by Chuck Sharman

New detention standards published by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on August 10, 2026, make several changes reportedly requested by The GEO Group to boost the private prison operator’s defense against lawsuits alleging it cheats immigrant detainees out of a fair wage for their labor.

Since former GEO Group executive David Venturella assumed the helm at ICE in early June, the move is but the latest that suggests “ICE enforcement priorities are being driven by the financial interests of politically connected detention contractors,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to Venturella.

As PLN reported, GEO Group first faced a legal challenge in Washington from immigrant detainees accusing the firm of violating the law by paying them just $1 a day for their labor while held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. GEO Group called the work “voluntary,” but a federal jury didn’t buy it and in October 2021 ordered the firm to pay some 10,000 current and former detainees a total of $17.3 million in back wages—the difference between the $1-per-day payments and the state’s then-minimum wage of $13.69 per hour. GEO Group was also ordered to …

by Michael Dean Thompson

Investigative reports filed by the Citrus County, Florida Sheriff’s Office, which includes the City of Inverness, paint a disturbing picture of an oversized drug problem at the CoreCivic-run county jail. As of June 2026, the Sheriff’s Office identified 11 overdose-related calls, in contrast to just eight in all of 2025. According to Citrus County Sheriff David Vincent, they have had six incidents in only one week.

Yet, CoreCivic’s jail contract monitor reported just over six overdose incidents so far this year and none for last year. Local reporting on the overdose problem led Citrus County Fire Rescue to review their own responses to medical emergencies at the jail. CoreCivic says that on three separate incidents in 2025 and 11 through mid-June of 2026, the jail staff administered Narcan. The emergencies had been called in, however, as “cardiac arrest,” “breathing problem,” or “unconscious with abnormal breathing.” Yet, even that likely underreports the number of overdoses as onsite medical staff may handle problems that are never reported.

The Sheriff’s Office is not responsible for CoreCivic’s reporting. Vincent told the Citrus County Chronicle, “Unless it’s someone requiring CPR and resuscitation, I don’t know that I …

by Chuck Sharman

The GEO Group, Inc., paid over $104,000 in May 2026 to settle charges by the California Department of Industrial Relations Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) that workplace safety rules were violated at Golden State Annex in McFarland, where the firm incarcerates detainees pursuant to a contract with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The following month, GEO Group’s commitment to detainee safety was again in question when a report by Capital & Main revealed that McFarland police were refusing to respond to crime reports from the lockup, citing an agreement to let GEO Group investigate itself.

The settlement resolved charges filed in December 2022, accusing GEO Group of failing to maintain workplace safety to Cal/OSHA standards during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the first time that California had treated the firm and its detainee workers as employer and employees; previously, the state accepted GEO Group’s assertion that the work program was voluntary. That’s also the company’s justification for paying detainees just $1 per day for their labor, but GEO Group has so far been successfully sued for violating minimum wage laws in Washington and Colorado—prompting officials to get ICE to amend its …

by Chuck Sharman

The Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) has yet to ink another long-term contract for prisoner healthcare since backing out of a 10-year, $4 billion agreement with Wexford Health Sources in July 2025. Instead, a series of 90-day emergency contracts were given to rival Centurion Health before a one-year deal that was signed in January 2026 for $507 million.

From interviews with prisoners and their families, the Chicago Sun Times reported in July 2026 that “critically understaffed facilities struggle to deliver proper correctional medicine to the tens of thousands of incarcerated people in their care.” As the news outlet also reported, that prompted independent prison monitor John Howard Association Executive Director Jennifer Vollen Katz to wonder, “What in God’s name are we paying for?”

Not much, according to the Monitor appointed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a long-running class-action challenge to the DOC’s shoddy healthcare. As PLN reported, the Monitor’s January 2026 report criticized the prison agency for making some policy changes but few if any of the other improvements promised in a consent decree in the case, including hiring more staff, creating a medical record system …

by Chuck Sharman

San Diego County attorneys agreed to a $3 million settlement on June 30, 2026, resolving claims filed by the Estate of Keith Bach, 63, who died of diabetic ketoacidosis at the Men’s Central Jail in September 2023, after his insulin pump ran dry and its alarm went ignored by jailers and medical staff with NaphCare, the County’s contracted jail healthcare provider. The settlement resolved only the claims against the County, and those against NaphCare were settled separately for a confidential amount, the Estate’s attorney, John H. Gomez, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Deaths in County jails have fallen sharply since 2022, when the detainee mortality rate topped that of all other large California counties, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.1.] But that was of little consolation to Cecilia Bach, who represented her dead husband’s Estate in the suit that Gomez and fellow lawyers with Gomez Trial Attorneys in San Deigo filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

A heating and air conditioning technician, Bach was arrested by Chula Vista police on suspicion of vandalism and making a threat on September 25, 2023. Bach, a Type 1 …

by Jo Ellen Knott

On August 4, 2026, private prison giant CoreCivic announced a lucrative five-year, $75 million annual contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen Prairie Correctional Facility in rural Appleton, Minnesota. Vacant since 2010, the 1,600-bed facility is set to house immigrant detainees starting in late 2026, advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to expand ICE detention capacity nationwide.

The deal has drawn fierce opposition from civil rights advocates, labor organizations and state lawmakers who condemn the expansion of the private prison industry. State Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-Hennepin County), chair of the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, denounced the plan as an affront to state values, highlighting documented human rights abuses inside private detention centers. Latz pointed to Minnesota’s 2023 statutory ban on private, for-profit prisons, pledging that state officials will explore all available avenues to block the facility from operating.

Community and labor groups have similarly mobilized against the reopening. CURE, a rural advocacy organization, reported that local Appleton residents have been organizing regular demonstrations to resist turning the shuttered prison into a corporate detention hub. The public workers union AFSCME issued a scathing condemnation, asserting that private corporations should not …

by Daniel A. Rosen

My most vivid memory of Aramark’s food service inside jails and prisons came early on in my incarceration: I watched a man at the D.C. Jail dig into the entrée on his evening meal tray and uncover half a dead mouse. Those of us around him struggled with our own gag reflexes while he lost his composure, yelling about the lawsuit he was going to file, and for a guard to come document the evidence. It was traumatic, for him and for everyone close enough to see it happen. That incident was the single most disturbing episode from my time eating inside—but probably had less long-term health impact than the cumulative effect of years of eating inedible, unnutritious, poor-quality meals.

I spent about six years eating both Aramark-prepared meals in jails and state-prepared trays in prisons. If there’s one thing both systems taught me, it’s that “self-operated” and “privatized” food service are really just two different flavors of contempt. There’s a difference though between neglect funded by the public payroll and the for-profit variety that comes with a shareholder base and C-suite salaries. A new report released this spring finally puts details and …

The federal immigration jail in Aurora, Colorado came under scrutiny in recent weeks due to both its unsanitary conditions that led to a tuberculosis outbreak as well as an incident in which a guard shot a protester at the facility’s entrance.

The tuberculosis outbreak at the Aurora jail has caused at least 12 detainees to contract the bacterial disease. According to The Guardian, in addition to the tuberculosis cases, dozens of other detainees were placed in quarantine. All of those held at the facility were forced to endure the isolation without air conditioning.

It is not currently known exactly how many people are locked up by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the jail, which has a capacity of 1,532 and is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison profiteer whose profits have grown substantially since President Donald Trump (R) returned to office last year. Conditions at the lockup have faced criticism before, such as when an alleged previous tuberculosis outbreak occurred there in April 2025.

A detainee in Aurora interviewed by The Guardian said that, after 88 people in the same pod were tested for tuberculosis, guards refused to separate those who …

by Jo Ellen Knott

The Jersey Vindicator reported thatthe GEO Group-operated Delaney Hall, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey, is facing severe infrastructure failures and exposing detainees to dangerous conditions.

In early July 2026, as the worst heat wave in New Jersey in 15 years brought temperatures past 100 degrees, the lockup’s air conditioning failed in one unit, leaving roughly 150 immigrant detainees struggling to breathe in stagnant, humid air. Advocates reported detainees stripped naked to cope with the extreme heat and had to drink discolored, metallic-tasting water.

While ICE claims portable cooling units were deployed, activists dispute this, claiming that neither the agency nor GEO Group provided the units. Some detainees received fans, but these offered little relief and only moved hot air around the area. Without an official explanation, around 120 detainees were bussed out of Delaney Hall for transfers or removals over the Fourth of July weekend, and three detainees were hospitalized for “various medical concerns.”

Delaney Hall has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with detainees holding a recent hunger strike in protest of the squalid conditions. Beyond broken airconditioning, detainees have raised complaints of …

by Douglas Ankney

Corizon Health, Inc. (“Corizon”) was a private profiteer that, in 2019, contracted with 149 prisons to provide medical care to incarcerated persons. While Corizon’s business shrank to serving just 52 prisons by May 2022, its decadence expanded from cheating prisoners and their families out of damages awarded based on Corizon’s substandard medical care to stiffing attorneys on their fees when representing Corizon.

As repeatedly reported in PLN, Corizon has been named as a defendant in scores of lawsuits filed by prisoners, pretrial detainees and/or their families that alleged it failed to provide constitutionally adequate medical care. In many of these cases, the horrid lack of even basic medical care resulted in lifelong permanent injury or death. And damages, including compensatory and punitive, were awarded as a remedy.

In a recent case, non-economic damages of $7.5 million were awarded jointly and severally against Corizon and one other defendant—with another whopping $300 million in punitive damages awarded against Corizon only. See: Jackson v. Corizon Health, Inc., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80656 (E.D. Mich. April 13, 2026). But, as also reported in PLN, Corizon filed for bankruptcy in Texas in 2023 and reemerged as two separate …