Citys Rikers Island Jail

by Gary Hunter

When Rikers Island was purchased in 1884 it was only 87 acres. The city of New York made it a landfill and expanded it for the citys Department of Correction a fact that has piled as much garbage above the ground as beneath. Corruption on Rikers Island reaches from bottom to top and has resulted in the abuse, brutalization and deaths of countless prisoners. Rikers Island is the jail complex for New York City which holds pretrial detainees and those serving sentences of less than one year and sentenced felons awaiting transport to the state prison system. Currently holding around 14,000 prisoners, Rikers Island has held as many as 20,000 prisoners. It is one of the largest jails in the country.

Corrupt Chiefs

Dominick Labruzzi, a captain at Rikers Island juvenile jail, was charged, on January 31, 2006, with sexually assaulting several teenage boys under his custody. Several young boys, who had no contact with each other, told strikingly similar stories to investigators. Each boy described a basement to where Labruzzi would take them then fondle their genitals as he pretended to search them. ...

In an attempt to recoup millions of dollars, private prison operator Cornell Companies, Inc., has filed lawsuits against lawyers entrusted to oversee the companys funds for land deals.

Cornell, based in Huston filed the latest suit on August 26, 2005, in Houstons 333rd District Court against Locke Liddell & Sapp and David Montgomery, a partner in the firm, alleging malpractice, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and fraud.

The complaint alleges the defendants gave Cornell the green light to place $13 million into an account that was supposedly an escrow account. There was no escrow agent; there was no escrow account, contends Scott Hershman, a Cornell attorney. That money was placed in the account with the intention to buy land for developing a prison in Colorado.

Cornell says $5 million was improperly taken from the account, and it incurred millions of dollars in fees, expenses, and transaction costs to pursue the missing money and finalize the land deal with another attorney.
The lawsuit comes as a surprise to Locke Liddell, who was representing Cornell on other matters when the suit was filed. They just filed this thing without any notice to us, said John McElhaney, Locke Liddells spokesman.

Cornell ...

Four guards have been indicted for reckless homicide and aggravated assault in the July 2004 murder of a female prisoner at the Metro Detention Facility in Nashville, Tennessee, previously reported in PLN. [see PLN, Apr. 2005, p. 14]. The Metro facility is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), Americas largest private prison company, which is based in Nashville.

Estelle Richardson, 34, was incarcerated at the Metro Detention Facility. On July 5, 2004, at 5:37 a.m., she was found unresponsive on the floor of her solitary confinement cell. CCA claims Richardson had fought with other prisoners. However, other prisoners could not have been responsible for the severe injuries that caused her death because she was alone in her cell at the time. Thus, only CCA employees could have killed her.

An autopsy revealed a fatal skull fracture, four broken ribs and liver injuries. The medical examiner said the injuries were consistent with blunt force trauma caused by Richardsons body being slammed against a hard surface, and could not have been self-inflicted. Her death was ruled a homicide.

In September 2005, CCA guards William Woods, 26; Keith Andre Hendricks, 35; Jeremy Neese, 24; and Joshua D. Schockman, 23, were indicted ...

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a grant of summary judgment to a physician employed by EMSA Correctional Care, Inc (EMSA) in an Ohio pretrial detainees inadequate medical care claim.

On October 5th or 6th, 1998, James Johnson II severely cut his hand after tripping on a concrete stoop and falling &through a glass door& [B]oth an ambulance and a police car were dispatched to the scene & while the medical personnel were caring for him, the police discovered that there was an outstanding [domestic violence] warrant for Johnsons arrest.

Johnson was taken to a hospital emergency room where a physician told him that his tendons had been completely severed, that he was to return for surgery in [7-10] days (because the tendons needed some time to harden before surgery was performed), and that if he did not return in the appropriate time period, he would probably & lose the use of [his] hand permanently.

Johnson was then held in the Franklin County, Ohio jail on the outstanding warrant. All the time & medical services at the jail were contracted out to EMSA. Dr. [Vincent Anthony] Spagna, [M.D.] an EMSA employee, served as medical director of the Franklin ...

Laura Woolseys biggest fear was dying in jail. But thanks to the inept care provided her at New Yorks Schenectady County Jail, that fear was tragically realized.

Woolsey, 39, died at the jail on August 3, 2005, three hours after complaining of chest pain. She had been returned to the jail the day before, five days after undergoing surgery to replace a defective heart valve.

A report by Sheriff Harry Buffardi put the blame squarely on Schenectady Family Health Services (SFHS), the jails not-for-profit health care provider. According to the report, a guard notified the jails on-call nurse that Woolsey was complaining of chest pains at 7:45 a.m. Twenty minutes later the nurse was told that Woolseys condition appeared to be worsening. A second nurse then administered medication.

Woolsey was in total cardiac arrest by 10:20 a.m. When paramedics arrived, however, SFHS nurse Lorraine Walker told them not to administer CPR because of Woolseys recent open heart surgery. Walker falsely asserted the instructions had been issued by a doctor. The advice was contrary to sound medical procedure and common sense.

Buffardi said paramedics and several doctors told him that the need to stimulate blood flow far outweighed any risk of ...

A former social worker with the Baltimore public defenders office in Maryland, who said she was raped by a 15-year-old boy she was a visiting at the Charles H. Hickley, Jr. School settled a civil lawsuit on March 28, 2005, against the corporations that ran the juvenile detention center.
Amy Bibighaus, 29, went to the Hickley School on February 12, 2002, to evaluate juvenile delinquents and make recommendations about punishment. One of the juveniles she saw was a 15-year-old boy who was being housed in isolation after being found delinquent in an armed robbery case. According to the lawsuit, the teenager had proven to be an assaultive disturbance within the school and had demonstrated a propensity toward sexually aggressive behavior in the violence, including the sexual assault of a Hickley staff member.

After the teenager asked the attorney accompanying Bibighaus to leave the room so he could talk to the social worker, he propositioned Bibighaus. When she tried to leave the small office, a malfunctioning lock prevented her from being able to escape, and the absence of attentive Hickley staff members kept anyone from noticing the attack that turned into a rape.
Hickley staff members called state police after one ...

Prison Health Services (PHS) has, once again, entered into a pretrial settlement to pay the family of a prisoner who died from the negligent care provided by PHS at Floridas Leon County Detention Center (LCOC).
The parents of a Ruth Hubbs brought this action in Leon County Circuit Court, but ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

In June 2005, the Colorado State Auditor released its April 2005 report of the performance audit of private prisons contracted by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The report strongly criticized the private prisons performance and the lack of oversight by the DOCs monitors.

The DOC uses six private prisons. Three medium-security private prisons in Colorado are operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) as is one maximum-security prison in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The CCA prisons all house male prisoners. One medium-security private prison for female prisoners, in Brush, Colorado, is owned and operated by Tennessee-based GRW Corporation. It was the site of recent sexual assault and drug scandals that caused Hawaii and Wyoming to withdraw their prisoners from the facility. One of the CCA prisons, Crowley County Correctional Facility (CCCF), recently experienced a riot that the DOC blamed on the lack of experience and poor training of CCA guards. [PLN, Jan. 2005, pp. 26, 31]. The auditors found the lowest staffing ratio at CCCF. The monitors failed to conduct a security or emergency activation audit at CCCF prior to the riot.

The method by which the private prisons are contracted is odd. The DOC contracts with ...