by Chuck Sharman

Massachusetts prisons are not going to meet a December 2026 deadline to achieve substantial compliance with the terms of a 2022 settlement agreement covering the provision of mental healthcare to state prisoners. That was the key takeaway from the most recent progress report delivered on March 24, 2026, by the monitor overseeing the agreement between the state Department of Correction (DOC) and the federal Department of Justice (DOJ).

The DOC agreed to the settlement after a 2020 DOJ report that summarized a two-year investigation. Among its findings: that prisoners on mental health watch were routinely isolated in restrictive housing for longer than the DOC’s four-day limit—up to six months in some cases, as PLN reported. The DOJ investigation also found that guards observed alarming instances of prisoner self-harm without attempting to intervene and, according to a least three prisoners, some guards offered them razors to encourage their suicide attempts. [See: PLN, July 2021, p.26.]

Problems weren’t limited to guards, though, as the latest compliance report recalled: “Suicide risk assessments were cursory, prisoners were almost universally shackled when interacting with mental health professionals (MHPs), and ‘treatment’ too often took the form of worksheets and …

by Chuck Sharman

After a spate of deaths at the Onondaga County Justice Center (OCJC), the New York Attorney General’s office found the jail’s private medical contractor, NaphCare, Inc., in violation of state medical licensing laws, leading to an $875,000 fine and a five-year ban on practicing in the state, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, May 2026, p.28.] A lawsuit filed after one of those deaths also resulted in a $750,000 settlement in February 2025, with the County paying $100,000 and the balance paid by NaphCare and its subsidiary, Proactive Healthcare Medicine PLLC.

Proactive held the contract to provide medical and mental health care at OCJC on September 1, 2021, when Angela P. Cheng, 27, was booked on a probation violation charge. As recalled in the complaint later filed on her behalf, Cheng was a “restaurant worker and recovering heroin and alcohol addict with a history of suicide attempts”—a history which was “well known” to Defendant jail and Proactive officials because supervision had been transferred to the County for her three-year probated DWI sentence. Yet Cheng never received any medical, mental health or suicide screening at the jail.

On September 2, jailers found …

by Robert Haughn

A federal jury awarded a $307.6 million verdict to a former Michigan prisoner who said he suffered for two years in prison because Corizon Health Inc., the prison’s private the healthcare contractor, refused to give him an essential surgery to reverse his colostomy. It is the largest verdict against a prison or jail healthcare contractor in U.S. history, according to lead attorney Jonathan F. Marko of Marko Law PLLC in Detroit. However, it was unclear how much might be recovered from Corizon, which has now reorganized and put such liabilities in a new firm, Tehum Care Services, that has declared bankruptcy, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2024, p.29.]

Former prisoner Kohchise Jackson originally filed the suit against Corizon in 2019. In the suit, Jackson alleged that his Fourteenth and Eighteenth Amendment rights were violated while he was in custody at St. Clair County Correctional Facility from May 2016 to March 23, 2017 and a prisoner held by the Michigan Department of Corrections (DOC) from March 23, 2017 to May 16, 2019.

In the suit, Jackson said that, in 2016, he developed a colovesical fistula, a hole in the tissue that separates the …

In late April of this year, the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) announced it had terminated its 5-year, $1 billion contract with prison healthcare profiteer YesCare. According to reporting by the Alabama Reflector, the contract was axed because the company could not meet payroll to pay its employees. The DOC also announced that it would replace YesCare with another for-profit healthcare provider, NaphCare, under an emergency contract that began on May 3.

The DOC made its decision days after several YesCare staffers refused to show up for work due to delayed paychecks. Given the history of YesCare, which spun off from Corizon Health in 2022 as part of a strategy to avoid paying creditors amid bankruptcy proceedings, this turn of events shouldn’t come as a surprise. [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.36.]

More recently, in March 2026, YesCare lost its protection from Chapter 11 bankruptcy by failing to make a scheduled $2 million installment payment; as a result, the firm lost its shield from lawsuits launched by hundreds of prisoners claiming medical malpractice, negligence, and other issues. “Who knew that a company that started off bankrupt, who took this deal so it can pay creditors, ended up bankrupt?” …

On March 18, 2026, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) told state lawmakers that the state must immediately move to open a new new prison to account for a projected growth in prisoner numbers, according to The Colorado Sun.

Gov. Polis’ demand came as Colorado grapples with a $1 billion budget shortfall that the state legislature has cut social services to address. And, as one of Gov. Polis’ staff warned the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, a single prison—which would cost $200 million—may not be enough to account for the estimated influx. “We may even need two prisons,” the staff member said, despite Colorado adopting policies in recent years to decrease its prison population such as reclassifying crimes and changing sentencing structures.

Advocates blame the state Department of Corrections’ adoption of stricter parole policies that keep people in prison for longer time periods. As Kyle Giddings, deputy director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, told The Colorado Sun, the state’s parole board has been less likely to grant parole and far more aggressive in its enforcement of parole violations. “There is no piece of legislation that did this,” Giddings added. “These are just independent choices of …

by Chuck Sharman

A $950,000 settlement received approval from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 28, 2026, resolving claims against the City of Norfolk by the Estate of Philemon S. Vinson, alleging that his suicide in the city lockup should have been prevented by guards working for Sheriff Joe Baron.

The agreement does not include claims against Wellpath, which was the jail’s contracted healthcare and mental healthcare provider at the time; those claims are proceeding in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, which is overseeing Wellpath’s Chapter 11 reorganization, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.56.]

Vinson, 24, was picked up in August 2022 on a failure to appear warrant. He was denied bond and placed in the Norfolk jail. At intake screening, Wellpath Nurse Practitioner Sharon Rice asked whether he had “feelings that there is nothing to look forward to or [felt] hopelessness/helplessness.” Vinson responded that both statements were true for him. But he was not placed on suicide watch. In fact, Wellpath Director of Mental Health Services Anne Purkeson released him into the jail’s general population. He was found fatally hanged in his …

by Jo Ellen Knott

The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) confirmed a third measles case at the Doña Ana County jail, bringing the state’s total to 13 so far this year, all occurring within Southern New Mexico carceral facilities. According to Searchlight New Mexico, the second case was confirmed in late March of this year, which also prompted a public health warning regarding potential exposure at the U.S. District Court in Las Cruces on February 24 of this year. Adding to the two cases reported at Doña Ana, two cases are in the Hidalgo County Jail and eight at the Luna County Detention Center.

While NMDOH officials believe the federal detainees were exposed out-of-state via Border Patrol custody, the highly infectious airborne virus poses a severe threat in crowded, congregate settings where social distancing is almost impossible. Despite official claims of prioritized safety, the outbreak follows a 2025 surge that saw 2,200 national cases and one death in New Mexico. Advocacy groups, including the New Mexico Prison and Jail Project, noted the terrifying speed of transmission in jails, echoing the failure to keep the detained safe and healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similarly, in Texas, …

On March 19, 2026, commissioners in Harris County renewed a $38 million contract to send detainees out of Texas to private facilities controlled by companies like CoreCivic. For years, the Harris County Jail has outsourced detainees in order to free up space; the new contract allows the jail to continue that practice for more than 1,000 detainees until at least 2027, despite the fact that some of the private facilities that accept the detainees face wrongful death lawsuits.

While Harris County ended a contract in 2025 that sent 300 detainees to a lockup in Mississippi, the jail has failed to meet the conditions of a remedial order imposed by the state in 2023 to bring it into compliance with minimum jail standards. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.26.] The order, brought into effect in part due to severe understaffing, prevents several hundred beds from being used until it is lifted. Although the Harris County Jail passed a recent inspection earlier in March, the order remains in place pending further inspections.

The renewed contract came despite the deaths of several detainees dying after being shipped out of the Harris County Jail to for-profit prisons run by LaSalle Corrections …

by Chuck Sharman

The story repeats with depressing regularity. It begins with a man struggling with drug dependency, acquired from a prescription for pain medication. Depressed, he makes suicidal threats. His frightened partner calls sheriff’s deputies. They take him to the county lockup. There, his family blithely trusts that “if he’s in jail, he’s safe.” But the jail fails to maintain him on suicide watch. Its medical contractor monitors him only for withdrawal symptoms, not a potential suicide attempt. Unsurprisingly, he suffocates himself and dies. After several years of litigation, the county and its contractor pay a multi-million-dollar settlement to the dead man’s family without admitting any liability. No one is criminally charged. The worst that might result is the contractor might cut its ties with the jail.

That’s what happened after Nick Rapp, 34, ended up in a cell on New Year’s Eve 2019 in Washington’s Kitsap County Jail, where NaphCare, Inc. held the contract to provide detainees with healthcare. Two days later, he was in a hospital on life support after making a suicide attempt in his cell. Four days after that, on January 6, 2020, he was dead.

His parents, John and Judith …

On March 10, supervisors of the Shasta County Jail in Redding, California voted unanimously in favor of a three-year, $25 million contract with Mediko Correctional Healthcare to take over the jail’s medical and mental health services.

The jail, beginning on July 1 of this year, will stop contracting with its current healthcare provider, private healthcare profiteer Wellpath, due to the company’s long record of medical neglect and wrongful deaths both in Shasta County and at jails across the country. Wellpath filed for bankruptcy in late 2024, due in part to the 1,500 lawsuits the company was facing, most of which stemmed from deficient medical care for prisoners. The firm pulled out of bankruptcy in 2025 and continues to operate. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.31].

Shasta County itself is facing several lawsuits from the family members of detainees who have died locked up in the county jail and under the care of Wellpath. Most recently, in February of this year, the mother of a 27-year-old detainee filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that her son went untreated during a mental health crisis that led to his death by suicide. The detainee, according to the lawsuit, was placed …