Across the nation, states are plagued by a shortage of prison guards. A decade of building prisons has created an industry that employs more people than General Electric, and costs taxpayers in excess of $40 billion a year. To fill the shortage Kansas recently lowered the age requirements for prison guards from 21 to 19. Alabama lowered its minimum age to 20, but is still short 412 guards. After losing 57 percent of last year's recruits, Oklahoma is considering lowering the minimum age from 21 to 18. Corrections spokesman John Hamm noted that while the state hired 180 guards last year 240 quit. Arkansas had a turnover rate of 42 percent.

Some experts question the wisdom of lowering age requirements. "You'd be hard pressed to find much support in the community for hiring 19-year-olds," says Kenny Wild, a state representative from Kansas. George Camp, co-president of the Criminal Justice Institute says, "Every state is really being affected in one way or another." He cites low wages and proximity to the workplace as two key factors responsible for the shortage.

Oklahoma is struggling against a 20 percent vacancy, and overtime pay has gone through the roof. But the $16,742 a year ...

Over 650 prisoners engaged in an apparently spontaneous protest at a Federal prison in New Mexico. On Monday, April 13, 2001, prisoners at the Cibola County Correctional Center congregated in the recreation yard and refused to leave. The assembly began as usual at 7:45 a.m., but at 8:00, when the call-out for work and school began, no one budged. They remained in the yard until 9:30 P.M. when they were forcibly removed. The Cibola facility is one of several federal prisons operated by the Correctional Corporation of America, a private prison conglomerate with facilities worldwide.

A special response team, composed of members from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the New Mexico Sheriff's department, was called to the scene. For 10 minutes, members of the combined task force bombarded unresisting prisoners with tear gas. After subduing them, guards proceeded to handcuff each of the prisoners.

No guards or prisoners were reported injured. Steve Owen, Director of Marketing for CCA, said the prisoners involved were peaceful and nonviolent. Captain Thomas of the State Police said, "The special response team tear gassed inmates because they were not complying with orders to lie down. & All day long they were not complying with ...

Hawaii officials found a prison "in turmoil" while inspecting a Florence, Arizona prison where about 560 Hawaii prisoners are being warehoused. The prison is operated by Nashville based Corrections Corporation of America.

An inspection of the prison conducted in April 2001 by a team of two men and two women was unable to access all areas of the prison because of the potential for violence, according to state reports obtained by the Honolulu Advertiser . The April report stated that tours of the prisoner housing units, recreational areas, prison industries facilities, prisoner work programs, library, visitation area, and chaplain's area were not conducted "due to the hostile environment in the prison."

The desert prison, located 45 miles southeast of Phoenix, was described in the April 30, 2001, report as a "facility in turmoil" with lax security conditions, widespread drug use, and domination by members of a prison gang known as the United Samoan Organization (USO). The USO was described in reports as Hawaii's first bona fide prison gang in nearly 20 years. Gang members were allegedly involved in attacks on prisoners and guards, drug trafficking, and having sex with female INS detainees held at the Florence prison.

Two Hawaii prisoners ...

Ten Washington, D.C., prison guards were charged with conspiracy to smuggle cash and twoway pagers to prisoners in federal indictments unsealed April 31, 2001. The guards, nine of whom work for Corrections Corporation of America, a private company operating the Correctional Treatment Facility in Southeast Washington, were caught in an FBI sting, according to the Washington Post .

The indictments signaled the end of a twoyear federal investigation into corruption at the private prison. Federal prosecutors said the guards accepted hundreds of dollars from an undercover FBI agent posing as a friend of several prisoners. The guards then smuggled the cash and twoway pagers into CTF and delivered them to prisoners.

Unlike previous scandals involving D.C. corrections, these smuggling charges did not involve drugs. When the guards handed over the contraband to certain prisoners, who cooperated in the government sting, the FBI confiscated it. Prisoners are allowed neither cash nor unrestricted electronic communication devices at the facility.

Those charged were Donald Edwards, 44, of Southeast Washington; Henry Hayes, 43, of Temple Hills; Aric Mack, 29, of Capitol Heights; Jonathan Mason, 31, of Oxon Hill; Anthony McLeod, 42, of Temple Hills; Cornelius Minor, 43, of Suitland; Ken Moore, 43, of Southeast ...

Mississippi Taxpayers Fund Welfare Payments To Private Prisons

by Ronald A. Young

Mississippi taxpayers will pay about $6 million a year to private and regional prisons for "ghost inmates" under a bill the legislature approved on March 26, 2001. The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) funding bill includes a provision to subsidize the regional and private facilities despite the absence of need of such facilities.

The provision will raise the number of prisoners at ten regional prisons from 200 to a new contracted amount of 230 and provides for 900 prisoners at the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood and the Marshall County Correctional Facility, both private prisons. The Delta prison is owned and operated by Nashvillebased Corrections Corporation of America, while Floridabased Wackenhut Corrections Corporation operates the Marshall County prison.

The state doesn't have the prisoners to fulfill the obligations under the bill, Corrections Commissioner Robert Johnson said. Taxpayers will pay about $2 million a year to private prisons and $4 million to regional prisons for what have been termed "ghost inmates," according to Johnson. "I guess that's where the old saying `politics makes strange bedfellows' comes from," he said. "Anytime you find a group of Mississippi legislators agreeing to ...

A federal district court in Oklahoma has denied summary judgment against a pretrial detainee's failure to protect and deliberate indifference to medical needs claims.

On September 5, 1995, John Winton was booked into the Tulsa County Jail on shooting charges that were later dismissed. Twelve days later he complained about the jail's feeding procedures which often resulted in food being stolen by other prisoners. He was told by guards to file a grievance which he did that same day. That evening, dinner was served in a different manner due to the filing of the grievance.

Several hours later, Winton, who is Caucasian, was pulled from his top bunk by several black prisoners and landed on his head. From there he was beaten and kicked. Later, Winton was removed and taken to a medical cell where he was seen the following day by a nurse contracted from Wexford Regional Medical Center. He was diagnosed with multiple abrasions and contusions, a cerebral contusion, a subdural hematoma, a basilar skull fracture with conductive hearing loss, a wrist fracture that required surgery, and a dislocated shoulder.

Winton and his wife filed a §1983 suit against the Board of Commissions of Tulsa County (the County), ...

by Brigette Sarabi and Edwin Bender

The popularity of the term "prison-industrial complex" in recent years, and especially since the groundbreaking Critical Resistance conference in Berkeley in September 1998, has produced a few critics who wonder if "prison-industrial complex" is an accurate description of today's prison/policing/judicial apparatuses.

The debate centers on whether analogies to the military-industrial complex are useful. Some argue that the MIC is so much larger, both in real dollars and as a percentage of the GDP, that the PIC pales in comparison. Others point out that those MIC expenditures paid for a standing army, bases around the world, a huge research and development budget which allowed for the post-WWII expansion of U.S. higher education and spun off hundreds of non-military industries, and industries for aircraft and computers which employed tens of thousands of high-paid engineers and unionized assembly workers. The PIC, in comparison, generates relatively little economic activity outside the prisons themselves.

But for all those differences, it appears that the MIC and PIC do have at least one thing in common: a breakneck expansion fueled by private corporations and public bureaucracies intent on growth. And growth for the PIC has meant more felonies, longer sentences and ...

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has held that a discovery sanction is excessive when it causes the dismissal of a prisoner's suit by excluding expert medical testimony. The Court also held that dismissing a claim for failure to file an adequate physician's certificate of merit was an abuse of the District Court's discretion. Finally, it found that disputed factual issues precluded the awarding of summary judgment.

David Sherrod, an Illinois state prisoner, developed severe abdominal pain. A nurse saw him and gave him an enema which failed to relieve the pain. The nurse refused to send him to a hospital, but admitted him to the prison's health unit for observation. Sherrod's pain worsened and included pain in the lower right quadrant, pain on palpitation, and pain with eating or movingclassic signs of appendicitis. Several times prison medical staff noted "rule out appendicitis" in Sherrod's chart.

During his entire time in the prison's health unit, Sherrod was never examined by a doctor. Four days after having been admitted to the health unit, and despite continuing pain, Sherrod was sent back to his cell. A doctor came by his cell two days later to discuss an error in medication, ...

Less than two years after it opened, the second privately operated prison in the state of Ohio is already in trouble. CiviGenics, a private prison company out of Massachusetts, has succumbed to pressure applied by the state employees union. On January 10, the director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC), Reginald A. Wilkinson, informed CiviGenics that when its contract expired on June 30, 2001, it would not be renewed. CiviGenics lost the contract because of failure to maintain adequate qualified staff and security requirements.

By law, the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility is obligated to contract with a private operator. Officials for the state employees union feel that the law should be changed. They feel that by combining the 550 bed North Coast facility with the 1,400 bed Grafton Correctional Institution, the state would save between $4 million and $6 million in operating costs. Union staff member Pat Hammel points to the fact that only 500 prisoners are currently housed at the North Coast facility. Under the union proposal, 200 prisoners from the Grafton facility could move in immediately.

North Coast was originally designed as a treatment center for non-violent felons convicted of drunken driving. It was ...

CCA Gets Tangled In Financial Quagmire

Corrections Corporation of America said it is contesting an $8.1 million request for payment from Merrill Lynch & Company related to its hiring of the investment firm in late 1999 for advice on a company restructuring.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, CCA also said its insurers have refused to cover damages from lawsuits by employees and prisoners that seek more than $50 million. The lawsuits include one brought by CCA employees in 1998 seeking more than $30 million related to a stock ownership plan and another by a woman demanding $20 million for an alleged assault by two former employees of CCA's TransCor unit. A third suit deals with a jury verdict of more than $3 million stemming from charges of mistreatment against juveniles at a South Carolina prison. All three cases were previously reported in PLN .

In the Merrill Lynch dispute, CCA, then called Prison Reality Trust, and a former sister entity, had both retained the investment firm as they faced problems raising money for growth and a looming deadline to pay a special dividend. CCA said Merrill Lynch claims last year's merger of the company and the ...