by Matthew T. Clarke


The price of attending the March 1997 South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, came very high for Dallas record producer David Prater. Busted for a minor drug possession, in 1998 Prater was sentenced to 250 days in the Wackenhut-run Travis County Community Justice Center (TCCJC).


TCCJC is a state jail, intended to house prisoners convicted of minor felonies. State jail felonies came into existence in 1994, following the successful lobbying by a group of Texas district attorneys for the legislature to create a new class of felonies and new prisons (state jails) to keep nonviolent prisoners with convictions for minor felonies out of hard core prisons. In theory, the state jails were to intensively focus on rehabilitation and education. There are 17 state jails and 8 substance abuse prisons under the auspices of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice-State Jail Division (TDCJ-SJD). Some of them are operated by private companies, such as Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America. From its opening in March 1997 until November 1999, TCCJC was run by Travis County which subcontracted with Wackenhut to operate it as a private prison.


Just ten days into his incarceration at TCCJC, Prater made ...

A jury has awarded the family of a prisoner who died while in the Kane County Illinois Jail $229,500. On May 16, 2002, after 92 hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict against Correctional Medical Services of Illinois, the jail's health care contractor. The total award was originally $450,000 ...

Agreeing to pay $10,000 for ethics violations, the director of Florida's agency overseeing private prison contracts resigned in April, 2002. The Florida Ethics Commission has accepted the settlement. C. Mark Hodges was in charge of Florida's Correctional Privatization Commission (CPC), a state agency empowered to award contracts to private prison companies where it would save the state money over the cost of state-run prisons. As director, he was the natural target of the Florida state prison guards union, the Florida Police Benevolent Association (FPBA).


In November, 2001, FPBA tipped off the Florida Department of Management Services that out-of-use computers at CPC had been illegally used to access porn websites. This proved to be true. Under Florida's open records law, it was legal for FPBA to download the computers' hard drives. Ken Kopczynski, an FPBA political affairs assistant, claimed he was only looking "to find evidence of Hodges doing private consulting" by checking the computers. "That's when we hit the porno." Hodges retorted that inspection of the unlocked computers was but another attempt by FPBA to discredit him with a smear campaign whose true motive was to derail non-union jobs. The union's complaint further alleged that Hodges failed to hold companies ...

Negotiating their way out of 21 felony bribery charges, a former Kansas sheriff and a lawyer-cum-executive for a private prison contractor each pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of conflict of interest on December 18, 2002, getting only one year in county jail and a $750,000 restitution order.


Reno County Sheriff Larry Leslie entered into a "prohibited contract" with lawyer Gerald Hertach when Leslie accepted $285,000 in bribes from Hertach for Leslie's part in awarding first a $1.5 million three-year contract and then an over $2 million four-year contract to Hertach's corrections company MgtGp Inc to run the Reno County jail annex. They had been indicted in May, 2001 after which Leslie resigned [PLN, Aug. `02].


Sentencing Judge Michael Barbera rejected a plea agreement involving only $750,000 in restitution because he doubted the two would pay. He did offer them a chance to do so after serving 90 days, however. Leslie said the $285,000, on top of his $59,762 annual salary, was "all gone." Leslie, Hertach and MgtGp Inc. were ordered to pay the $750,000. Hertach's attorney Steve Joseph opined that the punishment was "a little bit harsh for a class B misdemeanor." Hertach had funneled the shared illicit profits ...

Page 1 of the August 2002 issue of Prison Legal News carried a story about Correctional Services Corporation (CSC), the scandal-ridden private prison outfit beset with self-inflicted troubles. Since that story appeared, CSC's troubles have multiplied. Consider the following:

Ø In August 2002, a Texas court convicted a CSC Boot Camp nurse of negligent homicide following the death of an 18-year-old camper to whom she failed to provide adequate medical care.

Ø In January 2003, the New York State Lobbying Commission launched a probe into CSC's involvement with gifts improperly given to state legislators.

Ø Later in January, four female prisoners at a CSC-operated halfway house in Manhattan filed a federal lawsuit where they complained that they were sexually assaulted by a CSC counselor.

Ø In mid-January, a federal investigation report revealed that CSC employees' had been ordered to work on the election campaigns of New York's political elite: former Governor Cuomo, former Mayor Dinkins, and perennial victim Reverend Al Sharpton.

Ø Still further in January, a former prisoner at a CSC-operated youth facility in Nevada filed a federal lawsuit complaining that a female guard had forced the teenager to perform various sex acts.

Ø Late in January, the Albany ...

by Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative and Western Prison Project, 2003, 48 pages

Review by Paul Wright


As a prison journalist, one of the most challenging things is reporting the facts and putting those facts into a bigger context since no story occurs in a vacuum. There are a multitude of statistics, numbers and facts concerning the American criminal justice system. The problem is that they tend to be scattered in a variety of locations and documents and are hard to access for all but the most dedicated researchers. Peter Wagner, the assistant director of the Prison Policy Initiative and founder of Prisonsucks.com, an online database of facts and statistics pertaining to the prison industry, realized the same thing and decided to correct it. The result is a slick, well produced and superbly organized booklet.


The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control industry gathers facts and figures on literally all aspects of the criminal justice system, digests them and presents them in a cogent, organized format that can be used by everyone from the novice writer of letters to the editor-, to experienced journalists, academics and researchers.


Most importantly, it allows prisoners and citizens concerned about the ...

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an insidious and relentless disease which is highly unpredictable and eventually fatal. It is a chronic disease which is the leading cause of cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer which causes an estimated 10,000 deaths annually in the United States; a number the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expects to triple by 2010.


HCV infection in America's prisons has reached epidemic proportions. Random seroprevalance studies in state prisons in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, Texas and Virginia have revealed infection rates between 29 and 54 percent, compared to a 2 percent infection rate in the total U.S. population.


Most states are ignoring the crisis, however, even as prisoners are dying, or being released unaware of their disease and creating a public health risk. "Correctional systems have buried their heads in the sand because they don't want to know how many prisoners have hepatitis C," said Eric Blaban, a staff attorney with the National Prison Project of the ACLU. Even when prisoners are tested for HCV, prison doctors in many states fail to inform them of the results - or that they were tested - until years later, if at all.


New Jersey's Neglect ...

Mississippi Pays $6 Million For Empty Prison Bunks

by Matthew T. Clarke


In a highly politicized move, the Mississippi Legislature passed a budget paying Wackenhut Corporation (WC) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) millions of dollars for unneeded private prison bunks, despite Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove's attempts to prevent it. At issue is how to house Mississippi's 19,000 plus state prisoners.


Faced with $1.4 million in federal court ordered fines due to overcrowding, Mississippi contracted with private companies to build and run five private prisons in Marshall, Leflore, and Wilkinson Counties, Meridian and Walnut Grove.


In 2001, amid criticism that new prisons were increasingly bring viewed by local officials as a tool for economic development, Musgrove vetoed efforts to build even more private prisons. However, the Legislature overrode Musgrove's veto, appropriating $6 million more than was needed to run the private and regional prisons. Subsequently, a report by a legislative watchdog lowered the number of prisoners required for private and regional prisons to break even. This led critics to accuse the government of paying for "ghost prisoners" as a form of corporate welfare [PLN, Nov. `01].


In 2002, state spending on prisons and lack of spending on education and Medicare ...

No Right to Renounce Citizenship - U.S. Not "at War"

Judge Bernice B. Donald of the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee has denied habeas corpus relief to a Wisconsin prisoner seeking to renounce his citizenship and be deported to another country. In so doing, Judge Donald deflated a popular prison myth about state sovereignty.


James T. Koos is a Wisconsin prisoner housed under contract in a Tennessee prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Koos sought release through habeas corpus arguing that by transferring him out of state, Wisconsin had surrendered its authority over him. Further, Koos filed motions demanding that he be permitted to renounce his citizenship under 8 U.S.C. §1481(a)(5) (renunciation before a U.S. consular officer in a foreign country) or 8 U.S.C. §1481(a)(6) (written renunciation to U.S. Attorney General when the U.S. is at war).


The court discussed in detail what it termed "a popular myth among prisoners that a state's authority over a prisoner ends at the state's geographical border." As the court noted, "the myth appears to have sprung from a few cases early [last] century...." As the court explained, each of those cases turned on peculiar facts. ...

Although described as a troubled kid, 16-year old Chad Franza didn't deserve to die they way he did. Only 24 days after entering a juvenile boot camp in Bartow, Florida, the teenager was found dead after hanging himself with his boot laces in 1998. Now Franza's parents have agreed to ...