By Matthew T. Clarke

In August, 2004, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) gave House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, (R) Sugar Land, Texas, a check for $100,000 for his DeLay Foundation for Kids during a Lexington, Kentucky, political fund raiser for DeLay’s defense fund organized by Representative Hal Rogers, senior congressman from Kentucky. The event also raised $113,000 in donations to the defense fund.

DeLay has been under fire for questionable fund raising since three of his political aides were indicted for money laundering and illegally using corporate money to influence elections in Texas. The September 21, 2004, indictments resulted in large legal expenses for DeLay, who is seeking to avoid indictment himself. Thus far, DeLay has spent tens of thousands of dollars on defense lawyers with no end in sight. That may not be a problem since DeLay’s defense fund raised over $400,000 between July and December, 2004.

CCA donated nearly $180,000 to politicians for federal elections during 2004. DeLay received $4,500 for political contributions from CCA in 2004, while Rogers received $6,000. CCA is the largest, for profit, private prison company in the world with more than 65,000 prisoners under its control. Despite a long history of scandal, deaths ...

A New York State Assemblyman has been sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay $5,000 in fines and restitution for unlawfully billing the state for rides he got for free from Correctional Services Corporation (CSC). The sentence was imposed after Roger Green, a veteran Brooklyn Democrat, pleaded guilty to two counts of petty larceny and one count of offering a false instrument.

Green's legal problems resulted from an investigation of free transportation provided to lawmakers by the scandal-plagued CSC. According to Albany County prosecutors, Green, 54, billed the state for travel expenses he never incurred while being chauffeured from Brooklyn to Albany in CSC vans. Green filed fake claims for about 30 trips, they said.

Green, along with many other current and former state legislators, also wrote letters to New York officials advocating extensions of CSC's state contracts for halfway house services. Between 1992 and 2000, the state, paid CSC $25.4 million for those services.

Green was nearly jailed in April 2004 for not paying a $2,000 fine in the case. Green had claimed he was too tapped to pay, but finally coughed up the money on April 29, two days after an Albany Judge issued an arrest ...

by Robert H. Woodman

The Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, partly affirming a New Jersey prisoner's estate's suit, held that the New Jersey Department of Corrections (DOC) could be held liable for the negligence of Correctional Medical Services (CMS) in treating a prisoner's medical condition, resulting in the prisoner's death.

Tyrone Neal was a DOC prisoner in February 1997 at the East Jersey State Prison when he was diagnosed with a medical condition known as Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria with hemolytic episode" (PNH). The illness is a breakdown of the red blood cells. Treatment requires prednisone. The only known cure is a bone marrow transplant. After discharge from the hospital, the DOC administered prednisone until May 1997, then quit. In June 1997, Neal transferred to the Middlesex County Adult Corrections Center (MCACC) for sentencing on an unrelated charge. While there, he repeatedly completed medical request forms for treatment, but MCACC physicians refused to administer prednisone to Neal. On August 1, 1997, Neal died of PNH.

Neal's estate and his daughter, Tymirah Scott-Neal sued the DOC, MCACC, and CMS, but none of the individuals involved, under New Jersey state law claims and 42 U.S.C. §1983. The case was dismissed on ...

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the failure to exhaust administrative remedies may be excused in limited circumstances and should be excused in this case. This civil rights action arose from events that occurred while Ivan Rodriguez was incarcerated in New York's Westchester County Jail (WCJ) from July 1997 to November 1998. Rodriguez's complaint alleged he was beat by jail personnel and that EMSA Correctional Care denied him proper medical treatment for his injuries.

The defendants moved for summary judgment based on Rodriguez's failure to exhaust administrative remedies as required by 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a) (2000). Rodriguez admitted he did not exhaust administrative remedies, but sought to excuse his omission primarily for two reasons. First, he contended that he did not think exhaustion was required for a single episode of prisoner mistreatment, as distinguished from continuing prison conditions. Second, he contended that by time the Supreme Court ruled in Porter v. Nussle, 534 U.S. 516 (2002) [PLN June 2002, pg. 17], that all prisoner complaints required exhaustion, he had been transferred from WCJ, and administrative remedies were no longer available to him.

The district court granted the defendant's judgment, and Rodriguez appealed. The Second Circuit said it ...

by Matthew T. Clarke


On September 14, 2004, a prisoner uprising rocked the 816-bed, 88-acre Lee Adjustment Center (LAC), a private prison owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in Lee County, Kentucky.


The Prison


LAC was built in 1990 as a 400-bed, minimum-security prison by a private company under contract with the Kentucky Department of Corrections (KDOC). In 1999 CCA bought the prison and converted it into an 816-bed medium security prison used to house both KDOC and out-of-state prisoners. Apparently CCA cut costs during the conversion because during the uprising prisoners were able to move freely about the prison by pulling up the interior fences. At the time of the rebellion, it held 376 Kentucky DOC prisoners and 427 prisoners from the Vermont Department of Corrections (VDOC). Kentucky pays CCA $38.44 per prisoner per day while Vermont paid $42.50 per prisoner per day under a 29-month contract involving up to 700 prisoners and up to $29.5 million.


The Uprising


The rebellion began when nine prisoners, five from Kentucky and four from Vermont, attacked a round wooden guard tower in the center of the recreation yard after about 150 prisoners were let out on the yard for ...

Tough Justice Leads To Quadriplegic's Death
In CCA-Operated D.C. Jail

by Michael Rigby

Washington D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith E. Retchin is known for being tough on crime. She's so tough, in fact, that when a quadriplegic man came before her for possessing a small amount of marijuanahis first offenseshe sentenced him to ten days in jail. It was a death sentence.

Jonathan Magbie, 27, spent nearly his entire life paralyzed from the neck down. Struck by a drunk driver at the age of 4, Magbie was confined to a motorized wheelchair that he controlled with his chin. He was barely five feet tall and weighed just 120 pounds. Magbie relied on others for virtually everything, whether scratching an itch or flushing accumulated fluid from his lungs. He could not even breath on his own.

"Jonathan was totally dependent," said his mother, Mary Scott. When asked how he was able to inhale marijuana, she said simply, "he learned to do a lot of things."

Ten days in jail for a first time marijuana possession offense is considered exceptionally punitive by D.C. Superior Court standards. In fact, even the U.S. Attorney's office had not objected when Magbie's attorney, Boniface Cobbina, and ...

by Robert H. Woodman

On January 9, 2004 the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri found that Correctional Medical Services (CMS) and one of its employees, Gary Campbell, D.O., were liable for fourteen (14) months of pain and suffering endured by a Missouri state prisoner whose hip ...

by David M. Reutter

The Eleventh Circuit court of Appeals has held that BOP administrative segregation policies create a liberty interest. The Court reversed a Georgia federal district court's order granting prison officials' motion to dismiss under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.

The lawsuit at issue was filed by Salvador Magluta for events that occurred while he was a pre-trail detainee at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta (USP). Magluta was indicted by a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida in April 1991 on twenty-four drug trafficking and conspiracy charges. Magluta was arrested in October 1991 and placed in federal custody. Prior to his trial and eventual acquittal in 1996, Magluta was held in three different federal facilities _ first in Miami, then in Talladega, and later in USP.

Magluta filed his Bivens action while a pretrial detainee in 1994, alleging he was placed in "administrative segregation" _ the "hole" _ in conditions constituting solitary confinement for more than five hundred days in USP, and this lengthy and harsh pretrial detention was done at the direction of and with the knowledge of the four named defendants, F.P. Sam Samples ...

California Demands $1.6 Million In Diverted Telephone Revenues
From Private Prison Contractor

by John E. Dannenberg

The California Department of Corrections (CDC) has charged private prison contractor Marantha Corrections LLC with "misappropriating" more than $1 million in telephone revenues at its 500 bed prison in Adelanto, California, and ordered CDC's contract with Marantha terminated "for cause," effective September 30, 2004.

CDC Director Jeanne Woodford stated in a June 29, 2004 letter to Marantha that Marantha was "either unwilling or unable" to account for the phone funds, and as a result, was in breach of its $8.1 million contract with CDC. CDC spokesperson Margot Bach noted the squabble was not over performance, safety or security issues, but solely with their contract. The disputed funds are the commissions from phone calls that are collected by Marantha which are supposed, to be turned over to the state's Inmate Telephone Revenue Fund.

According to CDC documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee , Marantha's Chief Executive Terry Moreland had blocked the state from auditing Marantha's phone fund account. Moreland argued that they were insulated from audit because the phone service had been provided by Marantha's "landlord." CDC found out that that "landlord" was just another ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

States strapped by tight budgets and pressed by a swell of prisoners are faced with the Hobson's choice of releasing prisoners early to ease overcrowding or building prisons they can ill afford to construct and staff. Private prison corporations seem to offer a third choice. They claim to be able to house the state's excess prisoners without the substantial outlay of capital required to build prisons and at a lower cost of incarceration than the government can manage.

How do private prison corporations achieve this miracle of modern capitalism? By running a much more efficient operation than is possible with moribund state bureaucracies say private prison proponents. Opponents of private prisons reply that the savings are achieved by locating prisons in distant states with distressed labor markets and cutting the number of employees, union busting, slashing employee salaries and benefits, and the quality and/or quantity of food, medical care, and programs offered prisoners, as well as by plain, old-fashioned cooking the books. Regardless of the quality of programs and services offered, relocating prisoners to prisons in distant states traumatizes them and their families, making communication and visitation difficult and expensive, if not impossible, and reducing one ...