by Ed Lyon
Kentucky in December 2020 reopened Otter Creek Correctional Center (OCCC), leasing it from CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), but staffing it with state employed Department of Corrections (DOC) staff. Its new name is the Southeast State Correctional Complex (SSCC) and it’s now a 621-bed prison, housing medium security males rather than the females it held as the OCCC.
Long-time readers of Prison Legal News are undoubtedly familiar with the scandal and corruption surrounding the for-profit private prison firm CCA. An in-depth article concerning CCA’s Otter Creek Correctional Center (OCCC) located in Wheelwright, Kentucky, appeared in PLN’s September 2011 issue.
That article laid bare OCCC’s inadequate medical care, lax oversight and unfettered abuse of prisoners and staff so brutal that one employee pulled a pistol in the warden’s office and shot herself dead. Kentucky and Hawaii finally removed their prisoners from that facility in 2012.
The prison’s reopening in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic was heralded as providing 270 jobs for Floyd County. The state legislature appropriated the needed funds to reopen and operate the prison for only a single fiscal year. Governor Andy Beshear stated the prison’s reopening occurred to ease the ...
by David M. Reutter
As Virginia was poised to consider a bill to end private prisons, the GEO Group entered the fray with donations to legislators and lobbyists. The bill met a quick and sudden death in senate committee.
Virginia has one private prison, Lawrenceville Correctional Center (LCC). The GEO Group is paid more than $2 million per month to manage the prison. LCC has been in the crosshairs of private prison critics.
“We’re incarcerating the people, and we have a responsibility for those inmates to do it right,” said state Senator Adam Ebbin, the Democrat who sponsored the bill that would prohibit the Virginia Department of Corrections from contracting with private prisons. “However, private prisons by contrast have a motive to make money, lowering their operating costs, hiring fewer employees and pay and train them less than state operated prisons.”
The GEO Group responded by touting its party line of being a well-oiled machine that runs efficiently. “If it ain’t broke, why are we trying to fix it?” asked Tyler Bishop, a GEO Group lobbyist. “Unlike government run facilities, contract facilities provide greater accountability because they are governed by detailed contracts and typically have on site, full time contract ...
by Juliette LaMarr
Washington Governor Jay Inslee in April 2021 signed House Bill 1090, which bans private, for-profit detention facilities in the state. According to the text of the bill, this includes “any facility in which persons are incarcerated or otherwise involuntarily confined for purposes including prior to trial or sentencing, fulfilling the terms of a sentence imposed by a court, or for other judicial or administrative processes or proceedings,” according to an April 14, 2021 story by the Tacoma-based immigrant rights group La Resistencia. Notably, the bill exempts some private facilities and cases of involuntary detention — such as in-patient treatment centers or public health quarantines.
Currently, there is only one private, for-profit detention camp in the state, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. The facility is operated by the GEO Group on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As a result of the new law, it will close when the GEO Group’s contract comes to an end in 2025. Crucially, the law will also prevent any other private facilities from opening in the future.
There were a few major objections to the law — mainly from Republicans — about whether the government had the authority ...
by Margo Schlanger, University of Chicago Law Review Online, March 5, 2021
I. Introduction
Kamyar Samimi, a sixty-four-year-old legal permanent resident from Iran, died in U.S. immigration detention in December 2017. After more than four decades in the United States, he’d been confined at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility, a large immigration detention facility near Denver privately operated under a contract between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the GEO Group.
Samimi had taken methadone for twenty-five years, but facility medical staff cut him off and then, according to his family’s subsequent lawsuit, failed to treat his acute withdrawal despite his increasingly desperate pleas.2 His family alleges that it took just two weeks of neglect for him to die3 — the first of ten deaths of ICE detainees in fiscal year 2018.
The lawsuit against GEO is currently in discovery. It seeks damages for negligence and violation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which forbids disability discrimination in federal programs such as ICE detention. It alleges that GEO’s failure to accommodate Samimi’s disability — opioid use disorder — led to his inability to access mental health care, food, and water, and therefore violated the ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 12, 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that 18 U.S.C. §§ 111 and 1114, which criminalize assaulting federal officers, apply to private prison guards detaining federal prisoners. The court affirmed a federal prisoner’s conviction for punching a guard at a federally contracted privately operated prison.
Federal prisoner Derrick Grant was awaiting sentencing for an armed robbery conviction at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a privately owned and operated prison, when he decided to punch the next guard he saw. He walked up to a female guard and punched her in the face, which caused bruising on her neck and jaw. He was charged with assaulting a designated person under § 111, eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months’ imprisonment consecutive to his robbery term. With the assistance of Cincinnati attorney Anna M. Greve of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, he appealed.
The Sixth Circuit noted that 18 U.S.C. §§ 111 and 1114 criminalize assaulting “any officer or employee of the United States … or any person assisting such an officer or employee in the performance of such duties.” It rejected Grant’s argument that the guard was not covered by § 111 ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 3, 2020, the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the nation, revealed that it had suffered a ransomware attack in August of that year that exposed sensitive personal information of employees, immigrant detainees and prisoners.
GEO said it was sending data-breach notification letters to all affected individuals, but the company was unaware of any fraud or misuse of the information.
GEO owns or operates 123 facilities with a total of around 93,000 beds and about 23,000 employees in the U.S., U.K. and South Africa.
In a ransomware attack, criminal hackers penetrate a computer system and encrypt vital data. The system’s user is then offered the encryption key in exchange for payment, generally using Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.
The ransomware attack on GEO compromised data for prisoners at South Bay Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility in Florida, a Pennsylvania youth facility and a now-closed facility in California, as well as employee data on two corporate servers.
The data include medical treatment information, which is private under federal law, and information that could be used in identity theft such as name, date of birth, and Social Security number. GEO worked with law enforcement and ...
by Kevin Bliss
The Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) and its medical health-care provider, Centurion Managed Care, have been under investigation by the Vermont Defender General’s Prisoners’ Rights Office (PRO) and the law firm of Downs Rachlin Martin after the death of Kenneth Johnson, a 60-year-old Black prisoner at Northern State Correctional Facility (NSCF).
A November 2020 report by Tristam Coffin of the Burlington-based law firm Downs Rachlin Martin, prepared at the request of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Smith, stated that Johnson repeatedly complained that he could not breathe but was nonetheless denied necessary medical attention, possibly due to his race. His findings closely mirrored a July 2020 report prepared by Matthew Valerio, defender general of the PRO.
Johnson had been admitted to the infirmary at NSCF in fall 2019, complaining of shortness of breath, hoarseness and difficulty swallowing. The preliminary diagnosis was possible chronic obstructive lung disease. He was placed on steroids and scheduled to see a specialist.
On December 6, 2019, Johnson started showing signs of respiratory distress. He began complaining that he could not breathe and was dizzy. He fell on his way to the bathroom and had to be escorted back to ...
by Kevin Bliss
Within the first six days of office President Biden signed the ‘‘First Step’’ executive order preventing the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from renewing any of its contracts with private companies to run its prisons. Activists say the order was nothing more than a token gesture and should have included the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Biden campaigned on a platform promising to address problems in the corrections system. He said he intended to crack down on police and prosecutorial misconduct, reduce prison population and increase probation efforts, improve immigration conditions, and stop profiting off of prison privatization. He said he would ‘‘make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.
He had a ‘‘Day One’’ agenda of eliminating the Migrant Protection Protocols or ‘‘Remain in Mexico’’ policy, defining citizenship procedures to assist asylum seekers, and create a task force to reunite separated families. Once in office, he signed the United States Citizenship Act of 2021, largely making good on his promises. He signed orders ending the Muslim ban, fortifying protections for DREAMers, stopping construction on the border wall, and putting a ...
by Casey Bastian
Very few criminal offenses in America allow for a sentence of death. Nevertheless, too many people are dying in jails and prisons while serving a sentence or simply waiting for the process to slowly grind its way to a resolution. Oftentimes people can’t make bail for even minor offenses and see their health quickly deteriorate. Hundreds have died from complications of what are normally routine medical issues like diabetes or blood clots due to lack of adequate medical care—and that was before COVID-19.
As this disease swept around the globe, the focus was on identifying and protecting “vulnerable populations,” including those in jails and prisons. COVID put the national spotlight on these populations and the need to prevent needless deaths in facilities where adequate health care is lacking in the best of times.
These preventative measures are urgently needed in America. No other single nation locks up more of its citizens. America has more than 3,000 jails housing over 745,200 prisoners; 480,000 are still presumed legally innocent. COVID has forced local and state governments to at least partly unwind the practice of mass incarceration. The release of thousands of people was an attempt to mitigate COVID’s devastating ...
by David M. Reutter
Citing Mississippi’s refusal to invest in prison facilities and staff, private medical vendor Centurion pulled out of its contract with the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to provide medical and mental health care to prisoners. The move was hailed as a “significant victory” by Team Roc.
As PLN has reported, rappers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti created Team Roc, which is team of attorneys, to represent 227 prisoners held at the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman to sue MDOC and Centurion in the wake of seven prisoner deaths over 50 days. The deaths occurred after riots in January 2020 at Parchman and other prisons throughout the state. (See PLN, July 2020, p.1.)
In a July 7, 2020, letter to MDOC Commissioner Burl Cain, Centurion said, “We do not believe we can further improve the effectiveness of our level of care without additional investment from [MDOC] in correctional staffing and infrastructure along the lines of what we have already recommended.” The withdrawal of services became effective on October 5, 2020.
Team Roc attorney Marcy Croft said she hopes the letter gets the attention of Gov. Tate Reeves. “It’s time to invest in the health and well-being of ...
