Sexual abuse by a Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) guard has spurred three lawsuits against CCA and resulted in the guard's arrest.
The legal activity resulted from incidents at CCA's prisons at the Marion Adjustment Center (MAC) and St. Mary's Kentucky. MAC was home to Vermont prisoners that relocated to another state to ease overcrowding. PLN reported the September 2004 riot at MAC. [PLN March 2005].

The matter came to a crescendo on January 26, 2005, after 26-year-old Joel Becks, a former MAC guard, was arrested on charges of sexual abuse and official misconduct for sexually a abusing two prisoners by Kentucky's Nelson County Sheriff's Department.

Becks' charges stem from two incidents occurring in April 2004. Becks stayed over" from his shift ending at 3 p.m. on April 12. Around suppertime, Becks entered cell D205, finding prisoners John Doe and John Roe violating rules by smoking. Becks closed the cell door. He ordered Doe to the back of the cell and Roe to watch for guards.

Becks dropped to his knees, pulled Doe's sweats down, fondled him and commenced to performing fellatio. Doe neither became erect or ejaculated. Frustrated by Doe's lack of response, Becks said I want the kid ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

Tony Fabelo was the head of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council for two decades. He survived multiple changes of administration by doing a great job as the state's top number-cruncher on prison issues. Legislators of both parties say the Cuban-born Ph.D., a nationally-known authority on prisons and prison construction, served the state well during its dramatic build up of the prison system. However, Tony Fabelo no longer has a job.
O.K., technically Fabelo wasn't fired. No, Governor Rick Perry simply signed a line-item veto eliminating the council's $1 million biannual appropriation from the state budget. Fabelo, who recognized the irony of being the head of an unfunded government entity, then resigned and became a nationwide consultant on prison issues.

Why was Fabelo's council, which was doing such a good job, eliminated? Perry says that the council's job was done and he wanted to save the money. Neither aspect of that rationalization makes sense. The state still has one of the largest prison systems in the world and will still need advice on how to manage it. During its existence, the council collected twice as much money in federal grants as it received from the general ...

As we predicted, Washington's sentencing reform" has sharply increased the state's prison population to approximately 17,6001,400 prisoner's overcapacityadding 2,100 prisoners within the last two years alone.
Worse yet, nothing, including slashing sentences by up to 50 percent for a few hundred prisoners, has stemmed the flow and there is no end in sight.
As prison officials scrambled to find beds for this influx of new prisoners, they have resorted to shipping prisoners to rental beds in other states. In May 2003, 100 prisoners were sent to Nevada prisons, followed by 140 more later that summer. Still the problem persisted.
The 2004 Washington Legislature then attempted to put a $320 million, 2,400 beds, prison expansion Band-Aid over the emblem. Only, that prison building boom won't be complete until 2008, doing nothing to ease current overcrowding.

Despite the abysmal track record of private prisonsextensively reported in PLNprison officials opted to send 290 prisoners to private prisons operated by Corrections Corporation of America, (CCA), the nation's largest private jailer, in 2004.

In true CCA form, problems soon followed. On July 24, 2004, dozens of Washington and Wyoming prisoners gathered on the yard at the CCA-run prison in Onley Springs, Colorado. They had a ...

A New Jersey state appellate court issued an unpublished opinion reversing a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Correctional Medical Services (CMS) and the New Jersey Department of Corrections (DOC).

On November 7, 1996, Craig Szemple, a prisoner at the New Jersey State Prison, under went two surgeries to correct carpal tunnel syndrome and ulner nerve entrapment. The treating physician ordered physical therapy to begin as soon as possible and continue for three months. This order was noted in Szemple's prison medical file on November 21, 1996.

Nevertheless, it was not until December 9, 1996 that Dr. Acheloe, the Group Medical Director of the Central Region of CMS, reviewed [this] recommendation and authorized physical therapy. CMS policy required that Acheloe's recommendation also be approved by his supervisor, the statewide medical director for CMS.

Acheloe again recommended physical therapy on January 27, 1997 and February 25, 1997, because it had not yet begun. Szemple did not receive his first physical therapy evaluation on March 17, 1997 and did not begin receiving physical therapy until approximately April 1, 1997.

Szemple brought suit in state court against CMS and DOC alleging that they negligently delayed his physical therapy. Pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2A:52A-27, ...

In an unpublished decision, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a grant of summary judgment to a prison doctor, holding that the doctor manifested a substantial departure from accepted professional judgment in the treatment of a prisoner's cluster headache condition.

Illinois prisoner James Edens suffers from cluster headaches, which are a rare and intensely painful form of vascular headache that, although individually of relatively short duration, usually occur several times a day over the course of weeks or even months before going into remission." If left untreated, cluster headaches are severely painful, even to the point of disability.

While at the Logan Correctional Center ... [Edens] was taking ... Elavil (a tricyclic anti-depressant), which ... brought his headaches under control." In February 1999, however, Edens was transferred to the Pinckneyville Correctional Center and his Elavil prescription was discontinued.

Dr. Dennis Larson suggested meditation and relaxation' after Edens speculated that the attacks might be stress-related." Larson did not prescribe any medication at that time. Subsequently, another physical prescribed Fioricet which also controlled Edens' headaches and remained his primary treatment until mid-autumn 1999, when the physician left Pinckneyville.

On November 8, 1999, Larson discontinued Edens' Fioricet prescription, replacing it with Tylenol. ...

By Paul Von Zielbauer; Joseph Plambeck contributed reporting for this article.

Brian Tetrault was 44 when he was led into a dim county jail cell in upstate New York in 2001, charged with taking some skis and other items from his ex-wife’s home. A former nuclear scientist who had struggled with Parkinson’s disease, he began to die almost immediately, and state investigators would later discover why: The jail’s medical director had cut off all but a few of the 32 pills he needed each day to quell his tremors.

Over the next 10 days, Mr. Tetrault slid into a stupor, soaked in his own sweat and urine. But he never saw the jail doctor again, and the nurses dismissed him as a faker. After his heart finally stopped, investigators said, guards at the Schenectady jail doctored records to make it appear he had been released before he died.

Two months later, Victoria Williams Smith, the mother of a teenage boy, was booked into another upstate jail, in Dutchess County, charged with smuggling drugs to her husband in prison. She, too, had only 10 days to live after she began complaining of chest pains. She phoned friends in desperation: The medical ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

For years the Sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma, Stanley Glanz, has been telling anyone who would listen that he, not CCA, should be running the county jail. Now, after five years of CCA mismanagement, he may finally get his chance.

The saga started in the late 80s and early 90s when the previous county jail, located in the top two floors of the county courthouse, became hopelessly overcrowded. A federal judge ordered Glanz to reduce the crowding in the jail. He responded by setting up tents for prisoners and lobbying for a 5/12th cent increase in county sales tax to fund construction of a new jail. The tax increase passed along with a measure setting up the Tulsa County Criminal Justice Authority (TCCJA) to oversee the jail's administration.

The 1,714-bed new county jail is known as the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center. It was named after a tough-on-crime former District Attorney. The jail was immediately surrounded by controversy when former Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage led a coalition to privatize the new jail's management.

Glanz fought that move all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. However, the courts disagreed with his argument that the TCCJA ...

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 ...