by Keith Sanders

On April 6, 2022, Pennsylvania’s Delaware County assumed control of its jail for the first time in 24 years, after terminating its contract with the Florida-based GEO Group. Prior to that, the 1,800-bed George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton was the state’s last privately-operated county lockup.

GEO Group, the nation’s largest private prison operator, has managed the jail since 1998, when the firm was still known as Wackenhut and entered a private-public partnership with the county to build and run the jail. That partnership endured despite legal payouts for lawsuits filed over detainees’ wrongful deaths, including a $7 million settlement in 2018 with the survivors of a mentally ill detainee who was locked in solitary confinement and hanged herself with her bra. [See: PLN, Nov. 2018, p.36.]

In December 2018, the county signed its most recent contract with the firm, which was worth $259 million over five years. The fallout between the two dates to the following year, 2019, when employees said they were subjected to racist and sexist mistreatment by facility Superintendent John Reilly, Jr., and he resigned. [See: PLN, Mar. 2020, p.28.]

That same year, Democratic candidates took over the County Council, ...

by Kevin W. Bliss

On June 7, 2022, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky dismissed the case of a former jail detainee after she reached a settlement with the lockup’s privately contracted healthcare provider. However, the amount and most of the terms of the settlement between Kimissa Rowland and Southern Health Partners, Inc., (SHP) were not disclosed.

Rowland was booked on a drug charge into the Franklin County Regional Jail on July 28, 2017. She was being treated for ulcerative colitis (UC) at the time, and she soon suffered a flare-up of symptoms. That got her released on a medical furlough on September 11, 2017. However, her health insurance had lapsed, so she saw no other medical provider before returning to the jail two days later.

Jail staff suspected that she was hiding drugs when she returned and sent her to the hospital for a CT scan. When that revealed no foreign objects in her body, she was sent back to the jail with a note to see a gastroenterologist for follow up “as soon as possible.” She was also provided a five-day regimen of prednisone.

Before that was through, she went back to the jail’s medical ...

by Benjamin Tschirhart

In August 2022, private jail medical provider Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH) settled with the estate of a Missouri pretrial detainee who died of lung cancer after being refused medical attention for months. The agreement, which was for an undisclosed sum, came a few months after a jury ordered the company to pay $8.5 million in the case.

Beginning about two months after he was booked into Missouri’s Phelps County Jail on October 4, 2019, Bilal Hasanie Hill complained of illness and pain. When ACH staffers finally saw him in January 2020, they decided he had a pulled muscle and prescribed Tylenol. But by the end of that month, he also reported that his voice was changing and a lump in his neck was giving him difficulty swallowing. That earned him extra Tylenol, along with prednisone.

Hill, who was awaiting trial on federal drug and gun charges, continued to fill out sick-call requests in February 2020. By mid-month, his weight had dropped from almost 197 pounds to about 190. Less than a week later, it had fallen another ten pounds. His lab work looked normal, but his blood sample was not timely delivered, rendering the results suspect.

He ...

by Mark Wilson

Months after a government watchdog found wretched conditions at a privately operated New Mexico prison and called on federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to remove its migrant detainees, they remained there, holding a hunger strike in protest in September 2022.

Both ICE officials and the prison’s operator, Tennessee-based CoreCivic, denied any knowledge of a strike at the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) in Estancia, New Mexico. But the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, claimed the strike began on September 26, 2022, over complaints “ranging from egregious filthy conditions, medical and mental health neglect, and insufficient drinking water to prolonged detention, staff misconduct and unlawful retaliation.”

Earlier in the year, the Office Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, issued its first-ever “Management Alert” on March 16, 2022. Pointing to “critical staffing shortages that have led to safety risks and unsanitary living conditions,” OIG called on ICE to empty the prison and immediately move its migrant detainees to a different facility. See: ManagementAlert – ImmediateRemoval ofAllDetaineesfromtheTorrance CountyDetentionFacility,March 16, 2022; OIG 22-31.

The prison has been the site of numerous disturbances, including a November 2000 uprising in which ...

by Ben Tschirhart

On March 31, 2022, an agreement was entered by Michigan’s Macomb County paying $1.15 million to the estate of David Stojcevski, 32, a detainee who died from drug withdrawal while in custody in the county jail. Separately, the jail’s privately contracted healthcare provider, Correct Care Solutions (CCS) ...

by Kevin W. Bliss
After an Illinois prisoner developed a painful anal abscess and fistula, his medical care was “appalling” and the prison healthcare system was “dysfunctional.” But that’s just negligence, and the Constitution doesn’t protect prisoners from that.

That’s the takeaway from a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 23, 2022, which held that a lower federal court correctly granted summary judgment to Illinois prison officials and their privately contracted healthcare provider, Wexford Health Sources, in a suit brought by a former prisoner over his negligent medical care.

The prisoner, Michael Reck, was held by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) at Menard Correctional Center (MCC) in 2015 and 2016. He had a history of Crohn’s disease with perianal abscesses and fistulae, and he had already received surgeries for seton placement, fistulotomy, fistula plug and anorectal flap, according to the complaint he later filed.

That complaint alleged that through much of 2015 he submitted several request slips to be seen by a doctor for a perianal abscess and extreme pain he was experiencing. He said many of these requests were ignored, and when he finally was treated for his condition, both Wexford ...

by Ben Tschirhart

Some 20 newly unionized workers and their supporters manned a picket line at CoreCivic’s Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex (CAFCC) on August 12, 2022, after pay negotiations broke down over a company offer the union representative called “insulting.”

Despite alleged attempts by CoreCivic to thwart their vote, 17 maintenance workers at the prison in Eloy joined UA Local 469 Plumbers and Pipefitters Union in March 2022, after a National Labor Relations Board election. Union organizer Chad Jessee said that after not getting a raise from CoreCivic in almost 12 years, 15 workers voted for the union and two abstained.

Now CoreCivic has proposed “a 44 cent raise the first year, and 22 cent raises for each of the following two years,” Jessee said, explaining the firm’s proposed hike in the workers’ hourly pay, which is currently $22.

“That’s less than a $1 raise!” he said. “They haven’t had a raise in ten years and this is what they’re offered.”

Union member Dave Gossett said the workers keep vital prison systems running, including “boilers, kitchen equipment, HVAC, the fire system, all the plumbing.”

“When you don’t have working water or HVAC systems, when the toilets are plugged up, ...

by Ed Lyon

In January 2022, when Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) announced the closing of the state prison complex in Florence, he pointed to the facility’s age—it was built in 1904—and said spending an estimated $150 million on needed repairs “just doesn’t make sense.”

What does make sense? Apparently a $420 million, five-year contract with private prison giant CoreCivic to house up to 2,706 state prisoners dislocated by the closing at a facility the firm operates in Eloy.

Before the new contract was signed, the firm’s 3,096-bed La Palma Correctional Center (LPCC) was underutilized, holding fewer than 1,000 immigrant detainees for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For the privilege of buying up slack space in a desert prison nobody else wanted, the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, David Shinn, thanked “our successful partnership” with CoreCivic, “along with their modern correctional facility capacity.”

He might have also thanked the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), which ended its contract with CoreCivic to house some 2,000 prisoners from the Golden State at the Arizona facility in June 2019, thereby freeing up the space. That move was seen as an effort to keep a promise made ...

by David M. Reutter

On October 7, 2021, the Board of Commissioners of Michigan’s Macomb County agreed to pay $1 million to settle claims by survivors of a detainee who hanged himself at the county jail in 2017. The jail’s privately contracted medical provider, Correct Care Solutions (CCS), now known ...

by Matt Clarke

On February 1, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) did not violate the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, et seq., by requiring a Muslim prisoner to purchase prayer oil though the prison commissary’s sole vendor, a firm which also sold pork products and religious items for practitioners of other religions.

The prisoner, Brad Faver, was held at Augusta Correctional Center, where he alleged that his religious practice was unduly burdened by DOC’s refusal to allow him to “grow a beard at least a fist’s length” or to provide him “a diet containing meat that is ‘ritually slaughtered in the name of Allah,’” according to a complaint he later filed. Moreover, while DOC allowed him to “apply perfumed oils for prayer,” the prison’s sole commissary vendor, Keefe Commissary, also sold items for other religions that he considered “idols” as well as food that Muslims shun, leaving the firm’s prayer oils “tainted in the eyes of Allah,” he said.

In 2016, Faver filed suit pro se in federal court for the Western District of Virginia against DOC Director Harold Clarke, ...