by Jayson Hawkins

The private prison industry has been under fire recently across the country—from lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to federal policies mandating a slow and unsteady move away from for-profit prisons to scandals arising from inhumane conditions and rampant sexual assaults.

Feeling the heat from that fire—and with its flames fanned by a six-month grassroots lobbying campaign of the ACLU—Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) initially shied away from renewing the state’s contract with CoreCivic to operate Crossroads Correctional Center (CCC), a 664-bed prison located near the town of Shelby in the state’s remote Hi-Line region (named for being adjacent to the northernmost railway in the country.).

CoreCivic, the giant firm ($1.91 billion revenue in 2020) formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, is one of the largest for-profit prison operators in the country, and it has often found itself at the center of controversy. In fact, it is seen by many social justice advocates as a poster child for all that is wrong with the American criminal justice system, so the governor’s initial decision drew praise.

But on July 28, 2021, Bullock made an about-face and announced he was renewing the state’s contract with ...

by David M. Reutter

On December 11, 2021, New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court, County of Santa Fe, denied a motion to dismiss a suit filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of Prison Legal News (PLN) and Criminal Legal News (CLN), against Centurion Correctional Healthcare of New Mexico (Centurion) and the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), seeking to pry loose public records from litigation related to the company’s provision of health care to New Mexico prisoners.

Centurion is a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corp., a massive $111.1 billion health insurer that also provides policies subsidized by Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Tricare, the U.S. Department of Defense health insurance program.

On August 12, 2020, HRDC sent the company and NMCD requests “seeking all records of litigation,” including verdicts and settlements, “against Centurion and/or its employees or agents where Centurion and/or its insurers paid $1,000 or more to resolve claims” anytime “from January 1, 2010, to present.”

Centurion took over the contract to provide health care to NMCD prisoners on July 1, 2019, from another private firm, Corizon Correctional Healthcare, which had taken over from competitor Wexford Health Sources in 2013. But Centurion was then ...

by Jacob Barrett

On January 8, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina approved a $2 million settlement to be paid by Buncombe County, North Carolina, for the wrongful death of Michele Quantele Smiley, a 34-year-old mother of six children left to die in a ...

A panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit agreed with the dismissal of an appeal brought by former ICE detainees held by CoreCivic at their Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico. The ruling was released March 5, 2021 in a case first filed in 2019.

Former ICE detainees who worked in the “voluntary” work program at the Cibola facility brought a federal lawsuit alleging they were employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and New Mexico Minimum Wage Act (NMMWA). They claimed they were not paid a fair wage and that CoreCivic was “unjustly enriched” by employing them.

Importantly, the parties agreed that the NMMWA should be interpreted in accordance with the FLSA and the unjust enrichment claim depended upon the success of their FLSA claim.

CoreCivic filed a motion to dismiss which the court granted after determining that the FLSA did not apply to immigration detainees because they were not “employees.” Minimum wage was not at issue in the lawsuit.

The detainees were represented in their appeal by attorneys Joseph M. Sellers, Michael Hancock, and Stacy N. Cammarano of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, D.C., and Robert S. Libman of Miner Barnhill & Gallard ...

by Ed Lyon

Regardless of what people without first-hand knowledge of prisons or detention centers believe, prisoners are generally not the blood-thirsty, brutal animals depicted in the media. In fact, especially in the face of SWAT-styled rapid response teams used within institutions, prisoners are mostly hopeless, helpless, often powerless individuals.

Even the most benign, traditionally-recognized form of protest used by prisoners to bring attention to and hopefully effect positive change for deplorable prison conditions—the hunger strike—is attacked by detention officials, courts and government agencies.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is charged with receiving, processing and detaining asylum seekers entering the country while their cases are reviewed. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE does not own, staff and operate the majority of the detention facilities asylum seekers are housed in. Generally, private for-profit prison corporations build and staff these facilities and enter into contracts with ICE to house the detainees, supposedly within the policies, standards and rules set forth by ICE. Many local jails also house immigration detainees on a contract basis with ICE as well.

Hunger strikes have been occurring across the nation at these facilities since at least 2012, according to a June 2021 report by ...

In a landmark case, a federal jury decided against the GEO Group for paying $1 dollar a day wages to immigrant detainees at its privately-operated prison in Washington.

The facility in question is the Northwest ICE Processing Center (formerly the Northwest Detention Center) in Tacoma located on a toxic waste Superfund site and a lava flood zone. The 1,575-bed facility is run by GEO and holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the United States, although its population has dropped to about 400 since the pandemic.

On October 27, 2021, the jury found GEO was responsible to pay $17.3 million in back wages to more than 10,000 detainees who deserved a minimum wage, now $13.69 an hour. Additionally, U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan ordered GEO to return profits to Washington state in the amount of $5,950,340, and end its “voluntary” work program.

The lawsuit against GEO for what is essentially slave labor has been working its way through the federal courts for four years.

Detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center filed a lawsuit against GEO in 2017, with the assistance of the Seattle law firm of Schroeter ...

by Keith Sanders

On August 31, 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division released a report detailing its investigation concerning the conditions inside San Luis Obispo County Jail.

The findings of the report, conducted pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), 42, U.S.C. § 1997, Title II of the American Disabilities Act (ADA), and 42 U.S.C. § 12132, established reasonable cause that the California jail violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and the ADA. The United States District Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California advised Wade Horton, San Luis Obispo County Administration Officer, and Sheriff Ian Parkinson that the Attorney General could file suit under CRIPA against them within 49 days to remedy the alleged conditions inside the jail.

The investigation was initiated in October 2018 to examine the jail’s treatment of disabled prisoners and the level of medical and mental health care it provided. A relatively high percentage of prisoners in the county jail, roughly 40%, suffer from mental illness at any given time, most of whom are taking psychotropic medications. The jail estimated, according to the report, that over “90% of prisoners have substance abuse issues,” with many of them temporarily ...

by Keith Sanders

Dr. Garrett Felber, a history professor at the University of Mississippi (UM), has distinguished himself over the years as a vocal critic of America’s racist criminological and penological institutions. At conferences and public speaking engagements, he has decried mass incarceration, called for the abolition of prisons, and exposed brutal police tactics that have become the norm in law enforcement. Dr. Felber’s activism, however, is not confined to the country’s prisons and police departments. He also lambasted the University of Mississippi for its connection to slavery and criticized a colleague’s financial involvement with CoreCivic, a private-prison company.

Charles Overby is a celebrated instructor of journalism at UM. Among these other accolades, Overby served as the executive editor of the Jackson, MS newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger, and the chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum, a non-profit advocate for the freedom of press. In 2001, the Freedom Forum donated $5 million to construct the Overby Center for the Study of Southern Journalism and Politics on UM’s campus. In the same year, Mr. Overby also became the director of the board of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), later rebranded as CoreCivic. During a Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration (MUMI) Conference ...

by Ed Lyon

Prison populations exploded in every state across the country during the 1980s and ‘90s. It was during that massive expansion that the modern private prison industry was born as a “way to ease the burden on taxpayers by reducing public spending on government-run facilities,” as touted by the for-profit incarcerators. In reality it has become another way to transfer public wealth in the form of tax dollars into the coffers of private corporations and their shareholders.

The American Bar Association (ABA) foresaw what was ahead, and in a 1990 resolution numbered 115B, sternly advised “governments to proceed with caution before entering into contracts with private prison companies.”

In a January 16, 2021 Executive Order, President Joe Biden issued an order barring the Justice Department from renewing contracts with private prisons, while excluding immigration detention contracts. The Justice Department’s Inspector General had already found in 2016 that private prisons “do not maintain the same levels of safety and security for people in the federal criminal justice system or correctional staff.”

In March 2021, the Sentencing Project released a report on private prisons. The report stated 115,428 prisoners were held in private prisons as of 2019 and the private ...

by David M. Reutter

On June 17, 2021, Southern Health Partners paid $750,000 to resolve a lawsuit alleging it failed to take proper steps in caring for a pretrial detainee who entered South Carolina’s Marlboro County Jail with a prescription drug addiction.

Roy Locklear, 30, had a history of drug ...