On March 26, 2026, the Idaho Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that it would be transferring hundreds of prisoners out of state to a private prison in Arizona. The transfer is intended to reduce overcrowding at the 10 prisons controlled by the DOC, according to a statement released by the agency.

One hundred and twenty prisoners have already been sent to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex, a lockup owned and operated by private prison profiteer CoreCivic. Another 200 prisoners will soon be transferred to the facility, as the Idaho Statesman reported. The DOC also sends prisoners to another CoreCivic prison, the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona.

Idaho has a prison population that’s just under 10,000, but it only has a capacity of 8,200 beds. The DOC has sent around 700 prisoners to out-of-state facilities, which is around the same number as Montana—a state that recently switched from shipping prisoners to Arizona to a CoreCivic prison complex in Mississippi, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Apr. 2026, p. 41.] 

Source: Idaho Statesman

In early March, the administration of President Donald Trump (R) announced that it planned to offer a no-bid contract to an engineering and electronic services company to run the United States’s largest immigrant detention center, where one detainee was killed and at least two others have died in recent months.

In addition to the three deaths, the facility—Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas—was faulted during a recent inspection for having dozens of violations of national standards related to excessive force, disease, and other unsafe conditions. As reported by The Washington Post, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Detention Oversight performed a three-day inspection in February of this year that uncovered 49 violations. It was the first inspection of the lockup since it was hastily built and opened last summer. For comparison, the highest number of violations found during the office’s other inspections was only 13 so far this year.

Randall Kallinen, an attorney representing the family of a detainee who died at the facility in January 2026, said of the report: “Camp East Montana gets an F … not only are the detainees in danger of excessive force, they are also in danger …

The Frontier, a non-profit investigative news outlet in Oklahoma, recently found that seven detainees died from preventable causes in Tulsa’s municipal jail over a three-year period. These deaths occurred due to causes such as overdoses, suicides, an infection, and at least one restraint-related incident. The jail, which is small and windowless, typically locks people up who have been arrested on misdemeanor charges—and many of them suffer from severe mental illnesses.

City officials claim that each of the deaths were investigated by the Tulsa Police Department and assessed that no legal or policy violations had occurred. But when requested by The Frontier, the City has so far refused to provide documentation or video evidence from the jail to support their no-fault claim. As an expert interviewed by the publication pointed out, Tulsa’s refusal has the whiff of an admission of guilt. By not providing records, Joey Senat, a professor emeritus of media law at Oklahoma State University told The Frontier, “officials are sending the message that city employees did something wrong—that they in some way caused the death of detainees.”

In February, after news of the deaths broke, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols ordered “an additional …

With California’s declining prison population and a growing state budget deficit, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), a nonpartisan agency that provides policy advice to the state lawmakers, has recommended closing the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad.

While the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDRC) is already slated to close one facility this year, the California Correctional Facility in Norco (which could revert to becoming a luxury hotel), the LAO found that closing the Soledad prison would save an additional $150 million each year. The LAO report pinpointed the Soledad prison as a “strong candidate for closure” in large part because of the expected cost of future infrastructure projects to keep the facility in operating condition.

The cost of installing a planned video surveillance system, for example, alone will likely cost $10 million. Across the 25 state prisons in California, the CDCR estimates that it will need $2.5 billion to cover critical maintenance projects in the next ten years. At the same time, the state’s prison population continues to decrease; by 2030, the number of incarcerated people is expected to fall below 85,000, a drop of around 25,000 from 2020.

This decrease is in part due …

After a yearlong fight by advocates to prevent private prison profiteer CoreCivic from reopening its prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, city commissioners approved a special use permit on March 10, 2026, allowing the company to proceed.

Two people were arrested and multiple people ejected during the hour-long public comment period regarding the decision, which commissioners voted 4 to 1 to approve. CoreCivic, the largest owner of private prisons in the country, operated a maximum-security, federal detention center in Leavenworth that had a capacity of more than 1,000 detainees. That facility was closed in late 2021, after former President Joe Biden (D) issued an executive order that prevented federal agencies from renewing private prison contracts. President Donald Trump (R) reversed Biden’s order shortly after assuming office on January 20, 2025.

As part of Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, CoreCivic received a $60 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen the Leavenworth facility in September 2025. The contract was penned as CoreCivic attempted to bypass the city of Leavenworth’s development process by going directly through the court system. During the proceedings, which hinged on whether CoreCivic needed to apply for a permit, the company was placed under an …

In 2025, officials with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office failed to investigate at least seven reported cases of sexual assault that occured at Otay Mesa immigration detention center, a facility run by private prison profiteer CoreCivic that locks up nearly 1,500 federal immigration detainees.

As reported by CalMatters, a 2020 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between CoreCivic and the sheriff’s department granted Otay Mesa’s warden Christopher LaRose the authority to decide whether or not to investigate rape allegations. CoreCivic, in a response to CalMatters, said that it had conducted administrative investigations for each of the seven sexual assault cases, but that the company does not conduct criminal investigations because it is not a law enforcement agency.

CoreCivic operates two of seven private immigrant prisons located across California, and it isn’t clear if similar MOUs exist between these facilities and local law enforcement agencies.

The Otay Mesa prison is the subject of a separate legal battle with San Diego County as a lawsuit claims the company illegally blocked a public health inspection of the facility. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had initially cleared county officials for the inspection, but that decision was reversed …

Armor Health, the company that held a $24 million contract to provide healthcare at the Lee County Jail, gave local Sheriff Carmine Marceno a $50,000 donation four months before the medical contract was terminated, according to the The News-Press in Fort Myers. On February 23, 2024, Armor health made the payment to a political action committee (PAC) that supported Marceno’s reelection campaign. Another company, Enhanced Health Solutions LLC, wrote a $1,000 check to the PAC on the same day. Both companies are led by the same CEO and share the same address in Miami.

The donations came as the three-year contract that Armor Health held with the Lee County Jail, which locks up around 1,600 detainees, was up for an additional one-year renewal. Armor Health, however, must not have plied Marceno with enough money as the company’s contract was cancelled in June 2024. Five months later, in November of that year, Maceno won re-election with 90.6% of the vote.

Armor Health, like most of the private healthcare companies that contract with jails, has a long track record of medical neglect and preventable deaths. In 2023, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office terminated a $98 million contract with Armor after …

by Chuck Sharman

On January 16, 2025, a grand jury in Georgia’s Richmond County reported that its inspection of the County jail revealed serious overcrowding, with mattresses on the floor pressing many cells into double-occupancy. As if to underscore the problem’s seriousness, a detainee was violently assaulted and stabbed on January 23, sending him to the hospital with nine stab wounds. Five fellow detainees have been charged in that attack.

GA Code § 15-12-71 (2024) requires grand juries in each of the state’s 159 counties to physically inspect its jail every year. The grand jury seated in state Superior Court for Richmond County for its November 2025 term conducted the inspection on January 6, 2026, presenting its report to Judge R. Ashley Wright on the term’s last day. Although jailers quibbled about the exact number, the Grand Jury reported that the Charles B. Webster Detention Center in Augusta was operating at more than 126% of its designed capacity.

That “inadequate ability to house its jail population,” the report noted, was reflected in the fact that the jail was “set up to house 1,065” detainees and prisoners, but there were 1,346 confined there on the date of …

by Rudi Keller

This article was originally published in the Missouri Independent.

Whether prisoners die while in state custody is not used to measure the performance of Missouri’s private prison health care contractor, the state’s top corrections official told lawmakers on January 14, 2026.

The 14 performance standards in Centurion Health’s contract track timelines for services, such as dental visits and physical exams, but do not include inmate mortality, said Travis Foley, director of the Missouri Department of Corrections.

During most of a two-hour hearing of the Missouri House Corrections Committee, Foley sought to tamp down reports that Centurion medical staffwalkedout of the Jefferson City Correctional Center in October. Under questioning from state Rep. Gregg Bush, a Democrat from Columbia, Foley listed several of the performance measures and said he would provide the full list.

“Is any of them mortality?” Bush asked.

“No,” Foley replied.

“Okay, so that’s not actually a measure that we’re measuring from our health care vendor,” Bush said.

“Not in terms of the outcome,” Foley said.

For several years,advocatesforprisonerrights have been sounding alarms about the historically high number …

In late February 2026, reporting on the Dilley Immigration Processing Center revealed harrowing details about the conditions under which families are being detained at the facility.

Dilley received public attention last month following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest in Minneapolis of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and Spiderman backpack. Ramos and his father were then sent to Dilley, with the boy caged alongside hundreds of children who have been detained there for months. (Both Ramos and his father were released after 10 days, due to the intervention of Congress members and a judge.)

Dilley, located about 75 miles south of Laredo, was first opened in 2014 during the Obama administration and, after being scaled back, closed in the last year of the Biden administration. Republican President Donald Trump re-opened Dilley in spring 2025, as part of his administration’s crackdown on immigrants. The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply in recent months to more than 1,300 people, with many of them children being held for longer than the 20-day limit established by a longstanding court order.

The Texas detention facility is run by CoreCivic, the Nashville-based private prison …