By Silja JA Talvi, Santa Fe Reporter

Prison program sparks lawsuit. Faith-based initiatives are all the rage these days, particularly when hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding have been available to programs and agencies that tow the religion-and-social-services approach favored by the Bush administration.

When the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) started looking into New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's willingness to sign on as one of 26 governors who agreed to establish their own faith-based offices, they discovered that the state already had a sprinkling of such programs
underway.

One of the programs that piqued the FFRF's interest was the Christian-based Life Principles/Crossings residential segregation pod, housed within the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA)-run New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants.

FFRF sought out more information on the prison program, and located a March 9, 2005 SFR cover story, Beyond the God Pod: A new era of Christian programs makes life better for some women prisoners--the ones who believe.

That story was the result of a day-long visit to NMWCF, which sparked an ensuing investigation into CCA's plan to extend this residential religious model to all of its other privately owned prisons in the US, in partnership with a ...

The latest development in the unsavory Texas VitaPro scandal is the jailing of a court reporter for botching the transcripts in the VitaPro trial.


In 1995, George W. Bush was the governor of Texas and James "Andy" Collins ran the Texas prison system which was involved in a multi-billion dollar rapid expansion. Ballooning from 35,000 to 150,000 prisoners in seven years, the prison system had been allowed special "emergency" contracting powers, sidestepping state bidding requirements. During that time, Collins used the special procedures to defraud the taxpayers out of millions of dollars. The fraud took many forms, but inevitably resulted in single-bid contracting on such items as razor wire and the inedible VitaPro meat substitute.


Shortly after he retired, amid rumors of a pending state indictment, Collins gave an interview to Texas Monthly magazine which appeared in the May 1996 issue. In the interview, Collins stated that people well above him in state government were involved in the VitaPro scam and that he would take them down with him if the State of Texas indicted him. The only person above Collins in the governmental hierarchy was the governorGeorge W. Bush. The state did not indict Collins.


In January 1998, one ...

Correctional Medical Services (CMS), a private provider of medical services to jails and prisons, lost a jury verdict in a case brought by a former Lake County, Illinois, Jail prisoner's estate alleging that CMS violated the prisoner's constitutional rights, resulting in his suicide. The jury awarded compensatory damages to the ...

According to the Toronto Star, on September 20, 2002, more than a hundred prisoners at the privately-run Superjail in Penetanguishene, Ontario, used a battering ram to attempt an escape. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, the prisoners, who were armed with homemade weapons and equipped with crude gas masks, breached several layers of security. However, Central North Correctional Centere (CNCC) officials, speaking to reporters later that day, refused to confirm that a battering ram or weapons were used. According to them, the disturbance was limited to a 175-man housing area and all of the prisoners were back in their cells less than two hours after the disturbance began.


CNCC is run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based private prison company. It was designed to help replace 20 older jails around the province. The plan calls for two more superjails in Maplehurst and Linsday and envisions savings of $500 million a year.


The superjail has a total of 1,184 beds, 32 of which are designated for women. Prisoners at CNCC consist of about 1,000 serving up to a day less than two years and around 200 pretrial detainees. According to a confidential provincial cabinet document leaked in 2000 the ...

A Florida Jury awarded a Martin County Jail guard, Ronald Keeler, $515,813 against a private medical provider. Keeler sued Correctional Physician Services (CPS), who provided medical care to jail prisoners, and New Horizons of the Treasure Coast, Inc., who was a subcontractor to provide mental health services to prisoners. Prisoner ...

It is often said that you can tell a lot about a society by checking the condition of its prisons. Based on the way prisoners in Alabama are treated (or, more accurately stated, not treated), citizens of that state have a lot to be worried about. With only a few months left to go on his sentence for marijuana possession, 43-year-old prisoner Timothy Oliff caught a cold that he just couldn't shake. Oliff's complaints went ignored by prison health care workers at the Elmore Correctional Facility until several days later when he became so ill that fellow prisoners had to carry him to the gate for emergency help.


Three days later Oliff died at the Montgomery Baptist South Hospital. Although neither prison officials nor hospital brass would comment on his death, Oliff's sister, Diane Aman, said doctors at the hospital told her he had died of pneumonia and had the worst stomach infection they'd ever seen. Aman also said they told her that prison health care workers had been too late in getting Oliff to the hospital for the emergency care he needed.


Also refusing to comment on his death are officials of NaphCare, Inc., the for-profit company that, until ...

On June 26, 2003, the parties in Baker v. Campbell agreed to the entry of a temporary preliminary injunction which, among other things, provides for "immediate" and "adequate" medical care for Alabama prisoners with serious illnesses.


The "Preliminary Injunction Settlement Agreement" stems from a class action suit filed by prisoners at the St. Clair Correctional Facility against the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) and Naphcare, a for-profit company that contracts with Alabama to provide medical services to its prisoners. (See: Baker et al., v. Campbell, et al., No. CV-03-C-1114-Mt U.S, District-Court for the Northern District of Alabama.) The suit was brought because of "the grossly inadequate medical care provided to them" by ADOC and Naphcare. Among the illnesses-the 11 named plaintiffs claim the defendants allowed to go untreated are cancer, lung disease, hemophilia, Hepatitis C, deafness, and other serious medical conditions. The suit alleged that defendants' negligence is causing plaintiff's to suffer "serious harm and are at great risk of further harm, including death."


In fact, after the original complaint was filed, lead plaintiff Jerry Baker, suffering from lung disease, died on May 15, 2003 from "the failure to fill his prescribed medications," according to the amended complaint filed May ...

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 ...